Canny: We're losing in quality -- principally to bioengineering, which is now the best students' top choice -- and diversity. It's a problem of social relevance. Minorities and women moved fastest into areas such as law and medicine that have obvious and compelling social impact. We've never cared much about social impact in CS.

How should CS programs be modernized?

Chazelle: Much of the curriculum is antiquated. Why are we still demanding fluency in assembly language today for our CS majors? Some curricula seem built almost entirely around the mastery of Java. This is criminal.

The curriculum is changing to fulfill the true promise of CS, which is to provide a conceptual framework for other fields. Students need to understand there's more, vastly more, to CS than writing the next version of Windows. For example, at Princeton, we have people who major in CS because they want to do life sciences or policy work related to security, or even high-tech music. In all three cases, we offer tracks that allow them to acquire the technical background to make them intellectually equipped to pursue these cross-disciplinary activities at the highest level.

Birman: We need to realize that we're losing a lot of students around Grade 10. So we need to revamp the way CS is taught in high school to focus much less on programming and much more on problem-solving and puzzles. Kids also need to work with things that are fun -- robot dogs that follow their owner around and growl at people who are wearing pink socks -- and do much less coding. Kids need to be grappling with information management issues, like the challenges of securely managing medical records and the legal and ethical issues that arise if we put monitoring systems in homes to keep an eye on the elderly, or in cars to provide emergency services.