news

Recently, on a social platform, "2024 Taiyuan University of Technology Software Engineering recruits 60 classes, nearly 2,000 people" became a hot search. Most netizens expressed surprise and disbelief. Specifically, Taiyuan University of Technology plans to recruit 1,795 people for software engineering in 2024. If we consider that there are more computer majors, because computer science and technology plans to recruit 165 people, the total number is closer to 2,000.

In fact, there are many universities that do this. For example, in the 2024 enrollment plan, Henan Normal University has set up six directions for software engineering, including .Net, Java, mobile development, Web front-end, Python and intelligent applications, and two directions for network engineering, including data security and embedded development. Each direction plans to enroll 245 people, totaling 1,960 people; Henan University of Technology has set up seven directions for computer science, with a total enrollment of 1,956 people; Zhengzhou University of Light Industry plans to enroll a total of 1,830 people in software engineering, computer science and technology, network engineering and other majors.

This division of majors and directions reflects a basic fact: although the computer major has been thriving for a long time, as a major major that is highly related to employment in the Internet and mobile Internet industries, the Internet and mobile Internet industries are still developing and changing rapidly. As the "upstream" or industry-induced mapping of the computer major, it is naturally impossible to solidify or finalize. In this sense, the fact that the above-mentioned universities have launched computer majors and recruited a lot of students shows that their enrollment plans are market- and employment-oriented.

It is no secret that the above-mentioned universities have a very large enrollment scale for computer science, with nearly 2,000 students. Generally, a department recruits dozens to hundreds of students, and recruiting hundreds of students is already exaggerated. Nearly 2,000 students is almost the annual enrollment scale of a university.

However, considering that in the past few years, those who studied science and engineering but not computer science, or even liberal arts, would consider "changing to coding" (changing careers to become code farmers) because of the average employment prospects of their majors, learning computer science through minor or self-study in school is foresight, and those who found it difficult to find a job after graduation and "changed to coding" after taking a few months of crash course training are considered to be afterthoughts, which is not uncommon. When the Internet and mobile Internet industries are in a shortage of talent and are eager to recruit talents due to the rapid development, it is often the case that heroes do not ask where they came from. It is not important whether you are from a famous school or whether your major is computer science. What is important is whether you can do this job now. If you can do it, you can do it. If you can't do it, you can't get by.

Obviously, as a regular full-time university and a 211 university, Taiyuan University of Technology’s professionalism and systematicness in training programmers is much better than the crash courses on the market, right? As for Henan Normal University, Henan University of Technology and Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, although they are not 211, they are at least regular full-time universities. Isn’t it appropriate for these universities to expand their enrollment in computer science and compete with crash courses in the same ecological niche?

Furthermore, we discuss the mechanism and internal rationality of these universities' massive expansion of computer science majors, to illustrate that if universities must expand enrollment in order to survive, expanding enrollment in computer science majors is also relatively beneficial to students.

We have experienced the expansion of university enrollment and witnessed the entire process of university education from elite education to popularization. The enrollment scale of colleges and universities has expanded tenfold from one million in 1998 to over ten million in 2021.

However, the difficulty of expanding enrollment varies for different majors. Some majors, such as experimental physics, require building laboratories and hiring famous teachers, which requires a lot of investment. On the other hand, the proportion of people who are talented and interested in devoting themselves to physics research and contributing to expanding the boundaries of human knowledge is very low, so such majors are restricted by both supply and demand, and the expansion of enrollment will not be very large.

The situation is different for liberal arts and social science majors, from literature, history and philosophy to economics and law. From the supply side, there is no need to build laboratories, and the faculty can be expanded quickly, so it has become one of the main forces for enrollment expansion. For the computer major, from the supply side, it is not difficult to expand the faculty; from the demand side, in the era of rapid development of the Internet and mobile Internet industries, new industry outlets are emerging one after another, the demand for labor is strong, and the starting salary is much higher than other industries. Students have no worries about employment, and universities can charge higher tuition fees than general majors, so colleges and universities are competing to expand enrollment.

Since China’s economic take-off after joining the WTO, the demand for college students in various industries is very strong, so the consequences of the expansion of college enrollment have just been absorbed by the expanded market. However, with the decrease in the number of newborns, universities will generally face stock competition for students in a few years, which is still a "long-term concern" for universities; the combination of multiple factors has led to a severe employment situation, which has caused many schools and many majors to be cold in recruiting students. This is a "near-term concern" for non-head universities and non-popular majors, and means an imminent survival crisis.

Schools and majors that cannot recruit students cannot get corresponding financial grants, nor can they collect tuition fees. Teachers have to change jobs or even lose their jobs, so universities and colleges have the motivation to start self-help. In this sense, universities directly expanding enrollment in computer majors is a relatively wise self-help measure. Take Taiyuan University of Technology as an example. The tuition fees for its traditional majors such as law and accounting are 5,100 yuan per year, and software engineering is 16,000 yuan per year. The latter is more than three times the former, and they recruit a lot of people, so they can make money just from tuition fees. Compared with the crash courses on the market, this tuition fee is not high.

Relatively speaking, it is difficult to find a job in some majors, but in order to keep their jobs and earn money, teachers have to package their majors in various ways and "cheat" students into enrolling through information asymmetry, which is irresponsible to students; aiming at employment and the market, directly expanding the enrollment of computer majors, although the original intention is also for survival and income, it is still relatively beneficial to students. Of course, it is more difficult to find a job in computer majors now than in the past, but compared with other industries, it still has significant advantages in finding a job and earning money.

Non-leading universities will feel the survival crisis earlier, so they have the motivation to adjust early. On the contrary, leading universities, because they have no worries about the source of students, have less motivation to change. This is why we see that Taiyuan University of Technology and the above-mentioned Henan universities have expanded their enrollment in computer science.

Chen Bin

Editor: Xin Shengzhi