A lot of students took the advice to learn to code.
Since the Great Recession left technology as a rare spot of optimism in American industry, computer science has been among the fastest-growing college majors in the country, according to indispensable degree data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
From 2008 to 2024, the number of four-year computer science degrees granted rose about fivefold. That’s more than double the pace of the next fastest-growing large majors: exercise science, nursing and mechanical engineering.
Now there are signs that the 15-year boom in computer science education may be ending or at least morphing. The change is not showing up in graduations — at least not yet. But we can see it in enrollment data from the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse, which crunches numbers from 97 percent of U.S. universities.
Student enrollment in computer science at four-year colleges fell 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025. In absolute numbers, it’s the biggest one-year drop of any major discipline going back to at least 2020. In a single year, computer science fell from the fourth-largest undergraduate major to sixth. (Business, health and liberal arts have consistently taken the top three spots.)
The decrease is not uniform across schools, and the National Student Clearinghouse calculates only declared majors — leaving some undeclared undergrads out of the count. But the national trend of declining computer science enrollment shows up in surveys of faculty, and it’s the hot talk of computer-related academia.
We can guess that some of you immediately fingered artificial intelligence as the culprit. For sure, plenty of people have been citing AI as a red alert for computer science education. “The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting,” the Atlantic magazine declared last year. Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Johnson recently told college students and others that AI has “substantially wiped out” computer coding as a “source of productive opportunity.”
Computer science students are taught to write programs that tell machines what to do. AI is now starting to automate parts of that coding work. Even some veteran programmers are freaking out that AI could make them obsolete. Surely, then, some would-be computer science majors — or their anxious parents — figure that degree is no longer a sure ticket to a well-paying career.
Before we blamed this on fears of an AI wipeout and moved on, we puzzled over a question: Among the roughly 54,000 fewer college students majoring in computer science this school year compared to last, what disciplines did they choose instead? (It’s not journalism. We checked.)
Sarah Karamarkovich, a research associate with the National Student Clearinghouse, pointed to an explanation from the data that we had overlooked. Enrollments in two interdisciplinary majors, data analytics and data science, topped a combined 35,000 in the fall of 2025. That was up from a few hundred when those disciplines were broken out into their own majors in 2020.
Those relatively new categories reflect colleges’ zeal to create specialized majors, including in AI, data science, robotics and cybersecurity. Some of those disciplines may be counted in the national enrollment data as computer science. Others are not.
The numbers suggest that some of the disappearing computer science majors didn’t flee so much as they splintered into related disciplines. If a coding-curious teenager opts for the University of Michigan’s robotics major, which was added in 2022, it’s hard to say she was avoiding the AI jobs apocalypse.
Next we went to the true experts: college students.
When Gavin O’Malley was applying to enter college last year, he was “intimidated” that only the very best computer science students at his Houston-area high school were applying to college in the discipline. He figured his odds of landing a spot in a top-notch school weren’t great if he gunned for comp sci.
He also couldn’t entirely brush off social media memes mocking the job-hunting struggles of computer science graduates. One recent example was a post with the text “Giving free food to the homeless” that shows a woman bringing pizzas to students coding on their laptops.
O’Malley’s tale reminded us just how much the job market has turned south for computer science graduates in ways that are largely not about AI.
Recent college grads are generally having an awful time landing good jobs. Knowing how to code is no guarantee of stable work.
It’s not that programming jobs are drying up, exactly. But there’s an abundant supply of degree holders at a time when many companies — notably Big Tech firms such as Google and Meta — aren’t scooping up fresh computer science grads as they once did. Among the reasons are a hangover from a pandemic-era technology hiring binge and an employer shift to do more work with fewer people.
There may also be early evidence that AI is making unemployment worse for young people in fields such as programming, although economists are hotly debating this.
Given the new reality, college students who decide to major in computer science today may do it for the love of coding rather than out of career pragmatism, said Theo Urban, a 20-year-old senior at Carnegie Mellon University who is majoring in AI.
Dare we say it: That makes the comp sci youngsters more like us onetime liberal arts grads who didn’t have obvious employment paths fresh out of college. (Shira and Andrew have bachelor of arts degrees in political science and history, respectively.)
Understanding what happened to the disappearing computer science majors really started to click when talked to mechanical engineers.
The two fields are related. Computer science focuses largely on coding and other work that lives primarily as digital bytes, while mechanical engineering typically concentrates on the design of machines and how they interact with software.
The 8 percent decline in computer science majors last fall was nearly mirrored by a 7.3 percent increase in engineering majors, according to the National Student Clearinghouse data. Within engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering major enrollments increased by the largest absolute amounts — a jump of 11 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
Michael Leamy has recently seen the mechanical engineering growth spurt at two universities. While he was teaching at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he said, the engineering labs expanded to a 12-hour day — from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. — to accommodate a student boom, and equipment was in short supply. “There’s only so much lab space and oscilloscopes,” Leamy said, referring to machines measuring electrical signals.
This year, he became chair of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Vermont, where he said student applications rose more than 20 percent compared with the incoming class two years ago. Applicants to the computer science program have fallen by more than half over that period, he said.
Leamy and other mechanical engineers said students may believe the discipline is more versatile and gives them better job opportunities in an AI-fueled world, including for industries such as robotics, drones, aerospace and electric vehicles.
Other veterans of computer-related academia don’t buy that computer science is entering a death valley. But they said that compared with relatively slow-and-steady enrollment trends in engineering, computer science is more prone to swings in students’ concerns about the job market.
College computer science numbers slumped in the late 1980s, and again after the dot-com bust. Each time, enrollment numbers recovered to around previous levels, if not higher.
Tom Cortina, associate dean for undergraduate programs at Carnegie Mellon’s school of computer science, has honed a spiel for families worried about AI killing job prospects. His program is training students, he says, to be flexible for what are likely to be waves of technologies that reshape a computing-related career of 40 years or more.
While undergrad enrollment at his top-ranked program has remained steady, he knows other university programs are shrinking. “We think that AI is having some impact,” Cortina said. “I remain optimistic that this is just a dip.”
That brings us back to our new friend Gavin O’Malley.
He’s now a freshman at Rice University majoring in mechanical engineering. It didn’t hurt that his parents are mechanical engineers, but O’Malley said he opted for that major mostly to zig away from the computer science hordes.
“I would say that competition between peers was probably the largest factor for me,” he said.
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