For years, the conventional wisdom for ambitious students and languishing jobseekers alike was “learn to code.” Do that, the ubiquitous advice went, and you’d be able to find yourself a six-figure job anywhere.
But in an age when bosses are hellbent on using powerful AI agents to perform the duties of software engineers, that advice is now looking increasingly obsolete, if not outright backfiring. And the youngsters appear to be getting wise to that new reality.
For the first time in nearly twenty years, computer science enrollment declined during the 2025-26 academic year, according to new research from the Stanford economist Jacob Light reported by Business Insider.
A separate survey from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that undergraduate enrollment in another IT degree, computer and information sciences and support services, dropped by a precipitous 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025.
Light said that the dropoff could be related to AI, and not necessarily a direct result of AI taking over coding jobs.
“The decline could reflect changes in the education production function as generative AI alters how students complete coursework, changes in students’ expectations about the returns to Computer Science skills, responses to labor market conditions that themselves partly reflect AI adoption, broader weakness in the technology labor market unrelated to AI, or other contemporaneous shifts in student demand,” Light wrote, per BI.
“Therefore, I treat the enrollment patterns as descriptive evidence rather than as an estimate of the causal effect of ChatGPT or AI exposure on student demand,” he concluded.
There’s probably nuance under the hood. When The Washington Post dived into the National Student Clearinghouse data earlier this year, its analysis suggested that some of those disappearing computer science enrollments are being funneled into related disciplines instead, like data analytics and data science.
In any case, it’s clear that programming jobs, at least in big tech, aren’t as secure as they used to be. Over 120,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026 so far, according to the industry layoffs trackers Layoffs.fyi. A significant portion came at companies like Meta and Google as they ramped up their AI spending.
One report found that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. Whether AI meaningfully replaced those jobs or was simply used as a scapegoat by employers to gloss over other reasons for the cuts, though, is a matter of ongoing debate.
More on AI: Sixteen Nobel-Winning Economists Warn That Major AI Job Losses Are Coming
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