I don't think they're like CMU, which has a separate school of Computer Science you have to be admitted to in order to be a CS major. If Stanford is like the University of Chicago, the only thing stopping students from majoring in CS are the registrar-imposed limits on the number of students physically enrolled.
Stanford doesn't even have those "registrar-imposed limits." Classes almost never fill up; they just get larger rooms or add TAs. Students don't usually register for classes until after the term has started!
I was an undergrad at a more traditional school where we registered for classes months in advance. I was amazed that the Stanford system was so informal, but in practice it worked just fine. It's wonderful to be able to audit a few classes before deciding on exactly what you're going to take; you may learn that you can't stand a professor, or love a surprising subject.
Wow, as an undergrad who has endured years of stressful schedule twiddling followed by a 2-week sprint to figure out how I'm going to replace all the crap courses I naively selected months ago, that sounds like paradise.
It's not exactly paradise. Because classes are only ten weeks total (slightly less in spring), you can't exactly spend the first week or two shopping around without doing non-trivial work for every single class you're shopping --- an approach which doesn't scale, to say the least. There's still a sprint the first few days. But still, it's nice.
I think it reflects so well on Stanford that they are committed to making sure students have an opportunity to major in cs, even if enrollment is tough to manage. That bit about helping the geology phd reflects especially well on stanford.
I attended cal for grad school, and I love it in many ways, but I just don't see as deep a commitment to every students success. Don't want to overstate this, plenty of wonderful profs and staff at cal who make an effort, and the challenges of 25k undergrads is great.
But it pains me to see young smart people who stumble a bit in their first couple years bounced from a major because the dept is looking for reasons to turn students away. I thins the field loses a lot of c@reative people who would have made big contributions.
Cs hasn't been impacted at cal forr a while now, thought it was when I was there.
Fortunately there are other good paths for persistent students.
This is one of the things you pay the big bucks for at the better private colleges. Part of their implicit contract with you is that they'll make available to you the resources necessary to complete your major in 4 years (although that can get difficult with laboratories that have highly finite sizes, e.g. a chemistry lab with N hoods) and they won't intentionally limit capacity with "weed out" courses. At the worst case some big colleges are less of a bargain than they appear since you have to take 5+ years to get into all the required courses due to capacity issues.
Or take the half of the big 4 CS schools: Berkeley is like many if not most big public schools in requiring you apply to either their Engineering or "Letters and Science" schools, and you can't take EECS without getting into the former, CS without getting into one of either (or at least that's what they say on their home page, their may be exceptions of course).
CMU is unusual for a private school in that you have to apply to their CS department which has a fixed per year class size of 135 (last time I checked). MIT and I gather Stanford are like most? private colleges in that acceptance allows you to major in anything you can do and to switch if you want to. If a major doubles in size "overnight" they'll move heaven and earth to accommodate the undergrads (which is a or the major theme of this blog posting, some panic that Stanford CS major enrollment is exploding).
MIT, mindful of the transitory popularly of fields (e.g. look at the early '70s areo-astro crash from which the field never recovered) has never let the EECS department---the number of professors and graduate students---get "too big", which sure appeared wise after the dot.com crash which resulted in undergraduate enrollment falling by more than 1/2. That put great stress on the department when it had 40% of the undergraduates in the 80s and 90s (and which they may be returning to, with their "CS1" course enrollment exploding from 250 last spring to 380 this spring). Enough that for a long time in that period they refused to offer a service introductory programming course for non-majors, citing their overload.
Can't they just use auto-graders? I got the impression that for many of my CS courses, the TA and professor labor went mainly into creating assignments and lectures. But many of the assignments were self or automatically grading. If you have suitably lab-based assignments, then it shouldn't be too difficult to lower the cost of adding more students into the lower level courses.
As mentioned in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444557) this course, like MIT's equivalent, is very TA intensive and is using undergraduate TAs (although I should note that MIT's 6.01-2 are not suitable for non-majors).
ADDED: I just found out that enrollment in MIT's 6.01 just jumped to 380 this spring from 250 last spring. As noted, you don't by and large take this course unless you're seriously considering EECS as a major....
So it looks like Stanford's experience is mirrored at MIT.
Well, as the article stated, many students from other degrees end up taking CS courses as part of their program and like them enough to switch. That's not necessarily related to the current potential bubble.
I know many who took computer science classes as part of a degree in biology and just ended up switching entirely.
