That's the question that greeted me this morning as I read my periodic communique from ACM. http://technews.acm.org/.
Reasons cited for declining CS enroll are offshoring of US work to other countries making CS an unattractive career, and a perception in decline of attractiveness as computer technology permeated many levels of society: it was losing status.
Other articles in the same email cite "ACM TechNews
Other articles in the same communique are "Brochure Aims to Lure Fleeing CS Students Back", and "Engineering Loses Over Half of New Students."
A lot of this is semantics. How does one define Computer Science as opposed to IT? This reminds me of prior handwringing when I was an undergraduate. At that time the businesses and state government decried that CS grads didn't know COBOL (an old programming language -- even then). In effect saying that the CS programs weren't turning out people to satisfy their hiring needs. The CS point of view, was more or less, 'that's not CS, that's not what we do.'
So what's the relation to Internet and Society? If we acknowledge that the Internet and companies that we know today like Google, evolved in part from fundamentals and applications of Computer Science, then what impediments to the evolution technology in the future are placed by declining attractiveness of the discipline? Does the definition of Comp Sci need to change, or what is taught?