US computer-science enrollment drops after 20 years

For the first time in roughly 20 years, computer-science enrollment in the US has fallen. The shift showed up in the 2025-26 academic year, ending a long run in which the subject had been treated as one of higher education’s safest bets.

The finding comes from Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, in research reported by Business Insider. His dataset spans more than 50 million course sections since 1996 across 1,019 US colleges. In that data, computer science’s share of enrollment declined for the first time in about two decades. At the average school, enrollment in CS classes fell about 4.6% year over year.

National data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse said undergraduate computer-science enrollment at four-year colleges dropped 8.1% in autumn 2025, falling from about 659,700 students to 606,100.

That downturn follows a huge expansion. According to National Science Foundation figures, computer-science bachelor’s degrees more than doubled in a decade, rising from about 56,000 in 2014 to 122,000 in 2024.

The timing is striking. The decline arrived as AI assistants went mainstream, taking on tasks like writing, debugging, and completing coding assignments, while the market for entry-level software jobs cooled.

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Light, however, does not argue that AI caused the drop. He describes the numbers as descriptive, not causal, and lists five possible drivers:

• a weaker junior-developer job market
• doubts about the value of a CS degree
• weaker math preparation
• immigration-linked demographic shifts
• the rise of data science

His data cannot disentangle those factors. Computer science has also long behaved like a boom-and-bust major, and enrollment remains above its 2022 level.

Still, the direction matters. Students are reacting to many of the same signals as employers. The source points to layoffs at firms including Verizon, while JPMorgan’s boss has said AI has already erased a third of jobs in some units. At the same time, some demand is shifting to other paths, including the skilled trades.

There is a counterpoint. The chief of Google DeepMind has said a STEM degree still makes people far more effective with AI, and Light agrees that many graduates will continue to get real value from one. Whether this is a short-term dip or the start of a broader reset may become clearer over the next few admissions cycles.