The explosive rise of ChatGPT may coincide with a turning point for one of America’s fastest-growing college subjects.
Computer science enrollment declined during the 2025-26 academic year for the first time in roughly two decades, according to new research by Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
While the study doesn’t estimate the size of the drop, separate National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data showed undergraduate enrollment in Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services at four-year colleges fell 8.1% year over year in the fall of 2025.
The timing overlaps with the rapid adoption of generative AI, but Light cautioned that the data does not show artificial intelligence caused the decline.
Using a dataset covering more than 50 million course sections offered since 1996 across 1,019 US colleges and universities, Light tracked long-term enrollment patterns alongside the growing capabilities of large language models.
Light told Business Insider that, at the average school in his sample, enrollment in computer science classes fell about 4.6% year over year, while computer science’s share of overall course enrollment dropped 6.3 percentage points.
“The most notable recent development is the flattening and reversal in the Computer Science enrollment share trend,” Light wrote. “In 2025-26, Computer Science enrollment share declined for the first time in roughly two decades, interrupting a period of sustained and unusually rapid growth.”
‘Descriptive’ rather than ‘causal’ effect of AI
Computer science had enjoyed years of booming popularity as demand for software engineers and other tech workers surged.
The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer and information sciences more than doubled over the past decade, rising from about 56,000 in 2014 to about 122,000 in 2024, according to data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
But the arrival of AI assistants capable of writing code, debugging programs, and completing technical assignments has sparked debate about whether the field’s value proposition is changing.
Light told Business Insider there are five leading explanations for the enrollment drop: a weaker entry-level software engineering job market, uncertainty about the value of computer science degrees in the AI era, weaker academic preparation among incoming students, changes in college demographics linked to immigration policy, and the expansion of competing fields such as data science.
He added that the data cannot distinguish among those possibilities.
“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,” Light wrote.
The finding is also consistent with data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Its Fall 2025 enrollment report found that undergraduate enrollment in Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services at four-year colleges fell 8.1% year over year, from about 659,700 students in 2024 to 606,100 in 2025.
Even so, enrollment remained well above 2022 levels of 574,333 students, suggesting the recent decline followed years of rapid growth.
Whether the slowdown proves temporary or marks a lasting shift in students’ attitudes toward computer science remains an open question.
“Computer science has historically been a boom-and-bust major; a decline in CS enrollment would not be a new phenomenon for universities,” he told Business Insider.
“While I think there’s reason to believe CS enrollment may decline in the short-term, many graduates may still find a lot of value in a CS degree,” he added.
Light wrote that it will become clearer “as additional cohorts make course and major choices.”
Read the full article here
