US computer-science enrolment falls for first time in 20 years
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 reversalThe finding comes from Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford’s. . .
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 reversalThe finding comes from Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Business Insiderreportedhis 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. TheNational Student Clearinghousereported 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 wobbleThe scale of the earlier boom is the context. Computer-science bachelor’s degrees more than doubled in a decade,National Science Foundationfigures 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. The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Not so fastHere 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 signalsEven with the caveats, the direction matters. Students are reading the same signals as the market. Firms likeVerizonare cutting staff. JPMorgan’s boss says AI has alreadyeraseda third of jobs in some units. Some demand is shifting elsewhere, including to theskilled 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 aSTEM degreestill 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 againstvibe coding, a few more intakes will tell. Published July 22, 2026 - 11:31 am UTCBack to top