Some people teach it as misspelled mathematics, which it is not. The second major theme is that there is a lot of bad teaching around CS as has always been the case. It doesn't need to be hard to drive people away, just boring. People get in for the wrong reasons and decide they really didn't understand what it was and that they don't really like it. There is a lot of hype out there about AI at the moment, and self driving cars, and going to Mars, etc. But in certain combinations of economic factors and media hype, a lot of students go in to CS not really understanding what they are getting in to but are lured by the, perhaps elusive, draw of big salaries. The first is periodic and I don't know where we are in the period at the moment.
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Let me start an answer, but it might take several iterations to get all my thoughts together on the two ideas.
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The difficulty of CS (true or imagined) and the drop out rates are not the same thing. So: What would be the best reply to a beginning CS student who asks, "Why is CS hard?" This semester I had a student in my virtual office hour ask, "Why is computer science harder than other majors, as you say?", and I was a bit flat-footed for a good response. A few times in my introductory programming course, I will mention this fact (that computer science is among the hardest majors), partly to set expectations that students will need to work hard to succeed. community college, and the non-passing rates are even higher in this context. I teach computer science majors at a U.S. Why are computer science drop-out rates so high? (Trinity News, 2016).
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Concern over drop-out rates in computer science courses (The Irish Times, 2016).Computer science undergraduates most likely to drop out (, 2019).A number of sources all echo the finding that roughly one-third of incoming CS majors do not progress to a second year, higher than most other majors. Data pretty regularly shows that computer science programs have among the highest failure and dropout rates of any college program.