Something weird just happened in California. For the first time since the dot-com bubble burst, computer science enrollment at UC campuses actually dropped. Down 6% this year after a 3% decline in 2024. This is happening while overall college enrollment is climbing 2% nationally.
The only UC campus bucking the trend? UC San Diego, which happens to be the only one that added a dedicated AI major this fall. Coincidence? Not a chance.
The Great Student Migration
This isn’t students abandoning technology. They’re not suddenly deciding to become English majors or philosophy students. They’re voting with their feet and their tuition dollars, moving toward AI-specific programs while traditional CS departments watch their numbers shrink.
Chinese universities figured this out way before we did. Nearly 60% of Chinese students and faculty now use AI tools multiple times daily. Schools like Zhejiang University made AI coursework mandatory. Tsinghua created entirely new interdisciplinary AI colleges. They’re treating AI fluency like it’s as essential as reading and writing, because at this point, it basically is.
Meanwhile, American universities spent the last few years debating whether to ban ChatGPT.
Faculty Resistance Meets Reality
UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts described the situation perfectly when he talked about faculty members existing on a spectrum. Some are “leaning forward” with AI, while others have “their heads in the sand.” Roberts, who came from finance rather than academia, pushed for AI integration despite pushback from faculty who apparently think we can just ignore the biggest technological shift since the internet.
The Computing Research Association found that 62% of their member institutions saw undergraduate enrollment declines in computing programs this fall. But here’s the thing: those students didn’t disappear. They’re showing up in the new AI programs that are launching everywhere.
MIT’s “AI and decision-making” major is now the second-largest major on campus. The University of South Florida enrolled over 3,000 students in a new AI and cybersecurity college in one semester. The University at Buffalo got more than 200 applicants for their new “AI and Society” department before it even officially opened. USC, Columbia, Pace University, New Mexico State, they’re all launching AI degrees this fall.
Parents Are Panicking Too
It’s not just students making this shift. Parents who spent years pushing their kids toward CS degrees are now steering them away, worried about AI automation. David Reynaldo from College Zoom says parents are reflexively pointing kids toward mechanical and electrical engineering instead, as if those fields won’t be transformed by AI too.
This might be an overreaction. Or it might be exactly the right instinct. Nobody really knows yet, which is part of what makes this moment so fascinating and terrifying.
The debate over whether to allow AI tools in classrooms already feels like ancient history. That ship sailed, left port, and is probably halfway across the ocean by now. The real question is whether American universities can move fast enough to meet students where they’re going, or whether they’ll keep holding committee meetings about AI policy while students transfer to schools that already built the programs.
Roberts said something that cuts to the heart of it: “No one’s going to say to students after they graduate, ‘Do the best job you can, but if you use AI, you’ll be in trouble.’” Yet faculty members are effectively saying exactly that right now by refusing to integrate AI into their teaching or by treating it like cheating rather than a tool.
The New Table Stakes
This could be a temporary panic, students fleeing traditional CS because they heard job placement rates dropped. But it looks more like a genuine shift in how people think about business and technology education. AI isn’t a specialization anymore, it’s becoming the foundation.
The universities that figured this out early, the ones that built dedicated programs and hired vice provosts specifically for AI integration, they’re the ones seeing enrollment surge. The ones still arguing about academic integrity policies are watching students leave.
China treated AI literacy as essential infrastructure while American universities treated it as a threat to be managed. Now we’re playing catch-up, launching dozens of new programs in the last two years alone, trying to build in 24 months what probably should have taken five years of thoughtful planning.
It’s messy and it’s rushed and some of these programs are probably going to be terrible. But at least it’s movement, which is better than the alternative of standing still while the world changes around you and pretending that if you just ignore AI long enough, it’ll go away and let everyone go back to teaching algorithms the way they did in 2019.
