Over the past 25 years, there have been an increase in the number of college freshmen who initially enrolled in #ComputerScience then, after a semester, transferred out to information systems, data science, media studies, and other computing-adjacent disciplines. Some 45 years earlier, there was a similar trend in which kids entered #ElectricalEngineering then quickly switched in despair to computer science.
The common pattern is the misperception of these fields by the freshmen. In the early 1980s, most kids entered college already infected with the obsession for the 8-bit home PCs. Many of them mistakenly believed that home PCs were what #EE was all about. After the first semester, they bailed. In the early 2000s, incoming freshmen were all Web obsessed. They mistakenly believed that the Web was what #CS was all about. After the first semester, they bailed. This is a waste of time, effort, money, and goodwill, for those kids.
To remedy this, the present high school curriculum and, especially, the AP courses related to these fields (vector calculus, electromagnetics, discrete mathematics, algorithmic analysis, etc.) should be clarified and the way these courses are taught should be refined.
Sure, these high school courses are rather basic, but they should still be taught by teachers with degrees in mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science, and not by someone who is learning Python alongside the students. The high school seniors and college freshmen should be explained clearly what EE and CS are and what they are not. For instance, despite what many college curricula may hint, the core courses in EE and CS have nothing to do with deep learning in PyTorch.