The educational aspirations of the nation's elite students are shifting towards Silicon Valley: Introduction to Computer Science is now the most popular class for Harvard freshman. The Harvard Crimson reports that nearly 12% of first year students enroll in CS 50, making it more popular than the finance-track intro course, Principles of Economics.
Quartz put together a nice graph of the growth of Computer Science since Mark Zuckerberg's freshman year in 2004:
Likewise, the number of Computer Science majors at Harvard has nearly doubled, from 86 in 2008 to 153 in 2013, according to The Crimson.
There are a few reasons why this matters:
1) It signals a shift in the market. Harvard has a habit of producing political and business leaders for the next generation. Technology may increasingly become the path through which the social elite attempt to influence the world.
2) Others may follow Harvard's lead. In order to remain competitive, other Ivy League universities may start to attract fence-sitting high schoolers with carrots of world-class computer science education. This spirals into an ever-increasing arms race by an expanding circle of competitor schools to offer better and better tech majors.
3) Popularity breeds popularity. As high-profile schools shift towards tech, envious students begin to mirror what they think the best students' strategy of success is. This is like #2, but occurs at the student level. Many students may have already decided which college to attend but will pursue Computer Science regardless, because they want to be competitive with Harvard graduates on the job market.
Some solid evidence for this copy cat trend is Harvard itself. Stanford led the way among the top-tier schools when Computer Science became the top major back in 2012.
All signs point toward a generation that has tech on the brain --- and a market that will reshape itself to meet the new demand.