Geez, I can’t believe that I’m finally getting to this. But on July 10, 2003 the Caribbean Business ranked the Bachelor’s Degrees Granted in Puerto Rico between 2001 and 2002. The big winner by far was Business Management & Administration Services with 35.53%. Rounding out the top five were Education (13.4%), Biological/Life Sciences (7.5%), Health Professions & Related Sciences (6.4%), and Engineering (6.4%).
Although the Engineering area of study did include computer engineering, Computer Sciences came in at … wait for it … 12th place with 1.6%, with an average of 132 graduates per year. With these numbers, I believe that a knowledge economy in Puerto Rico is not possible. No matter how much we talk about it, no matter how much we prognosticate that a knowledge economy is our next stage of economic development, it will never happen with the number of computer scientists we are producing. These numbers will also reduce once we consider the number of graduates that migrate to the United States to obtain more lucrative opportunities.
Our only hope, even though it is a great stretch of our collective imagination, is if our mainstream programs significantly increase their emphasis on computers and what it means to �align Information Technology with business.� Perhaps this dream (nightmare?) should even become more widespread. If we would extrapolate the impact of open source software and offshore outsourcing, main stream computer science is indeed in great trouble. Maybe all schools in all countries should enhance their curriculum to include a minor concentration on computer science. Only then will we assured that our future graduates will be able to fill-in the decimated ranks of the IT industry.
