Artificial intelligence is the hot new college major.
This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
At the University of California, San Diego, 150 first-year students signed up for a new A.I. major. And the State University of New York at Buffalo created a stand-alone “department of A.I. and society,” which is offering new interdisciplinary degrees in fields like “A.I. and policy analysis.”
The fast popularization of products like ChatGPT, along with skyrocketing valuations of tech giants like the chip maker Nvidia, are helping to drive the campus A.I. boom.
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions of dollars into the technology. And this year, Google and Microsoft announced company efforts to train millions of students and adult workers on A.I..
Now interest in understanding, using and learning how to build A.I. technologies is soaring, and schools are racing to meet rising student and industry demand.
Over the last two years, dozens of U.S. universities and colleges have announced new A.I. departments, majors, minors, courses, interdisciplinary concentrations and other programs.
In 2022, for instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a new major, called “A.I. and decision-making.” Students in the program learn to develop A.I. systems and study how technologies like robots interact with humans and the environment. This year, nearly 330 students are enrolled in the program — making A.I. the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science.
“Students who prefer to work with data to address problems find themselves more drawn to an A.I. major,” said Asu Ozdaglar, the deputy dean of academics at the M.I.T. Schwarzman College of Computing. Students interested in applying A.I. in fields like biology and health care are also flocking to the new major, she added.
Some college students said that the new major seemed timely, and that they hoped the A.I. branding would open up more job opportunities.
Leena Banga, a first-year student from Fremont, Calif., said that she became interested in A.I. after trying out chatbots and wanted to understand more about how the underlying technology worked. After participating in an A.I. summer program for high school students at the University of Pennsylvania, she decided to pursue the new major at U.C. San Diego.
“This is so cool to me to have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this,” said Ms. Banga, 18.
Had universities not yet offered new A.I. degrees, Ms. Banga said she would have chosen computer science — a popular major that teaches computer programming and fundamental computing concepts, like the algorithmic building blocks of A.I.
Over the past 15 years, the boom in smartphones and social media, along with industry promises of high-paying tech jobs, helped fuel college enrollments in computing. Nearly 173,000 undergraduates majored in computer science in the spring of 2024, compared with about 65,000 students a decade earlier, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data annually from about 200 universities.
But this fall, 62 percent of computing programs reported undergraduate enrollment declines, according to a report in October from the Computing Research Association.
One reason for the dip: student employment concerns.
Some large tech companies are laying off thousands of workers, and recent computing graduates say they have faced increased challenges in landing tech jobs this year. Companies like Amazon have also begun asking their software engineers to use A.I. tools that can write code, potentially reducing the need for junior programmers.
Among 133 computing programs participating in the Computing Research Association report, 66 percent somewhat or strongly agreed that computing majors who graduated this year were having difficulty getting jobs.
“It’s a noticeable difference,” said Andy Meneely, the undergraduate program director for software engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, “especially when I see really good students struggling to get a job.”
While computer science enrollment generally declined this year, many schools reported increased enrollment in subfields like A.I. Tracy Camp, the executive director of the Computing Research Association, called the shift “a new era for computing degrees becoming more specialized.”
That’s true of the A.I. major at U.C. San Diego, which is based in the department of computer science and engineering. As part of the program, the university developed two new courses in the foundations of A.I. and machine learning. Students must also take advanced math and grapple with the social impacts of emerging technologies, said Mia Minnes, the university’s vice chair for undergraduate computer science education.
Ms. Banga, the first-year student there, said her siblings were initially skeptical of her chosen degree program.
“They were like: ‘What? There’s a major called A.I.? No way!’” she said. “But my dad is in the tech business and he was really happy.”
Natasha Singer is a reporter for The Times who writes about how tech companies, digital devices and apps are reshaping childhood, education and job opportunities.
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