Freshmen Going Long on Nursing, Short on Python: CS Enrollment Cracks 📉

Computer science and programming enrollment each fell more than 10% in the 2025-2026 academic year, according to Goldman Sachs research, marking the first clear evidence that US college students are steering away from majors exposed to AI. Fields tied to low automation risk grew about 3% on average, led by healthcare and engineering, reversing a multi-year boom in computer science that ran through the 2024-2025 cycle.

The retreat shows up on individual campuses. Arizona State University reported a roughly 14% drop in bachelor-level computer science enrollment between fall 2024 and fall 2025, while the share of computer science majors at Washington University in St. Louis fell 16% over two years. Rather than survey students directly, Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei mapped more than 180 majors to occupations using Census data from 2022 to 2024 and scored each job for automation risk. Computer science, statistics, and quantitative business majors carried the highest exposure, while pharmacy, nursing, and education ranked among the safest.

Mei expects the market signal to travel faster than in past technological shifts. "Historically, such adjustments have taken a few years… But the current adjustment may be unfolding more quickly, given the heightened salience of AI disruption," Fortune reported, citing Mei. The pressure is already measurable at the bottom of the labor market: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York put recent-graduate unemployment near 5.7% at the end of 2025, with underemployment at 42.5%, the highest since 2020.

Employers are automating the entry-level rungs that once absorbed trained graduates. Block cut about 4,000 jobs while tying the decision to automation, and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, who sells those AI agents, has warned that new-graduate unemployment could climb into the mid-30s as early-career work is absorbed. The repricing has reached graduate school as well: mid-tier MBA programs are slashing tuition by up to 50%, with Purdue cutting its online MBA from $60,000 to $36,000, while applications at discounters keep falling 20% to 30% this cycle, with none of the cutting schools sitting in the top 20. A new $100,000 cap on graduate borrowing takes effect in July, adding a fresh constraint as Stanford graduates recently walked out on Google chief executive Sundar Pichai over the same concerns.

Goldman Sachs estimates AI keeps cutting US jobs each month, and the bank framed Mei's findings as evidence that students are reading that market in real time, with enrollment tilting toward majors that automation is unlikely to absorb soon.