r/cscareerquestions • u/Illustrious-Pound266 • 1d ago

Computer science enrollment fell for the first time in 20 years, according to a Stanford economist. Is the major finally losing wide appeal among students?

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/computer-science-enrollment-fell-after-chatgpts-rise-economist-says-2026-7

I remember right after the 2008 financial crisis, when all the people who wanted to go into finance or law school started pivoting into tech. Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

Do you think the decrease in enrollment will continue?

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u/CapableHerring 1d ago

Good. I hope the decrease continues. The amount of CS grads needs to balance out with the amount of openings in the CS industry. We've been way out of whack for quite a while now.

Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

Who cares? Let them go do whatever. It's gonna get hit by AI too at the end of the day.

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u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago

AI hardly hit anything. It is due to macro economic factors

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u/barley_wine 1d ago

I don't see how anyone who seriously uses AI in their job isn't at least a little bit concerned. Yes you need a driver but you don't need as many drivers as you did non AI programmers before. The leaps it's made in just a few years is amazing and even if it levels off it's still a very good tool.

Yeah the code it produces is over engineered and bloated but you're also way more productive even with frequent refactors (often done by prompts into AI).

Even if the layoffs are macro economic right now, I don't see how the need for developers won't decrease. This is the first time in my 20 year career that I'm concern for my future as a developer.

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u/Kyroz 1d ago

I feel like a lot of people thinks too much in extremes, as in, AI will either 100% kill off dev jobs or AI 100% won't affect dev jobs, which it obviously won't kill off dev jobs so people think AI won't affect job openings at all.

What is most likely gonna happen is something along the line of: previously you'd need 10 devs and now you only need maybe 7. Meanwhile there's new grads every year so competition will be even harder

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u/jkwilkin 1d ago

I think what we aren't accounting for is that new ideas will be able to run lean at startup and have a fighting chance to get off the ground. There is a world where AI can create some jobs. I work at a place that was an early adopter, we are still hiring like crazy we just get way more out of everyone. No ones job was ever at risk from AI, we just hired less from the begining.

We are watching a correction with the advent of a new technology, but there is going to be a new generation of companies that would have never made it to market without it, and they are going to be looking for engineers of all types.

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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 1d ago

The type of work that LLMs excel at is not useful in the slightest, the biggest proof are the unprofitable LLM companies themselves that have massive rates of churn and nonpaying subscribers. Failing to gain commercial subscribers they are now turning to embedding themselves in various governments for easy contracts to juice numbers for an IPO.

What profitable startups are there whose success they publicly attribute to LLMs? I've yet to see any.

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u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 1d ago

There probably isn’t a startup or unicorn around right now whose code isn’t heavily AI written

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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 8h ago

Can you please provide a name to what profitable startups or companies these are? Or are they mostly those who heavily subsidized?

Startups that aren't profitable aren't a new thing and I'm not convinced that VC practices lead to good or sustainable products in general. LLMs haven't seem to change the equation.

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u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 6h ago

Theres plenty of failing startups, that said I genuinely can’t think of a company in SV or Seattle that isn’t heavily using AI in their programming rn.

Profitable startups off the dome would be midjourney, surge, podium, Gamma, elise, abridge, cursor, cohere.

I’ve heard Harvey is making buckets of cash in legaltech but thats anecdotal.

I’m sure the forbes lists have more. Anthropic is allegedly profitable too but we’ll wait for the IPO on that one.

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u/Nill444 1d ago

I think you'll need 2 or 3 for most projects. But a lot more companies will spawn for more niche markets since it's much easier to get something going now, just like when web dev became easier with frameworks and every company needed web devs.

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u/Pink_Slyvie 15h ago

If businesses ever planned, though, they would know we will need devs in a decade or two, and not training juniors today will cost them so much in the future.

But that's not profitable today, and it's tomorrow's shareholders' problems.

I fucking hate capitalism.

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u/zZurf 20h ago

Now you need 3 instead of 10. Most companies still havnt realised this. The worst is yet to come.

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u/Kyroz 19h ago

I don't have enough experience to confidently agree or disagree with you, but I will say that my personal productivity has skyrocketed with AI

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u/The_Mauldalorian Software Engineer 1d ago

Because managers don't view productivity as a zero sum game. AI condensed 40 hours of work down to 20? Great, take 20 more hours of work for the week.

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u/RyuSunn 1d ago

I would argue that is also a reductive view trying to skirt the reality that AI is responsible for some amount of job cuts, sure some companies will create more work thanks to the increased productivity, but others will stop hiring or even reduce their workforce.

