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Computer science students at Cleveland State University present at an annual undergraduate research event. The Ohio university is gearing up to debut 11 integrated degree programs, more than half of which combine computer science with another major.
Cleveland State University
As the director of first-year writing at a midsize public university, Melanie Gagich doesn’t know a ton about computer science. But when her institution invited faculty to propose new programs combining two existing majors, she and another writing instructor felt that English and computer science would be a perfect fit.
“A lot of students worry, I think, about being an English major, because they’re always like, ‘Well, can I get a job with that?’ That was sort of our inspiration,” she said.
Gagich’s proposal will become one of the inaugural integrated majors at Cleveland State University, which is launching 11 such programs this spring. The university is part of a consortium of 10 universities exploring integrated majors under the guidance of the Center for Inclusive Computing, a research center located at the birthplace of integrated majors, Northeastern University. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Northeastern was the first to launch what it called combined majors in 2001 with a series of programs combining computer science with other majors (often referred to as “CS+X”). Nearly two and a half decades later, it offers a whopping 270 combined majors across a variety of disciplines, with 8,401 students—approximately half the student body—enrolled in them this past fall.
Two core ideas catalyzed the concept, according to Carla Brodley, the director of the CIC. The first, she said, is that in today’s world, “every field is a tech field.” That is to say, in every discipline and industry, there are computer science roles and opportunities available.
“Every field needs people that can understand the discipline but also know how to create the software and the tools that are needed for the digital world that we live in,” she said.
The second idea has to do with demographics: Combined majors can encourage students who might not be otherwise interested in computer science—and especially those who are underrepresented in the field, including women and Black and Hispanic students—to consider studying it.
Rather than bring people to computing, bring computing to where people are.”
—Mats Heimdahl, University of Minnesota
For some populations, the numbers seem to support the theory. A paper published by Brodley and a group of collaborators in 2022 showed that the percentage of traditional computer science majors at Northeastern who are women grew from 16 percent to 21 percent from 2014 to 2020. But within the combined computer science majors, the percentage of women grew from 18 percent to 39 percent in the same time period. On the other hand, the rate of nonwhite students in the regular computer science program was roughly the same as in the combined programs, the report showed.
A handful of other institutions have launched their own CS+X programs in the intervening years, such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which debuted a framework in 2014 to facilitate the creation of new CS+X majors—though it offered both a computer science and math major and a computer science and statistic major for decades before then. Others have been less successful; a CS+X pilot program at Stanford University was discontinued, with students reporting the course load was too intensive.
Mats Heimdahl, who heads the University of Minnesota’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, says boosting the number of female computer scientists is one of the key reasons his department is partaking in the new project.
“My background is in software engineering,” he said, “and it’s well known that diverse development teams and organizations, they just perform better than a homogeneous, sort of bro-culture type of development team.”
About 25 percent of UMN’s computer science students are female, Heimdahl said, an increase of about 15 percent over the past decade or so, thanks to efforts led by female faculty members to make computer science more accessible and less intimidating.
But he hopes the integrated program, which will likely be formally proposed within the next year, will result in even higher numbers of women enrolling in computer science majors at UMN.
“We’ve been trying to make it attractive and reach out [to female students],” he said. “But it seems like a better model—rather than bring people to computing, bring computing to where people are.”
Brodley said that, as part of the project, the CIC and the institutions will be tracking their success attracting women and minority students over the coming years; the research will also study other elements of the implementation, like how students learn about these programs, and will ultimately inform best practices for other institutions looking to develop combined or integrated major programs.
Combined Curricula
Cleveland State is the only institution in the consortium that is offering integrated majors beyond computer science, including a design and psychology major and a journalism and sociology major.
The university’s combined majors developed not only from faculty members’ proposals, but also from collaboration with local employers, who weighed in on which of the proposed programs might meet the area’s workforce needs.
“As a regional public, as an institution that seeks to serve this community, we said, what do our employers need?” said Nigamanth Sridhar, the university’s provost, who is spearheading the initiative.
Once the programs were chosen, faculty within the two departments worked to figure out what the curriculum for a given program would look like. In the English and computer science program, which is the only CS+X major that is being classified as a bachelor’s of arts, the curriculum will include essentially all the classes that are required for a regular English major, plus a slate of computer science courses Gagich hopes won’t be too intimidating for humanities-minded students. Whereas a traditional computer science student must take calculus, for instance, English and computer science majors can substitute Math for Business Majors.
She is also developing a course in which students can combine their technical computer science know-how with principles of rhetoric and composition, culminating in creating a website as a final project.
“They’d be bringing in the skills of computer science that I don’t know, but I would be able to guide them on the whole literature side and the whole English side, which is thinking about audience, thinking about purpose, thinking about message,” she said.
Sathish Kumar, a computer science professor at Cleveland State, helped craft the curricula for its combined CS majors. He said that the courses in each integrated major were selected to complement the other major; the design and computer science major, for example, requires students to take a software engineering course, while English and computer science students must take courses on language processors and artificial intelligence.
But university officials said that the computer science curriculum isn’t dumbed down for students in these programs, even if they don’t have to take as many CS classes.
“The computer science courses are deep enough that the graduate will have a fundamental knowledge of computer science,” said George Chatzimavroudis, interim chair of the computer science department and associate dean of undergraduate studies and faculty affairs. “It’s not a superficial knowledge … but they’re not going to have all of the core courses and not all of the technical electives.”