Why My Major Leads Dropout Statistics
I came into USC my freshman year having no idea what I wanted to do. I applied and got accepted as a biology major, but quickly realized (even before I stepped foot on campus) that I did not want to follow the same path as my older brother. He is now gearing up for medical school and I realize that it is a process I never wanted to pursue.
My major was officially “undeclared/undecided” for a while, but I eventually decided to stick with computer science. I took my first computer science class my freshman year at USC with no prior programming experience, and it was a struggle. The class was meant for people with little to no prior coding skills, but even learning the basics such as conditional statements, loops, and functions seemed completely foreign at the time. No wonder that out of every college degree, computer science has the highest dropout rate.
According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, computer science has an undergraduate dropout rate of 9.8%. This freaked me out. I was struggling in a class which I thought was the easiest CS course at USC, and part of a major in which nearly 1 in 10 students switch to something else. Seeing that the content and coursework could only get harder, I thought of myself as a prime candidate to take my studies to another department. But, I was wrong. I am still here. I am following the CS course plan to the book and I honestly couldn’t see myself doing anything else. What the hell happened between then and now??
A post on LinkedIn that I saw seemed to describe exactly what happened. The post, with triple-digit likes and comments, started off with the sentence, “I believe it is not possible to get an A in a USC computer science course by yourself.” I reflected on this statement, and the more I thought about it, the more true I thought it was. It was through friends I met early on that I was able to stick with the major.
On the second or third day of my freshman welcome week at USC, I decided to go to rec fest to sign up for the club golf team. At the same time I was signing up, a friend who I used to play against in rival high school golf matches in New York walked up to the table to also put his name on the sign up list. We talked for a while about our golf teams in high school and then he eventually invited me back to his suite in McCarthy. There, I met some of his suite-mates, who at the time, I had no idea would also become some of my best friends to this day, and friends who I could not have done the early computer science classes without.
Long story short, I would go to these friends for help with nearly every programming assignment I was given during my first and second semester. They helped me overcome the learning curve and provided the extra assistance that was imperative to my success. Further down in the LinkedIn post the author writes, “The only people who last 4 years have a strong network of highly intelligent friends in the program”, and later goes on to say how he met his friends by complete chance in a study room. I could not have resonated with this more.
There were many times where I felt like I was sinking and did not believe that I was the right type for the major. This is a feeling that so many bright, intelligent and capable students have right before dropping out of CS courses. These courses truly seem like they embrace a sink or swim attitude and without a strong support system, it’s easy to feel hopeless. I am not sure what can be done to change this, but concerns over why so many students quit should be no mystery.
