A personal view of UC Berkeley’s EECS crisis

I got a BA in CS via the undeclared major to L&amp;S CS major route over 25 years ago and worked that reader, tutor, TA pipeline too. To be honest, I am not even sure it was a pipeline yet, based on the reactions I saw at the time.<p>I want to imagine that Nick is just venting over departmental politics or engaging in rhetorical brinkmanship in suggesting that the entire major could be pruned. I think it would be a shame for CS to be removed as an option for folks like me, who would never have imagined enrolling in EECS when they were in high school.<p>Tangentially, does anybody have links to statistics similar to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eecs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;about&#x2F;by-the-numbers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eecs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;about&#x2F;by-the-numbers</a> but including prior decades? I had a sense that I was in the minority in my classes in the early&#x2F;mid 90s, but I do now wonder how the trends went during prior economic cycles...

The CS-Ed Podcast has an episode that goes into detail on how UC Berkeley’s EECS undergraduate teaching pipeline works. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csedpodcast.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;season3_episode3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;csedpodcast.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;season3_episode3&#x2F;</a>

“At this point, the EECS department is running an annual deficit of nearly $5 million”<p>“department must provide more than 7,000 student-seats per year in the upper division courses”<p>That’s crazy. Also amusing how the author constantly talks about scaling up as if the department is a startup.<p>As an international graduate student, I never considered Berkeley to be an attractive place to study a PhD: insane housing prices, expensive fees and insurance, huge bureaucracy, and all the while even the most popular departments are underfunded or barely-funded so low stipends.<p>I recommend watching the documentary “At Berkeley”.