Colleges raced to build massive computer-science departments. Now the boom is turning to bust.

By Hannah Pedone

'Computer science isn't the ticket to the American dream like people thought it was'

When Damia Sargent was a high-school senior in 2022, she received a promotional brochure from the Neumont College of Computer Science, a school located in Salt Lake City that she had never heard of before. Sargent enjoyed taking computer-programming classes in high school, and several months later enrolled at the college with roughly 500 students.

As the popularity of computer science was surging across the nation's college campuses, Neumont University had a few years earlier, in 2017, changed its name to the Neumont College of Computer Science - saying the rebranding "reinforces the school's commitment to provide high-intensity, tech-focused instruction." But as Sargent started her academic studies in 2023, she noticed many of her classmates were abruptly souring on computer science.

"When I first started [at Neumont] everyone was really excited, and then, like three quarters in, roughly half of my incoming class dropped," she said.

In 2025, the school changed its name back to Neumont University, saying the decision "reflects the institution's growth in academic scope."

Sargent stayed the course and graduated with a Neumont computer-science degree in 2026. She now works as a cashier at the fast-food chain Wingstop in Lubbock, Texas, and said she is searching for a job as a web developer while trying to pay off her $96,000 in student debt.

There's been "declining computer-science enrollment nationwide, and Neumont has not been immune to that trend," said Aaron Reed, CEO of Neumont, a for-profit institution. "We believe declining enrollment in computer-science programs, coupled with renewed demand for technical talent, could eventually create a shortage of qualified graduates and expand employment opportunities."

Computer science became the hottest college major in America in the wake of the 2007-09 recession, as student debt exploded and families and policymakers began demanding that graduates receive a return on their investment in the form of a well-paying job. Colleges raced to prove they were setting their students up for success after graduation by investing in what was thought to be a sure path to financial stability: the computer-science major.

Schools built big computer-science departments with gleaming new buildings and technically trained faculty. The number of students enrolled in four-year bachelor's computer-science degree programs in America soared to 232,539 in 2024, up 56% from 148,886 in 2018, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a nonprofit that collects higher-education data.

Then, in November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and unleashed the artificial-intelligence frenzy. Many high-school students concluded that AI would eventually be doing a lot of the coding previously associated with high-income jobs in the field, an unease that escalated as several tech companies announced job cuts.

Instead of seeming like a smart pursuit, a computer-science degree started to look like it could be a dead end. Student enrollment in four-year computer-science programs plunged to 206,442 students in 2025, down 11% from 2024, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Recently published enrollment data for the fall of 2026 from schools including the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College indicate a more pronounced computer-science decline is underway this year.

"It's becoming increasingly clear that, for many, computer science isn't the ticket to the American dream like people thought it was," said Connor Diemand-Yauman, co-CEO of Merit America, a nonprofit that helps low-wage workers without bachelor's degrees transition into higher-paying jobs in tech. "For years we've been telling students that the safest thing that they could do was to learn to code. I think students are seeing in the job market, but also feeling in the zeitgeist, that that advice has expired."

The big bet colleges made on computer science by hiring faculty and building facilities is now putting them in a bind as they look to pivot amid declining student demand. The rise and fall of the computer-science degree exposes a fundamental tension that's been playing out at universities over the past several years, experts say, between chasing labor-market trends and providing students with the skills that prepare them for careers and adulthood more broadly.

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Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester College and a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said university leaders are increasingly under pressure from families to provide areas of study that will lead to lucrative employment. But, he added, colleges are traditionally structured to boost economic returns for their students as compared with high-school graduates. Neither the schools nor the students are good at responding to rapid changes taking place in the workplace, he said.

"People choose majors and areas of study on the basis of what they think often, not always, will lead to jobs. But often what you think will lead to jobs when you enter as a freshman isn't even the case when you leave as a graduating senior," Rosenberg said. "The computer-science-major boom is now going to probably become a computer-science-major bust."

Michigan's computer-science enrollment is down 48%

When Moneeb Zuberi worked as an instructional aid in 2024 for EECS 280 - a class that most students majoring in computer science at the University of Michigan need to take - he became overwhelmed by requests for help in the week before the final project was due. Nearly 1,200 undergraduates were in the class in the winter term of 2024, and they flooded the online queue for office hours.

"Just the sheer number of students - I mean, we were incapable of getting through and helping all the students," Zuberi said. "It kind of sucks to leave a student who's obviously still confused with stuff, but you've hit your five-minute limit and there's a hundred other students [waiting]."

At the peak in the fall of 2023, 2,503 undergraduate students at Michigan were declared computer-science majors, up 235% from 748 students in the fall of 2013, according to the university. Computer science became the most popular undergraduate major at the flagship Ann Arbor campus, according to Michigan's budget office.

"We were really stressed at that point, and, to head that off, we started restricting the major," Atul Prakash, chair of computer science and engineering at Michigan, told MarketWatch. "We were not able to keep up."

In the fall of 2023, the university required students interested in pursuing computer science to complete an additional application step in order to apply for the major.

"A lot of us felt that we're a public school - if a student comes to Michigan, they want to do a computer-science degree, we should be able to teach them," Prakash explained. "But with the faculty body we have, with the space constraints we had at that time, we just couldn't serve the students."

Michigan made big investments in computer science. In 2021, the school's board of regents approved the building of the 163,000-square-foot Leinweber Computer Science and Information Building. It cost $145 million and was mostly funded by the university. Opened in 2025, the all-electric building, which contains a 200-seat lecture hall, is powered by a geothermal facility that provides heating and cooling.

"The biggest challenge was building into a hill and negotiating the 30-foot grade difference in planning the building. We needed to provide entrances at both the lower Grove level and the upper north side of campus," said Mariko Masuoka, an architect at Pelli Clarke & Partners, which designed the building. "The other thing, there was an issue with birds flying into the glass."

By the time students started using the building, interest in computer science had tumbled. Now, in the fall term of 2026, 1,315 students enrolled at Michigan are majoring in computer science - down 48% from the 2023 peak, university data show. Michigan also recently removed the enrollment cap on the program.

"Really, they should have started building the new building in 2019 or 2018," said a 2023 graduate of Michigan's computer-science program who went on to work at a large technology company. "We're sort of past the demand curve."

Prakash said that the current enrollment drop offers his department some relief. Computer-science students, he said, no longer need to contend with long waiting lists to get into popular classes as they did several years ago.

"There's a worry that if it continues declining, then do we have a problem? To some extent, yes, in the sense that the department revenue obviously depends on the number of students who are enrolled," he said. "What emerges from this shakeout, in some sense, I think the jury is still out."

State universities, liberal-arts colleges and online schools

The Arizona State University campus in Tempe.

Arizona State University is a public school with several primary campuses in the Phoenix area, coupled with a massive component that operates online. For years, the computer-science department was mostly focused on students at the main campus in Tempe, Ariz.

Undergraduate enrollment in the computer-science program rose to 5,898 students in the fall of 2024, up 168% from 2,180 students in the fall of 2017, according to reports published by the university's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. The surge in enrollment was pushed higher after Arizona State opened the computer-science bachelor's program to online students in 2023, reports from the university show. Then, in the fall of 2025, enrollment in the bachelor's program fell to 5,180 students, a 12% decline.

Arizona State did not respond to requests for comment.

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