Computer science was the safe bet. For twenty years, enrolment in the US only went up. In the 2025-26 academic year, it went down.
The reversal
The finding comes from Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Business Insider reported his research. His dataset is vast: more than 50 million course sections since 1996, across 1,019 US colleges. In it, computer science’s share of enrolment fell for the first time in roughly two decades.
At the average school, enrolment in CS classes dropped about 4.6% year on year. National figures point the same way. The National Student Clearinghouse reported undergraduate computer-science enrolment at four-year colleges down 8.1% in autumn 2025. That is about 659,700 students down to 606,100.
From boom to wobble
The scale of the earlier boom is the context. Computer-science bachelor’s degrees more than doubled in a decade, National Science Foundation figures show. They went from about 56,000 in 2014 to 122,000 in 2024. This is the first real crack in that run.
The timing is hard to ignore. The drop lands just as AI assistants have gone mainstream. They write, debug, and finish coding assignments. And the entry-level software job market has cooled.
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Not so fast
Here is the part the headlines will skip. Light does not say AI caused it. He treats the numbers as descriptive, not causal. He lists five possible drivers. They include a weaker junior-developer job market and doubt about the value of a CS degree. Others are weaker maths preparation, immigration-linked demographic shifts, and the rise of data science.
The data cannot separate them. And computer science has always been a boom-and-bust major, so a dip is not new. Enrolment is still above its 2022 level.
What it signals
Even with the caveats, the direction matters. Students are reading the same signals as the market. Firms like Verizon are cutting staff. JPMorgan’s boss says AI has already erased a third of jobs in some units. Some demand is shifting elsewhere, including to the skilled trades. The worry is that the field building AI is losing the people who would build the next of it.
There is a counter-argument. Google DeepMind’s chief says a STEM degree still makes you far more effective with AI. Light agrees many graduates will find real value in one. Is this a blip, or the start of a rethink? As students weigh a degree against vibe coding, a few more intakes will tell.
