Reply to How many more engineering and CS majors do we need?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Engineering and CS majors can work in many industries including going to law school and taking jobs at investment banks, no need for them to be humanities majors[/quote]

They don’t often have the other soft skills necessary to complete those jobs though. So they would never be hired to begin with.[/quote]

Actually, engineering majors are often the best read and most empathetic kids you'll meet these days. Because they are smart and they  are curious. At my kid's top 20 school, the engineering majors are highly recruited by MBB and Wall Street. So I think your assumptions are very dated. It's not 1987 anymore. The smart kids aren't going into history or political science or other soft majors these days. Engineering is vacuuming a lot of the talent now. Whether it's the right fit for everyone is a different discussion. I would never encourage anyone who doesn't have the aptitude and discipline to choose engineering. It is a very tough major everywhere. [/quote]
No need to overdo it. The big reason so many students are majoring in STEM is the shift by institutions to make STEM accessible. CS, particularly, has been softened to play-doh at many institutions and you can coast through a degree with the hardest math class maybe being an application-based linear algebra course. Smart kids still major in any and everything, and there's many social science students going into banking/finance and consulting.[/quote]
It's actually surprising how little you need to do a CS major at these schools.

Williams: one math course (Discrete), intro course/intro data structures, two core courses (only one in algorithms), and 3 electives...that is hardly a CS degree. That is just baby software engineering bootcamp; you might even learn more in a boot camp.[/quote]

I have a CS degree from a top 5 school. For Williams, the requirements are here:
https://csci.williams.edu/patterns-of-course-elections/

I agree the required courses are a little light, but 3 electives are required from this list:
https://csci.williams.edu/electives/

One or two of those is not that intense (digital design; computational biology) but the rest are all hard-core, like Operating Systems, Compiler Design, Distributed Systems.

The only way I'd make this more intense it to require 2 CS courses per semester, not 1. I was doing 2-3 CS courses per semester in my senior year. It was intense, but worth it.[/quote]
Also a software engineer/DP, and I'm just surprised, because I had to do a lot more coursework for a CS degree. Is this normal across LACs?[/quote]

It varies, but the minimal requirements CS degrees are not unusual at Small LACs where CS grew out of the Math Department.

This became an issue at the university where I did my CS Master’s degree.  That university eventually instituted mandatory “placement exams” for all incoming grad students.  Any student who did not do sufficiently well on a particular section of the placement exam was told to take the corresponding undergrad course before starting any related graduate course.  It did the affected students a favor, because they were unlikely to survive the graduate course due to lack of foundational knowledge.[/quote]

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