Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
&gt; <i>&quot;It&#x27;s not a video games major.&quot;</i><p>If it was true in the 80s, it was certainly true in the early 2000s when I was getting my CprE degree.  I met quite a few people who were studying ComS or CprE for reasons that can be summed up as, &quot;I built my own computer, I like video games, people said I&#x27;m good with computers, so I should be a Computer Science&#x2F;Computer Engineering major!&quot;  They rarely lasted more than a semester or two, though I think the most epic flameout I knew managed a whopping 0.34 GPA his first semester...<p>And if the goal is &quot;Get a degree, coast on through life with the easy money from computers,&quot; well... good luck.  There are some very wide open pathways where if you&#x27;re good, you can make lots of coin, but they&#x27;re rare, and most tend to involve an awful lot of years of hard learning before you&#x27;re competent (embedded dev and firmware&#x2F;OS dev are some fields desperate for competent hires).<p>If you can write solid C, ring 0&#x2F;EL3 doesn&#x27;t scare you off, or you can figure out how to cram 10 pounds of hard realtime code into a 5 pound microcontroller... yeah, you&#x27;ll go far.  Come out having done the minimum, knowing Python and Javascript, well... there&#x27;s an awful lot of competition for most of those positions if you&#x27;re just a basic coder, not skilled at using those to accomplish interesting real world tasks (&quot;make those images slide across the webpage&quot; is not particularly novel or interesting anymore).<p>I&#x27;m struggling a bit to find ComS majors as a percent of degrees, but some stuff I&#x27;ve found indicates it&#x27;s only in the 3-4% range or so today, so while it&#x27;s double the percentage referenced in the article, it&#x27;s not an order of magnitude higher by ratio (though in terms of degrees issued, probably, with college being more popular).