For twenty years, "study computer science" was close to a guaranteed answer for a stressed-out high schooler picking a major. That's no longer true, and the reason isn't vibes — there's real data behind it now.

The enrollment numbers are real

Undergraduate enrollment in computer and information science at four-year colleges fell 8.1% in fall 2025, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — the steepest drop of any field of study that year. Separately, Stanford economist Jacob Light tracked course enrollment across more than 1,000 U.S. colleges and found a 4.6% decline in the 2025-26 academic year, the first national drop in computer science enrollment in nearly two decades. The Computing Research Association's own Taulbee Survey found new CS bachelor's enrollments down 12.9%, with doctoral enrollments falling even further, down 15% — though master's enrollments actually declined less than bachelor's, down 10.3%.

This isn't a niche blip — it's a real reversal of a growth trend that had been running essentially uninterrupted since the mid-2000s.

The job market data behind it

The enrollment drop tracks a real shift in entry-level hiring, not just fear of one. Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, using ADP payroll data covering millions of U.S. workers, found that employment for software developers age 22–25 fell nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak, while every age group over 30 in the same field grew over that period — 41-to-49-year-olds were up 14%. Indeed's Hiring Lab separately found entry-level tech job postings down 7.5% year over year as of May 2026, with entry-level roles shrinking from 8.1% to 7.4% of the total IT job mix over that period while senior-level postings climbed 14.7% — the labor market is visibly tilting toward experience.

The pattern researchers point to: AI is best at replacing exactly what a CS degree traditionally taught first — syntax, boilerplate, and textbook algorithms — which happens to be the work junior developers were historically hired to do. Experienced developers, whose value is in system design, judgment, and debugging things AI gets wrong, haven't seen the same decline.

What this doesn't mean

It's tempting to read "junior developer jobs are down 20%" as "don't study CS." That's not what the data supports. Total computing employment isn't collapsing — the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs research lists AI and data roles among the fastest-growing job categories worldwide, and U.S. computer/IT employment overall is still projected to grow through the 2030s. What's actually happening is narrower and more specific: AI is dismantling the bottom rung of the career ladder, not the ladder itself. The jump from "no experience" to "hired" got harder; the field beyond that entry point hasn't shrunk the same way.

What this means if you're choosing a major

The honest read isn't "avoid CS" or "CS is fine, ignore the headlines" — it's that the degree alone is no longer the credential it used to be. Employers are shifting what they screen for: real project work, systems you can explain in depth, and fluency with AI tools rather than competing against them, over a transcript that just proves you passed the standard course sequence. If you're choosing CS because you assumed it was the safe, obvious major, that assumption is exactly what's being tested right now — go in expecting to need more than the degree by itself, the same way this shift is already reshaping how current CS students are approaching the major. See our broader piece on which majors are actually best positioned for the AI era if you're weighing CS against other options entirely.

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