The Skills Crunch
The number of college students earning a BS in computer science has fallen 43% in the past decade. But demand for programmers is soaring because:
ENTERPRISE-WIDE SYSTEMS
Companies worldwide spent an estimated $42.5 billion in 1996 to link computers so that managers can monitor inventories and finances in real time.
THE INTERNET
The Net has dramatically hiked demand for techies. An estimated 760,000 people are working for Net-related companies alone. Corporations are scouring the want ads for programmers to run intranets.
THE YEAR 2000
Thousands of business programs--for issuing pay checks, calculating life-insurance premiums, you name it--are not set up to work with dates after 1999. So companies are rushing to reprogram computers to avoid a massive crash. The cost: as high as $600 billion in the U.S. alone.
| 
