Cambridge University is experiencing a significant decline in applicants for its computer science courses.

Applications to study the subject at Cambridge have been steadily reducing since 2000. Last year, 70 were accepted out of 210 applications, a significant decrease on the figures for 2000, when 500 applications were made and 100 accepted.

This Thursday the Cambridge Computer Laboratories will hold their recruitment fair in which 55 leading companies, each looking to hire several graduates, will be competing to recruit just 70 graduating students.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s International Review of ICT calls this lack of interest in computer science ‘alarming’. They blame the dropping numbers of applications on the bursting of the dotcom bubble after the internet craze of the nineties, and on the outsourcing of graduate jobs to lower cost countries such as India and China.

The Review reports that ‘many people do not find the career described sufficiently attractive’, a view shared by Professor David Patterson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He attributes the falling number of applicants worldwide to ‘the current negative view of the computer science profession by pre-college students’, and the assumption that career potential is limited to ‘university research laboratories and fields of cubicles with displays and keyboards’.

Professor Peter Robinson, deputy head of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, has pointed out that ‘starting salaries for computer scientists are among the highest for any graduates’, whilst multinational technology companies, forced to recruit graduates in maths, engineering and natural sciences, are taking the shortage of properly trained graduates seriously.
Microsoft Research is currently sponsoring an outreach event taking place in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory for local sixth forms in December and Google recently sent a team of people into the Laboratory offering interviews and summer internships to any students who were interested.
Clemmie Dowley