The downturn in CS enrolments in universities this millennium has elicited several responses. In the theoretical CS community, there seems to be a strong feeling that many of the students we had were here for the wrong reasons, namely the internet bubble and associated overoptimism about job prospects (ironically, job prospects now are great for our graduates, but we are still (at Auckland) seeing a decline in enrolment).

The idea is that CS has a public relations problem compared to areas like biology and physics – it has been presented far too vocationally, and the big ideas have not been communicated in the way that they have in those fields. It frustrates me, for example, that the general education CS course in my department deals with very few big ideas, and a lot of “how to write XHTML” stuff. Of course, even many “computer scientists” think of CS as part of engineering, not science. Unlike E.W. Dijkstra, they apparently think that computer science is about computers, whereas the rest of us think that it is about information and computation, with computers being both tools to study these fundamental concepts and technological fruits of that study. Most of my immediate colleagues work in pretty applied areas as far as I can work out, with not much to excite a really good student, no matter how worthy the application.

Michael Mitzenmacher has a project to write a popular book aimed at inspiring high school students about theoretical CS. The CS Unplugged materials already address a younger audience. The latter was developed substantially in New Zealand, but seems relatively unknown here. In this country theoretical CS is relatively weak compared to both applied CS and mathematics, and public understanding of the issues above is probably even less than in the USA.

I would love to contribute more to spreading better information locally about the intellectual side of CS. Anyone in NZ reading this who wants to help should contact me, or better still, tell me about their great ideas that I can help with.