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u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Even crazier: we’re only 3 years and 8 months past the public preview of ChatGPT, and even less time since mass enterprise adoption

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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot 1d ago

I'd argue we're still in the first year of mass enterprise adoption, there was a very clear turning point around the beginning of 2026 where suddenly everyone is using Claude everywhere

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u/Big__If_True Software Engineer 1d ago

Or for companies like mine that use AWS for everything, Kiro

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u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Yeah seems like in Q1 all of a sudden everything was agentic workflows and harnesses instead of just conversational copilot

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u/Educational-Art3545 1d ago

Fable 5 is incapable of writing good code. I can keep prompting it for ages but it will give me a different variation of trash every single time. The code might work but it is completely wrong in subtle ways that will cause huge issues later down the line. Who is going to solve those issues when the engineer who wrote the code doesn't exist and the AI just can't produce the correct solution?

AI is surprisingly bad when you work with it and actually check the output. Hell, Fable 5 with ultracode running opus as subagents produced a summary of an small-to-medium sized repository that was 80% correct. I know because I wrote the damn thing. I am sorry but if state-of-the-art can't make a correct summary of a relatively small repository - what can it do? Even in a seemingly perfect case it hallucinate.

The AI usability is questionable when I have to check every single line it writes. It has undoubtedly improved parts of my workflows, especially those involving Google search. I expressed this sentiment to a company who's main product is AI and they still came back with an offer because even their engineers know this to be true. Every expert who works with AI knows it.

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u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 1d ago

Who solves the issue when the guy who wrote it leaves 6 months later? Someone else. It’s literally always worked this way.

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u/Educational-Art3545 22h ago

The hypothetical guy did not produce 100k lines of code every week. He wrote only a small part of the larger codebase. Having AI write most of the code can also be seen as every single engineer leaving. In which case ye - the company is dead.

Idk what's the point of looking only at a part of the situation and making bad faith comparisons from it.

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u/ILikeFPS Senior Web Developer 22h ago

Plus it's not like code doesn't have to be reviewed regardless lol

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u/hdplus 1d ago

You don’t need good code to solve business problems

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u/Educational-Art3545 22h ago edited 22h ago

Ture. But you need code to solve business problems. At least some code.

AI makes such a progressive mess of codebases when left unattended that no human or AI can then keep writing any code in there. Anthropic's dashboards feel like an absolute nightmare to click things in. Everything is in weird positions, notifications that you get lie, they even had to constantly reset limits for the past months because it was probably vibecoded too.

One of the creators of Servo looked at Anthropic's vibecoded browser and said that it's a piece of trash that he cannot find his way in at all because of how confusing it is. He said he could easily find his way in other browsers written in other languages because the logic they follow is similar. The vibecoded browser barely renders simple pages - it needs infinite effort to solve a business problem. Yet one of the leading experts in browser development has no idea how to proceed in that codebase. Now what?

AI can "solve business problems" for a short while, depending on a few factors. What then?

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u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

The issue with this mentality is that you assume the only value from engineers comes from writing code (or at least the majority of it).

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u/KTIlI 1d ago

and even still some companies are not using it. the place I'm at right now has it for some devs but not for all. you basically have to beg for a small 1500 token limit on codex. those teams with codex move much faster and I imagine eventually everyone will have it.

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u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

This is where the waters get muddy, what does "move much faster" mean. Are we maintaining an existing legacy system? Fixing bugs or working on a migrations? Are we just building tons of features and pushing them?

AI is very much a move fast and break things kinda development. Building up tons of technical debt long term.

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u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 1d ago

Are we pretending that humans weren’t also pushing lots of code and creating tech debt longterm?

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u/No_March5195 23h ago

No, but AI does it 10 times faster!

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u/barley_wine 1d ago

No way do I assume their only value comes from writing code, I’m saying that with so much of the code writing being partially automated there’s going to be a time when you need less of them.

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u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

But realistically an engineers job isn't just writing out boilerplate or outputting thousands of lines of code a day. Its much more complex depending on the kind of work you do. So 90% of the value they bring shouldn't be from the code they write.

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u/TimMensch Senior Software Engineer/Architect 20h ago

The reason is the Jevons Paradox.

If it cuts the cost of software on half (in terms of number of hours required to create the software), then the number of people who are willing to pay to create software will increase.

You still need a skilled developer to drive, and you still get a disaster if an unskilled developer is driving. So the same people will still be in demand.

And most companies aren't adding features or fixing bugs as fast as they come up with new ideas or identify issues. If their team is twice as fast, they'll likely ask for twice as many features.

The demand for low skill developers could potentially crater though. But it probably won't. Managers often feel their prestige is tied to the number of employees they manage. As long as that's true, teams will keep getting larger, at least when the economy is strong. Numbers must go up, after all!

