Jay Vegso, who prepared the CRA's report on enrollment and graduate trends, said enrollments are showing a 'delayed reaction to the 2001-2002 slowdowns in the tech sector.' Computer science enrollments, because of this lag, are usually out of sync with technology sector needs, he said.

But Vegso also expects the number of graduates to continue to decline because of a drop in computer science enrollments, which have fallen by half from about 16,000 in 2000.

Not everyone sees declining enrollments in some core IT programs as a problem. David Foote, of Foote Partners LLC, a management consultancy and IT workforce research firm in New Canaan, Conn., said companies are hiring people from all kinds of backgrounds, even liberal arts, and giving them the IT training they need on the job. 'The world is asking for a completely different type of professional,' he said.

But companies still need IT skills, and one vendor that has been trying to get more students involved in mainframe work is IBM. The experience of Jason Arnold illustrates how companies are recruiting.

Arnold graduated with a degree in computer science and mathematics from Northern Illinois State University in DeKalb in December, and is now working on a graduate degree in that same field at DePaul University in Chicago. Arnold learned how to program in BASIC when he was 10. At Northern Illinois, he started studying computer science and took an assembly language course that involved working on a mainframe. Although DePaul didn't have mainframe training, Arnold said that in his final semester last fall at Northern Illinois, he saw a posting for an IBM mainframe contest and signed up for it. The contest involved a series of increasingly difficult steps, similar to what a systems programmer might encounter.