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A lot of students took the advice to learn to code. Since the Great Recession left technology as a rare spot of optimism in American industry, computer science has been among the fastest-growing college majors in the country, according to indispensable degree data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
From 2008 to 2024, the number of four-year computer science degrees granted rose about fivefold. That’s more than double the pace of the next fastest-growing large majors: exercise science, nursing and mechanical engineering.
Now there are signs that the 15-year boom in computer science education may be ending or at least morphing. The change is not showing up in graduations — at least not yet. But we can see it in enrollment data from the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse, which crunches numbers from 97 percent of U.S. universities.
Student enrollment in computer science at four-year colleges fell 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025. In absolute numbers, it’s the biggest one-year drop of any major discipline going back to at least 2020. In a single year, computer science fell from the fourth-largest undergraduate major to sixth. (Business, health and liberal arts have consistently taken the top three spots.)
The decrease is not uniform across schools, and the National Student Clearinghouse calculates only declared majors — leaving some undeclared undergrads out of the count. But the national trend of declining computer science enrollment shows up in surveys of faculty, and it’s the hot talk of computer-related academia.
We can guess that some of you immediately fingered artificial intelligence as the culprit. For sure, plenty of people have been citing AI as a red alert for computer science education. “The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting,” the Atlantic magazine declared last year. Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Johnson recently told college students and others that AI has “substantially wiped out” computer coding as a “source of productive opportunity.”
Computer science students are taught to write programs that tell machines what to do. AI is now starting to automate parts of that coding work. Even some veteran programmers are freaking out that AI could make them obsolete. Surely, then, some would-be computer science majors — or their anxious parents — figure that degree is no longer a sure ticket to a well-paying career.
Before we blamed this on fears of an AI wipeout and moved on, we puzzled over a question: Among the roughly 54,000 fewer college students majoring in computer science this school year compared to last, what disciplines did they choose instead? (It’s not journalism. We checked.)
Sarah Karamarkovich, a research associate with the National Student Clearinghouse, pointed to an explanation from the data that we had overlooked. Enrollments in two interdisciplinary majors, data analytics and data science, topped a combined 35,000 in the fall of 2025. That was up from a few hundred when those disciplines were broken out into their own majors in 2020.
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