With an average starting salary of $66,000 and the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, the number of college students studying computer science has skyrocketed in recent years.

Between 10 and 20 companies reached out to two students before they had even graduated with a computer science degree or degree in computer engineering information from a university in New York City, according to a CNN Money story. Upon graduation, one of the students had received "four or five" job offers, he told the news source.

"Most of my friends who are also CS students do have the same similar feeling; they're not really worried about jobs," one student said.

And there doesn't seem to be much cause of worry. Last spring, the computer science department at a New York university had a staggering job placement rate of 94 percent. Fifty-six percent of computer science majors had a job offer before graduation, compared with 41 percent of the overall college graduates, CNN found.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects a 24 percent growth in employment for computer and information scientists and researchers by 2018. Employers reported a difficult time finding graduates of Ph.D. programs in engineering and computer science to fill highly skilled positions.

That growth - which is much quicker than all other occupations - will be driven by increasing systems design and related services industry, as well as the software publishing industry, according to the BLS. They rely on heavy use of computer science and will be the fastest-growing industries in the U.S. economy, it said.

In 2008, there were nearly 29,000 computer science jobs in the United States, and about 23 percent of those were in the computer systems design and related services industry.

The median annual wages of computer and information scientists was nearly $98,000 in May 2008, with the middle 50 percent earning $75,340 to $124,370, the BLS said. The average starting salary of computer science graduates from the New York institution is $66,000, which has driven the department to double since 2007.

"Coding is the literacy of the future and they want to get in on that," Evan Korth, associate professor of computer science at the New York university, told CNN. "When I started, the program was really small and you only had one section for each class. Now for the introductory ones there's three to four at least."