The boom in the Internet economy has proved to be a double-edged sword for university computer science departments nationwide.
While a mass rush to major in the lucrative field has spurred demand for faculty in the departments, the Internet's lure is siphoning off those candidates who were previously more likely to enter academia.
At Princeton, where the number of majors doubled from 42 in 1994 to 85 in 1999, the computer science department has been "bursting at the seams," said the department's acting chair Ken Steiglitz in an e-mail.
Part of the pressure on the department comes from an expanding interest by non-majors to learn computer basics they will need for the future, according to Dean of Engineering and Applied Science James Wei.
"We felt that all engineering students should take a computer science class, but increasingly all the liberal arts students feel they cannot enter today's working world unless they know something about computers," Wei said. He added that the trustees have discussed a goal of 100 percent undergraduate participation in computer science courses.
Achieving this goal would require the department to expand, finding new faculty and resources, while retaining its current staff.
"There is of course fierce competition for the best people today, and resource allocation at the University is always difficult," Steiglitz said.
The University is not the only school facing enrollment increases. The number of computer science majors at schools such as the University of Michigan, Stanford, Yale, Cornell and Rice universities have all doubled during the past few years, according to officials at those institutions.
Increased student interest in the departments has caused a barrage of problems from large class sizes to faculty shortages.
Stanford's computer science department, which graduates approximately 380 undergraduates a year and enrolls almost 85 percent of all undergraduates in its two introductory courses, has found itself relying more on outside lecturers and its Ph.D candidates to cover teaching sections, according to department manager Peache Turner.
"We have a lot of former students in the industry who are willing to help us out," Turner said, citing as a chief reason the school's proximity to Silicon Valley — the symbolic core of the country's computer business.
Moshe Vardi, the chair of the Rice computer science department, said his university has experienced an explosion in computer science course enrollment — causing the faculty to strain to keep pace.
"We are trying to increase our faculty, but that does not happen overnight. The job market is such that industry is attracting people who usually enter academics."
"This is the case in small, large and tiny schools across the country — all over the place," he added.
Larger research universities such as Cornell are battling the same problems with large classes and competition for experienced faculty.
"The department used to be driven by people purely interested in the science, and there are still 30 to 40 of those a year," chair of Cornell's computer science department Charles Venloan explained. "But the growth has been in the commercial end, with more and more ending up on Wall Street, to use a metaphor."
Within the Cornell department, which has doubled in the past five years at a rate of 10 to 15 percent a year, Venloan noted that undergraduates have been planning at least a dozen startups.
"Ph.D. candidates now face the question, 'Do I go into academia or industry?' " Venloan said. "And the salary differential generally points to industry."
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