The course is a standard Computer Science 101 course, designed for majors but largely populated by non-majors in the Summer. My enrollment is huge (relatively speaking). I have 21 students compared to the normal 8 or so that take this course in the Summer. I'll be teaching C, then Python, over five weeks.
That my class's enrollment is larger than expected is, well, expected. Almost all of the department's CS classes are getting bigger. I'm sure this happened during the dot-com boom as more and more people wanted to become computer science majors for the impressive job prospects. Is that what's happening now? Are we experiencing a second dot-com-like boom? Here's a graph of enrollment at my university for the last eight years
The dark blue line, at the top, is the enrollment in the standard CS for majors course - these are probably future software engineers. It's been going up, unsurprisingly. The red line? that's the "CS for Poets" class in a slight and steady decline over the years - it wasn't offered in 2008/09. The green line is the "CS for smart people" class - slight increase over the years - these might be future theorists. The light blue line is a new class which I call "CS for technical non-majors" - it's populated by future economists, scientists, linguists, etc.... People in this class tend not to take it to fulfill a requirement, they take it because they think it'll be useful.
During the dot-com boom I suspect the dark blue line jumped up dramatically. It's not responsible for the growth we're seeing here. Overwhelmingly what seems to be driving today's interest in computer science is technical people from outside computer science electing to place another tool in their belt. What we're observing here is the diffusion of serious computer science outside the core of the discipline.
Extrapolation is fun. At the current rate of growth introductory CS classes will soon rival the mandatory calculus class required by the university. Calculus is great but I see it as a beautiful but useless theory for the vast majority of the population. I'd be happy to see this requirement be replaced by Statistics or possibly even CS (though I don't think everyone needs to know how to program either).
In closing I'll say that we're seeing a fundamental change in computer science. It's no longer the domain of the geeky hacker. It has overflowed past our boundaries and is now flooding the vast plains of general technical society.
Data was taken from the public-facing interface to the UChicago schedule http://timeschedules.uchicago.edu/. Numbers correspond to Autumn enrollment in Majors:CS-151 , Honors: CS-161, Poets: CS-105, Techies: CS-121
Re calculus: sure, beautiful, but probably not as beautiful as other math that most people never see and which could be taught more easily. (parts of graph theory, or group theory, maybe CS theory, or probability, or even statistics which is also useful).
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