That's the question asked by Australia's magazine The Age. Australia's and other English-spoken countries' universities experience a decreasing number of IT students. What's the reason for this phenomenon, especially if one considers our daily life that becomes more and more digital, filled with communication gadgets and computer power nobody would have imagined a few decades ago?
There's a multitude of reasons. First, computer science is subject to pig cycles like any other discipline. This wasn't the case 20 years ago when I started studying, where the future was bright and a lot of lies were told ("big money", "move the world") . Additionally, nobody in the job market is interested in computer science but IT jobs. Science doesn't make rich in money, so most people are interested in practical knowledge to get their job done.
A noticable cooling in Germany's job market happened during the mid-90s, after that the Internet was about to come and I got my first 'real' job. Before that almost every major company was off-shoring its developments and at a job fair I've been told that they hadn't any jobs because their developing staff was now residing in India.
Since then, ups and downs in that IT job market are a commonplace and job training changed significantly. IT's no longer rocket science but the supplier of everyday's technology and a lot of yesterday's old glamour is gone forever.
Society has changed, too. Though our administration launches success stories about our recovering and growing economy, the job market itself has changed drastically. Staying with the same company for the greatest part of your life becomes unlikely and once you're losing your job chances are high that you'll experience a real crash of your life style, especially if you're depending on unemployment benefits. Getting poor in Germany has become a real threat for employees, and the strength of one's company doesn't mean that her job is secure. There is no sign of resistance in the working class, so people seem to have accepted this situation.
And then there's the prestige. Especially in Germany, technical jobs never were that reputable. As long as they stayed with the academic community and were a matter of just a few people, computer and information science were considered as something sophisticated and boring. With every step of vulgarisation the reputation of IT was decreasing and to do IT wasn't special anymore. To become a lawyer or a consultant has always been more prestigious, these jobs are usually well-paid and promise high social status - as opposed to IT jobs, where employees often are service-oriented computer nerds and nothing else.
It's been a great loss of reputation that computer science experienced in the last twenty years. IT early left academia and became a business service. For the elite of a society becoming a servant isn't an option, so IT became the playground of social climbers. In a society that is affected by strong mechanisms of social distance service jobs don't promise enough reputation, thus less and less people want to do IT.