Recruiting Students BA vs BS and K12 Teacher Certification

Contributed by Mike Zamansky, mz631@hunter.cuny.edu

Institutional and departmental context

• Institution Name: Hunter College
• Location: New York City, NY USA
• Student body size: 22,000
• Degree(s) offered: BA Computer Science, MA Computer Science, MSEd Computer Science Education, Advanced Certificate Computer Science Education
• Department/major name: Department of Computer Science
• Number of contributing faculty: 13 tenure lines
• Number of majors annually: 1000 BS/MA, MSEd pending (just approved by NY State)

Facilitation

Are you willing to facilitate this discussion? Yes

Are there any others whom you would recommend as potential facilitators for this topic? Jim Matthews and Robin Flatland, Siena College

Description

New York state just recently established a K12 tenure area for computer science and approved Hunter as the first institution in NY State to be able to award a Masters in Computer Science Education and Advanced Certificate for teachers certified in other areas. Both programs will graduate students certified to teach computer science in New York State. We anticipate that recruiting undergraduates into the program will be challenging due to other career opportunities in CS, lack of CS teacher role models, and the national decline in interest in pre-college level STEM teaching. At Hunter we have spent the past few years establishing a presence in the K12 CS Education space in New York City to help mitigate these challenges.

Hunter College also faces challenges in undergraduate CS as a liberal arts institution with a relatively unknown CS program in a city with higher profile private Bachelors of Science awarding institutions and the high school misconception that computer science should be studied at a BS awarding institution. I would be interested in discussing the challenges faced at both the undergraduate CS level and at the teacher education level along with our successes and failures,