Even better would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem incidentally, and my own idée fixe, spaced repetition.
Like Moore's Law, at any point proponents have a stable of solutions for tackling the growth; they (or enough of them) have been successful for Moore's Law, and it has indeed continued pretty smoothly, so if they were to propose some SENS-style intervention, I'd give them decent credit for it. But in this case, the overall stylized evidence says that nothing has reversed the changes up until I guess the '80s at which point one could begin arguing that there's underestimation involved (especially for the Nobel prizes). SENS and online education are great, but reversing this trend any time soon? It doesn't seem terribly likely.
(I also wonder how big a gap between the standard courses and the 'cutting edge' there will be - if we make substantial gains in teaching the core courses, but there's a 'no mans land' of long-tail topics too niche to program and maintain a course on which extends all the way out to the actual cutting edge, then the results might be more like a one-time improvement.)
Thanks for the two sigma problem link.
...has finally been published.
Contents:
The issue consists of responses to Chalmers (2010). Future volumes will contain additional articles from Shulman & Bostrom, Igor Aleksander, Richard Brown, Ray Kurzweil, Pamela McCorduck, Chris Nunn, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jesse Prinz, Susan Schneider, Murray Shanahan, Burt Voorhees, and a response from Chalmers.
McDermott's chapter should be supplemented with this, which he says he didn't have space for in his JCS article.