It is common knowledge that technology jobs took a hard hit after the dot-com crash and the Y2K scare. But today those events, along with the myth that all technology jobs are being outsourced, are causing a new problem.
Despite the fact that high-paying technology jobs are plentiful, students have been shying away from the profession and leaving a talent gap across the country.
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“We have more jobs than students,” said Hal Records, chairman of the computer information systems department at Bryant University. “In 2001, with the dot-com crash, a lot of parents lost their jobs, and everybody said technology is not a good way to go.”
At Bryant, he said, “we’ve gone from 119 graduates in 2001 to 60 last year, and we’ll probably graduate 40 this year. The irony is, the jobs never really went away. In spite of the outsourcing, the number of technology jobs is increasing. So what we have now is a massive gap between the demand for technology graduates and the supply of technology graduates.”
And Bryant’s situation isn’t unique.
Brown University has seen a 50-percent decline in computer science enrollment since the dot-com bust, and the University of Rhode Island a 60-percent decline in the last four years.
Wheaton College reports a 50-percent decline since 2003, the Community College of Rhode Island has seen a “steady decline” since 2002, and Salve Regina University saw interest decline so much that it got rid of its computer science major, convinced that outsourcing had made it obsolete in the United States.
Nationally, the trend is the same.
According to The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the share of full-time, first-time freshmen at U.S. degree-granting institutions who said they would major in computer science dropped by 70 percent between 2000 and 2005.
In the fall of 2006, the institute found, there were only 7,798 new computer science majors, compared with 15,958 in 2000. The good news is that was only a slight decline from 2005, when there were 7,952 majors, indicating that the drop might be stabilizing.
But businesses say they are still in dire need of talent, and the expected retirement of baby boomers is expected to worsen the situation.
“We have to make people aware that there are viable careers available,” said Tim Hebert, chairman of the Tech Collective and CEO of Atrion Networking Corp. in Warwick. “The number of American students enrolling in math, science, technology and engineering is dropping across America today.”
Hebert agreed that the dot-com bust and layoffs after Y2K are partially to blame for that. “It created this period of time where there weren’t jobs,” he said. “It had a huge impact especially in California and Boston, because people saw the layoffs everyday.”
But he also blamed the outsourcing “myth.” He said that although there are many entry-level jobs going to India and other regions, information technology administrators will always be needed.
“Some of the entry-level jobs are disappearing,” Hebert said. “But information technology still requires hands-on work.”
Students need to get experience while in college to get into those higher-level jobs, Hebert said, but the jobs are available. Records agreed, saying that both internships and jobs are plentiful.
“If I had another 20 kids, I could place them this week,” Hebert said. “We have great jobs and internships that go begging because we don’t have enough students to take them. We have companies going to classes to recruit because there are so few students. And this is turning up in the pay rates. Most of the graduates are starting in the mid-$50,000s without experience. I am quite dumbfounded as to why students aren’t coming.”
Tom Doeppner, an associate professor and vice chair of the computer science department at Brown, said the parents of many freshmen are “very concerned about whether there are jobs” in technology, “and the perception is that they are going offshore. But our Brown career services is getting lots of requests” for computer science graduates.
“Our students aren’t going into entry level,” he added, “they’re going into advanced positions.”
But it isn’t just parents and students who are concerned about the job market.
James Schweikart, dean of the School of Management at Rhode Island College, said that the college recommends that technology students also major in a “typical business field” to make them more “marketable.”
And Ronald Atkins, chair of business studies and economics and coordinator of business administration and management at Salve, said the university had dropped the computer science major because “it’s all outsourced to India and China,” and “no one takes computers apart and puts them together again anymore” in the United States.
“For the last four years, I could see the interest dropping and the enrollments dropping, so I realized I had to change the program,” Atkins said. “I could see the trend, and the trend was downward, and I looked at the external environment and knew what was happening.”
Instead of computer science, Salve now offers a degree program in information systems management, which teaches students operating system and programming basics along with “a very strong management component.”
Hebert, of the Tech Collective, said that for schools like Salve that have a strong business focus, information systems management is probably a better fit than computer science. But if all schools made that choice, he warned, it would cause major problems. “It would hurt us being leaders in innovation,” he said.
“The mindset within the United States has to be changed,” Hebert said. “People are looking at this like they looked at all of the older manufacturing jobs that got offshored to the point where there were no jobs left.
“People think the same thing is happening in the information technology world,” he added, “but information technology is tied to everything, and it’s not going away.
“You can’t offshore everything that needs to be done for people to be successful. If your laptop breaks, you can’t work, and you can’t spend three hours on the phone with someone in India.”
