Nine years after the dot-com bubble burst, the Facebook kids are choosing computers as a career — in enough numbers to make computer profs lol.
After losing up to half the enrolment they had during the boom, campuses say the drop has stopped and geek chic is back as teens and their parents spy a job field growing like BlackBerrys.
“The whole nature of this job market has changed — we’ve got co-op students doing work terms with Mozilla Firefox in California, who get jobs before they’re through and we have to urge them to finish their degree,” said Rick Miner, president of Toronto’s Seneca College, which has seen a 30 per cent jump in demand for the four-year Bachelor of Informatics and Security.
Milton Grade 12 student Sarah Bonin hopes to study computer science this fall at the University of Waterloo or McMaster University, with hopes of one day programming robotic machines for factories.
“My friends tease me about being a computer geek, but it’s not really an insult any more because computers are where everything’s going,” said the 16-year-old student at Bishop Reding Secondary School.
