As director of a first-year writing course at a midsize public university, Melanie Gagich doesn’t know a lot about computer science. But when her institution invited faculty to propose new programmes combining two existing majors, she and another writing instructor felt that English and computer science would be a perfect fit. “A lot of students worry about being an English major, because they’re always like, ‘Well, can I get a job with that?’ That was our inspiration,” she says.
Gagich’s proposal will become one of the inaugural integrated majors at Cleveland State University, which is launching 11 such programmes this spring (April). The university is part of a consortium of ten universities exploring integrated majors under the guidance of the Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC), a research centre located at Northeastern University, the birthplace of integrated majors. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Northeastern was the first to launch what it called combined majors in 2001 with a series of programmes combining computer science with other majors (often referred to as “CS+X”). Nearly two and a half decades later, it offers a whopping 270 combined majors across a variety of disciplines, with 8,401 students — approximately half the student body – enrolled in them.
Two core ideas catalysed the concept, according to Carla Brodley, director of CIC. The first, she says is that in today’s world, “every field is a tech field.” That is to say, in every discipline and industry, there are computer science roles and opportunities available. “Every field needs people that can understand the discipline but also know how to create the software and the tools that are needed for the digital world that we live in,” she says.
The second idea has to do with demographics. Combined majors can encourage students who might not be otherwise interested in computer science — and especially those who are under-represented in the field, including women and black and Hispanic students — to consider studying it.
A handful of other institutions have launched their own CS+X programmes in the intervening years, such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which offered its first CS+X majors in 2014 and now has 14 such programmes. Others have been less successful; a CS+X pilot programme at Stanford University was discontinued, with students reporting that the course load was too intensive.
Cleveland State is the only institution in the consortium that offers integrated majors beyond computer science, including a design and psychology major and a journalism and sociology major. The university’s combined majors developed not only from faculty members’ proposals but in collaboration with local employers, who weighed in on which of the proposed programmes could meet the area’s workforce needs. “As a regional public institution that seeks to serve this community, we said, what do our employers need?” says Nigamanth Sridhar, the university’s provost, who is spearheading the initiative.
But university officials affirm that the computer science curriculum is not dumbed down for students in these programmes, even if they don’t have to take as many CS classes. “The computer science courses are deep enough for a graduate to acquire a fundamental knowledge of computer science,” says George Chatzimavroudis, interim chair of the computer science department and associate dean of undergraduate studies and faculty affairs. “It’s not superficial knowledge… but they’re not going to have all of the core courses and not all of the technical electives.”
