John Thornley commutes between New York City and Charlottesville to juggle his roles as entrepreneur and teacher. Photo by Wayne Scarberry

Another development is that colleges are more willing to grant leaves of absence to existing faculty members, allowing them the freedom to try industry or their own start-ups while retaining university ties. "I would prefer it not happen, but given the situation now, I tell them they have my blessing," says Sushi Jajodia, professor and chair of the department of information and software engineering at George Mason. "If I try to put up a roadblock, they would quit." The chances of start-ups succeeding aren’t great anyway, and if faculty members fail, they can end their leaves and return to school. That works for the administrators, especially these days, when competition to woo faculty is so fierce.

In one example, the University of Virginia granted John Thornley a leave of absence this August, just one year after he took a tenure-track teaching and research job there. Now, Thornley commutes from his home in Charlottesville to New York’s Knight Financial Services, where he writes software for an automatic stock-trading system. "The traditional view has been that once you’re in academia, it’s this underpaid, monastic experience and you do it for love while you watch the rest of the world get rich around you," Thornley says. "I don’t think that’s true anymore."

Thornley still advises a graduate student at U.Va. and wants to stay involved with academia, but he was interested in trying life on the other side. He wanted to see, firsthand, the commercial applications of his own training. And yes, he admits, he was interested in the money. "They did the Godfather-type thing and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse financially." He wouldn’t give specifics.

Starting salaries for industry-bound computer science specialists with master’s degrees average $60,979, according to recent statistics. But that figure does not include signing bonuses, stock options and other perks. There are enough examples from the high-end of the spectrum to make people cite much larger figures as the benchmark. Some estimate that new graduates can earn two or three times what a tenure-track professor would earn the first year out.

The Computing Research Association shows that first-year, tenure-track professors earned an average starting salary of $64,244 last year, although numbers vary. Even wages for undergraduates average more than $43,000 if they studied information systems, and more than $49,000 if they studied computer engineering.

Big bucks such as these are shaking up professors. "I had students who were drawing bigger salaries than me, their first year out," says Bob Matthews, who taught at a small Georgia college before returning to graduate school for his doctorate in an effort to make himself more attractive to industry. "That’s hard to reconcile, even if you like your job." This summer, Matthews left the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, short of completing his dissertation, to become a software engineer for North Carolina’s Red Hat. "Industry is a giant sucking sound right now," says Andrew Grimshaw, who is on half-leave from the University of Virginia this year to start his own company, Applied Metacomputing. "You take a major hit to stay in academia, and at some point you wonder whether it’s worth it." Over time, he fears, the better people will leave, which can only add to the crunch down the road. He says it’s more than the money that’s tempting academics to go corporate. "There’s a revolution going on," he says. No one wants to miss out.

New college students know that, which is why the undergraduate ranks are so full — not just of majors in computer-related fields, but of students majoring in English or art history who want to take computer science courses as electives. At Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, computer science recently replaced engineering as the largest undergraduate major, with 1,100 students. The size of the faculty has not grown accordingly. "We’re playing a little catch-up," Kafura says. "And that’s going to affect us down the road."

The Ph.D. shortage hasn’t reached a crisis yet, but there is a tightening pinch as the students who do enroll in graduate school leave for Sun Microsystems or Microsoft before they ever earn their degrees. William and Mary’s undergraduate ranks were even depleted this year after a couple of companies begged their summer interns to stay on longer. "Youngsters now have grown up around the Internet," says Dennis O’Donnell, development manager for the Hampton Roads Technology Council. "If I had those kind of skills, I’d look at doing it, too."

To find workers, some companies are handing out referral bonuses or hiring technical recruiters to zero in on the right people. In many cases, that means finding someone who knows how to think with a little experience and a four-year degree. Then companies can provide more training of their own — if the resources are available.

With the pace of business, it’s hard to think down the road to how taking people out of the pipeline will finally affect education — and the companies themselves. "Industry is concerned," O’Donnell says. "They’re going to continue to need people." Yet in the short term, it seems industry is more concerned about filling vacant positions.

University department heads say their schools and state governments need to do more to make high-tech teaching and graduate positions attractive. It’s going to take money, says Jack Stankovic, BP America professor and chair of the department of computer science at U.Va. Already, many universities are courting graduate students almost the way they court faculty, flying them in for interviews and offering better lab space and state-of-the-art equipment.