Do You Believe in Magic? Why Millennials Show Little Interest in IT Careers

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Do You Believe in Magic? Why Millennials Show Little Interest in IT Careers

7/27/2005

By Terry Calhoun

There was a 60 percent decline during 2000-2004 in the number of freshmen planning to major in computer science. Bill Gates was recently quoted as saying that he was baffled by that declining enrollment, especially since those same young people just love all of their technology toys. Microsoft, he says, can’t hire the workers that it needs.

Well, others say that maybe Microsoft is rejecting qualified people because of their specialized requirements. And some people point out that the unemployment rate in the computer occupations is higher than overall professional unemployment occupations. But it’s hard for me to believe that a guy as smart as Gates would be baffled by the freshmen major statistics.

I think I know why those young people are not choosing computer science majors. Here are a few reasons that I think add up to a lot of pressure:

That Unemployment Rate.
The kids heading to school right now are the Millennials. One of the things about Millennials that is important is that they rate eventual financial success as very important. And they’re not ignorant about that unemployment rate because another thing about Millennials is that they listen to their parents.

No, really. They do listen. Studies have shown that in many ways. I spoke recently with the career center director at a large Florida university. She d'es a sort of “exit survey” with graduating seniors and one of the questions she asks them is which factors in their lives are the most important in their job search. The largest single factor reported from those surveys is those students’ parents. Ahead of the career counseling office, ahead of online job services, ahead of everything else; Millennials are taking their parents’ advice. And you can bet that their parents are aware of that unemployment rate.

Outsourcing.
Real or not, and I think it’s real, those students heard, throughout high school, from the media and from their parents about jobs being outsourced offshore. For a young person who intends to be an affluent adult, and these kids do intend that, the uncertainty of going into a field where lots of people appear to be losing their jobs to lower paid but good IT workers in India and elsewhere is a barrier to looking at that major.

The dotCom Bust.
These students hit high school just after the dotcom bust. They’ve spent high school hearing their parents moan about losses in the 401k and 403b retirement funds. All of that has cast a bit of a pall on the attractiveness of an IT major.

Schools Having Less Emphasis.
And, although I don’t have statistics as to the extent of it, after that dotcom bust and in response to the offshore outsourcing, I believe that some schools shrank their computer science departments and also probably decreased their marketing of those majors.

Boys Versus Girls.
And if that wasn’t enough, you do know that there is a “crisis” about less boys coming to college, don’t you? And, like it or not, IT has been seen, by some inside and by a lot outside of it, as a particularly male domain.