Analysis of Current and Future Computer Science Needs via Advertised Faculty Searches

By Craig E. Wills, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The wealth of faculty searches in Computer Science during this hiring season for positions starting in the Fall of 2015 affords the opportunity to study areas of Computer Science where departments are choosing to invest in new faculty hires. While the number and areas for faculty searches does not necessarily translate into the same for faculty hires, we believe that they provide insight into current and future needs within the discipline.

We analyzed ads from 223 institutions for hundreds of tenure-track faculty positions in Computer Science. As shown in the accompanying graph, we found that the clusters of Big Data, Security and Systems/Networking are the areas of greatest investment with the highest percentages for both mentions and positions. We also found that from a third to over a half of all hires for areas that are, or may be, interdisciplinary in nature.

Differences are also seen when analyzing results based on the type of institution. Positions related to Big Data are roughly twice as frequent for PhD institutions as for BS and MS institutions. Security is of most interest for top-100 PhD and BS institutions. The Systems/Networks cluster is in relatively high demand from all types of institutions. Software Engineering is much less in demand for top-100 PhD institutions relative to the other institutions in our study. Finally, the abundance of potentially interdisciplinary areas is even more pronounced for PhD institutions with at least a third and up to 60% of all positions devoted to these areas.

The full report containing a description of the methodology and the complete results is available here.