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by v77 1645 days ago
I'm in my 40's and my graduating comp sci class was the biggest in history at that time because of the money people were making in the first dot com boom.
2 comments

Not sure how it is today, but for me in the mid-90s, there was a lot of interest in software and computer degrees, but the curriculum was sufficiently difficult to filter out the posers. I went to a huge state school, and our first year Comp Sci class was, not exaggerating, an auditorium-sized lecture of 1000+ students dreaming about becoming a Microsoft Millionaire. Most of the students didn't make it through hello_world.c. We also had requirements like Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, MOSFETs, Linear Systems, and Signal Processing. The electives were all very tough, too. By the time we graduated, there were about 30-40 of us. So, there was a lot of interest, but most didn't actually graduate with the major.
There was a bit of a downswing in CS degrees around the first DOTCOM bust, a lot of folks left programs at 2nd tier colleges and moved to adjacent but less “software” and “subject to outsourcing” like industrial engineering, electrical engineering.

I didn’t exactly have a broad view at the time, but it seemed like top ~20 Comp Sci programs were largely unaffected and kept growing the whole time.