Steve Lohr of the NY Times does a drive-by on battling dropping computer science enrollment. Two NU connections. First, NU's own Robin Hunicke, told a similar story to Microsoft's games folks earlier this summer. Second, the Jamika Burge mentioned in Lohr's article is a sometimes collaborator of my advisee Azzari Jarrett. I know you're happy for me.
My two cents on the cs enrollment "crisis"? Smart undergrads (and intelligent people in general) have figuread out that there's a lot of interesting and powerful things you can do with computers without having to suffer the rather unpleasant beatdown that Architecture, Operating Systems, Compilers, Networking, and Theory (typical required elements of a CS degree) often inflict. Along with the overwhelming caveman hacker ethic (me like command line), it'll be interesting to see if traditional CS departments can successfully find a way to let go of a few of these pillars and still maintain their engineering and scientific self-respect.
Alternatively, they could go all aggro and start selling hard to people interested in computational biology, nanotech, complex systems and networks, etc. Meanwhile, the "soft" stuff could be left to departments like Berkeley's SIMS, Indiana's School of Informatics, Irvine's school of Information and Computer Sciences, and of course The Media Lab.