Growing Enrollments Require Us to Do More: Perspectives on Broadening Participation During an Undergraduate Computing Enrollment Boom

Since 2006, undergraduate interest in computer science degrees has increased significantly, marking the third period of CS enrollment growth since the field’s emergence in the early 1900s. Scholars have theorized that institutional approaches to managing these cycles of enrollment growth, notably the inability to scale programs, resulted not only in the discipline’s constriction, but also the disproportionate decline in the participation of Black, Latin*, and Indigenous students in computing. This history suggests that it is important for stakeholders to think intentionally about how the management of enrollment surges can hamper, or even undermine, efforts to broaden participation in CS; yet there is limited research examining whether and how stakeholders from CS departments perceive this relationship. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of CS departments at four public research institutions in the United States to understand how 55 stakeholders perceived undergraduate enrollment and diversity trends, as well as the relationship between booming enrollments and diversity efforts within the department. We found that participants largely spoke about their diversity work without referencing the impacts of enrollment shifts in the department. When this relationship was discussed, participants varied in how they framed it—as either positive, negative, or null. We argue that separating out diversity work from core priorities in the department will hinder departments’ ability to sustain BPC efforts into the future. Instead, it is imperative that stakeholders understand how departmental responses to dynamic external forces (e.g., booming enrollments, shifting realities related to COVID-19) impact diversity efforts.