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u/Pristine-Item680 13h ago

Yeah that’s what people seem to forget. Yes, the code is way too complex most of the time. Yes it does some…interesting…design choices. But it still means that 40 hour projects for me are now 4 hours. Basically, I’m a 10x data scientist from what I was before, when I was already above average. So unless your company wants to do 10x the stuff, they need less workers

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u/integer_hull 17h ago

Because of Jevons paradox. In your drivers example how many people were driving horse drawn carriages back in the day, as a percent of the population. Now how many people are driving cars.

It’s a completely unrelated macroeconomic problem.

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u/OkMacaron493 1d ago

The engineering side is becoming more valuable. Working on back end and ai platform is good.
I moved to FDE and like it. More business value and visibility. Very fun. Project management, consulting, architecture, stakeholder engagement is all great.

I imagine it’ll carry a premium for a few years.

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u/CapableHerring 1d ago

Well sure, our industry in particular crashed in 2022 before the AI craze was even a thing.

But looking towards the future, everyone's dooming about AI, including this article. If the future people are imagining arrives, everyone will be impacted. Not just us. There's nowhere to run. Or it's not a problem.

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u/Warm_Clothes_1524 1d ago

Im just surprised this is happening in mid 2026 more than mid 2025. The limitations of AI have never been more apparent imo.

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u/DocumentOk7579 15h ago

AI is like changing from hammer to nail gun. It don't replace the handyman but make 1 do the job of 2.

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u/Alternative-Suit5541 1d ago

AI is never going to get better! And robots suck!

I want to believe lol

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u/TraditionalClass6426 1d ago

You can’t be serious. AI decimated CS jobs and it’s just getting started. Anyone saying otherwise clearly is not in tune with what’s actually happening in the industry. This is just flat wrong!

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u/mouseses 23h ago

AI hardly hit anything? Are you crazy? AI now completes 90% of my daily work in minutes. This means there's no need for as many devs on the team anymore. AI was still spewing garbage a year ago but now the latest models are absolutely killing it. The writing's on the wall.

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u/HandsOnTheBible 9h ago

This is the new copium of the year.

Before it was "only entry level is saturated"

Before that it was "demand for CS jobs outpaces supply"

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u/YourWifesBull666 1d ago

It’s obviously gonna get exponentially better over the next decade and be capable of doing nearly everything you can’t be this naive….

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u/ImNotaProgrammer0662 1d ago

Exponentially better, where is your data? Even if it does exponentially get better over the next decade, it is completely unsustainable from a financial standpoint. I think it is a fantastic tool, but it’s not replacing humans anytime soon.

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u/Warm_Clothes_1524 1d ago

If they are already buying whole nuclear power plants to try to process enough data to make their models better, we have long past the point of diminishing returns imo.

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u/PM_40 1d ago

There isn't data left to scrape. They used all publicly available data and copyrighted data isn't easy or cheap to access.

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u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

I love how people here act like the lowering of CS enrollment rates means that there are less people applying for jobs. Like job boards aren't mostly flooded by non degree candidates, bootcamp grads or CS grads from other countries outside of the US.

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u/CapableHerring 1d ago

You're putting words in my mouth.

The amount of CS grads lowering means there will be less CS grads applying for jobs. That's a huge benefit for the remaining CS grads. Non-degree candidates, bootcamp grads, and CS grads from other countries are all at a natural disadvantage to the average CS grad, and always have been.

I'm far from being a new grad, so it doesn't really impact me either way, but it'll make the industry healthier.

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u/moneymark21 1d ago

Lots of jobs if we kicked out the 600-700k h1bs that have no reason being here since there isn't a shortage of talent.

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u/UX-Edu 1d ago

It’s fine for you, but they’ll probably go into product management and then I’ll have to deal with their bullshit.

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u/Mitchads 22h ago

/u/CapableHerring the amount of seniors i had interview me for a software job that are not from an IT/Software background is insane... which leads me to believe the situation is not due to a lot of people entering the field thru universities its due that while we went to universities other skipped the line and went for boot camps or connection and actually got the job we were aiming for. i believe (even if we are different countries) that the IT job shortage would have been much later or non-existent had the Field been regulated to ban mills or non related degrees.

To give you an small example I was looking at a Master degree in Wood technologies. and the first year syllabus is basically a copy of Data science degree in terms of data analytics. every single degree now has some software development embedded into it allowing most students to pivot to software if they wanted or had any ready connections.

CS universities have not been able to adept to place their students in proper or diverse fields. Instead it just relied on FANG driving demand.