Kari George

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.

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, 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.

Students are aware of it.

They pay attention to the headlines.

And they're also seeing that recent graduates were having a greater difficulty getting jobs as well.

And so they're taking all of that into consideration.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Fifty four percent of our respondents indicated that they saw international student undergraduate computing enrollment is down.

And several of them pointed to changes in immigration policies and delays in visas as contributing factors to this decline.

We see a greater presence of international students among the computing graduate student body, which kind of makes sense when you consider the national clearinghouse data, reported declines in international student enrollment at the graduate level.

But even at the undergraduate level, depending on some of the sub-disciplines, there's anywhere from a 9% to 15% representation of international students among our bachelor's degree students.

I mean, computer engineering deals with more of the physical systems of computing.

And so what we heard from several of the department chairs who responded to our survey is that students are looking for a computing major that is more physical and perhaps less susceptible to the impact of AI.

So they expressed that students are showing a desire for more hands-on application of their computing skills and the building of real-world devices.

Yeah, I mean, we're not hearing that directly from students because our data is from these department chairs, but they are reporting that some students are choosing electrical or computer engineering over CS, potentially due to AI and opportunities with quantum.

We'll be right back.