What's your major? These days, you're less likely to hear computer science.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students

enrolling in computer and information science decreased this past fall from the year before.

That's at both the graduate and undergraduate level. It's the first drop since 2020.

Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association says there's been a decline in a number of computing-related majors.

I spoke about it with Carrie George, who's with the CRA Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline.

We're seeing overall that declines in enrollment across computing, but that's not evenly distributed across sub-disciplines.

So we see that some areas such as computer science, software

engineering, and information systems see lower enrollments where there are other sub-disciplines,

namely computer engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence that are

seeing stability and, in some cases, a lot of growth in their enrollment as well.

What does that say to you?

I mean, I think that that says that students are shifting towards more specialized and applied computing degrees, particularly those aligned with AI security or more physical or systems-oriented

computing. What our department chairs are telling us is that students are very aware of the job market and aware of these forces with AI and the labor market, and they're trying

to make choices that are going to best prepare them for life after graduation.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that. You know, a lot of tech companies have said they'll

need fewer workers in the future. They'll just use artificial intelligence instead.

So are students kind of hearing that and responding accordingly?

Yeah, I think that our department leaders do report that there's a fair amount of concern from students

about the impact of AI on the labor market and potentially there being fewer jobs. I think that is one of the

explanations they offered for why we see a decline in these software engineering enrollments.

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