Nice data visualizations. One thing I'd also like to see here is a representation for multiple majors (35% of Williams students are double majors).
Tangentially related, I was a little disappointed to see the slice for Computer Science is still so small. It was also small in mid-90's, and I believe it grew dramatically during the first dotcom boom, but it seems to have dropped back to the earlier levels.
Not that I think the CS program should get any easier just to attract more students (it was notoriously difficult for a while), but rather I think that CS can be the perfect science complement in a well-rounded liberal arts education.
I believe my year (2003) was the biggest CS class ever. Somewhere around 25-30; I forget the exact number.. I know it dipped in the couple years after that quite a bit, but not sure if it's picked up again.
Class of 2015 here! We have record numbers signed up for Algorithms in the spring, something like 30-40 and a lot of those people are planning to major.
It's a real department with seven profs. Lots of non-majors take CS classes, but even so, class sizes are relatively small (usually in the 10 to 30 range). That's really one of the major selling points for the LAC model of education.
At Bard College, we have recently begun offering CS intro courses that are juxtaposed with other disciplines. For instance, one of the most popular courses this semester was a CS called "Interactive Media" that had students learning Processing with the end result being they had to create a substantial piece of art (installation / visualizer / game) at the end of it. I also believe that next semester there is an intro course that is focused on using NLP (really basic stuff like N-grams, counting the number of word repetitions on a text) in conjunction with experimental poetry.
Its great because it gets the fundamentals of programming down while also allowing the students to attach it to their other interests. I love being able to talk to my art student friends about their projects and helping them with code. They are all really into it.
I think I know who you were and met you at Williams. I'm also a CS major and I graduated in the late 90's. It is indeed the case that the CS major grew absurdly huge in the late 90's, with my class being double the size of the previous year's class, and the class below me doubling in the size of my class. And with intro courses being yet more absurd. All of my memories of our profs involve them with big circles under their eyes, clutching mugs of coffee.
It says it does represent double majors, but probably not in any useful capacity that you were looking for: "Those with double-majors have two arcs on the left (one from each of their majors, each arc of 1/2 thickness) that combine into one resulting career choice."
Tangentially related, I was a little disappointed to see the slice for Computer Science is still so small. It was also small in mid-90's, and I believe it grew dramatically during the first dotcom boom, but it seems to have dropped back to the earlier levels.
Not that I think the CS program should get any easier just to attract more students (it was notoriously difficult for a while), but rather I think that CS can be the perfect science complement in a well-rounded liberal arts education.
Go Ephs.