When I was researching my last article about the drop in enrollments for Computer Science in the mid-2000's, I found some articles that tried to explain why.  Many of the articles I read indicated that students were worried that if they completed a degree in Computer Science in the 2000's, that they would end up losing their job due to counterparts offshore.

There's an article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review on career myths for executives. The piece is based on research by Monika Hamori at IE Business School in Madrid including interviews with 14,000 executives and 45 search firms. For IT executives, the most important fallacy Hamori discusses may be the first, that job-hopping helps you advance.

According to a study of 7,259 mathematicians who graduated between 1900 and 1960, successful academics did a far better job of mentoring students during the first third of their careers than during the final third of their vocations.

The study, which was conducted by researchers at Northwestern University and published in the June issue of Nature, found that students who were mentored by mathematicians who were in the first third of their career went on to train 29 percent more students than expected, according to an article about the study published in The Christian Science Monitor. By contrast, students trained by mathematicians in the final third of their careers ended up training 31 percent fewer students than expected.