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The trend of years of accelerated enrollment growth in computer-science departments followed by a sharp recent decline can be found across the country, on both big and small campuses and at public and private schools alike.

At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, undergraduate computer-science enrollment rose for nine straight years, to 672 students in 2024 from 291 students in 2015, according to data published by the university. Last year, computer-science enrollment at the university sank by 17% to 555.

The University of Tennessee did not respond to requests for comment.

In Minnesota, Carleton College's current senior class has 73 computer-science majors, according to the chair of the computer-science department, Amy Csizmar Dalal. There are currently 34 juniors in the major, suggesting it has become less popular at the liberal-art college, which has some 2,000 undergraduates overall. Students must declare a major by the end of their sophomore year.

Csizmar Dalal told MarketWatch that she's not worried about the future of computer science, despite the struggles her students now face to find jobs. "Our field has always kind of figured out what to do with the new normal and has sort of rebounded from that," she said, referring to a boom and bust in enrollment that took place around the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.

"I just recently went to our academic fair, which we have at the beginning of our school year for the incoming first-year students. And I was honestly a little shocked by how enthusiastic people still were about studying computer science and taking computer-science courses."

On the surface, higher-education institutions, especially the nation's most selective ones, are taking the dip in computer-science enrollment in stride. Computer-science professors and department chairs maintain that computer-science degrees are still valuable and that the major will remain attractive to students.

Mehran Sahami, who chairs the computer-science department at Stanford University, told MarketWatch that enrollment in the major declined roughly 10% last year.

"One [driver] is certainly perceptions around AI, the notion that AI will be writing more code, and so that might be perceived as limiting opportunities for programmers," while another factor is "fairly significant layoffs" by large tech companies, Sahami said. But he added that it would be "short-sighted to just say there's been a round of layoffs, so suddenly everything needs to change at universities."

'At the mercy of market trends'

In woodsy Hanover, N.H., the computer-science department at Dartmouth College, which has about 4,700 undergraduate students, went through its own computer-science boom time in the 2010s.

The Ivy League institution submitted plans to the town for a $200 million expansion of an existing building to house the computer-science department. But the college faced challenges that slowed the project after it was initially conceived in 2018. At one point construction was suspended after workers dug a 70-foot-deep hole more than 10 feet away from the intended location.

"[S]eemingly, nobody on the construction site possessed enough engineering expertise to figure out the intricacies of operating a tape measure," the Dartmouth Review wrote in 2019.

The number of Dartmouth undergraduates declaring computer science as their major peaked in 2021 at 263, up 209% from 2013, according to Dartmouth data. The expanded building opened in 2022. The number of students majoring in computer science dropped to 212 in 2026, down 19% from the 2021 peak, according to Dartmouth data.

Dartmouth did not respond to requests for comment.

Grinnell College, with an undergraduates population of 1,700, has also seen softening demand in the major since enrollment peaked in 2022. Jerod Weiman, chair of computer science at the Iowa college, told MarketWatch he is sympathetic to the career anxieties that students in his department are feeling.

"I'm also, I guess, excited for the possibilities that they might be able to experience putting their liberal education to use," Weiman said.

In a remote corner of western Massachusetts, at Williams College, enrollment in computer-science courses more than tripled to 881 in 2024, up from 286 in 2011. The liberal-arts college has roughly 2,000 undergraduates, and some of them take multiple computer-science courses each semester. In 2026, enrollment in computer-science courses declined to 645, driven by a decline in 100-level enrollments, the department chair, Mark Hopkins, shared with MarketWatch.

Hopkins said Williams's computer-science program is largely "at the mercy of market trends," and the drop in enrollment comes as a welcome reprieve.

"One of the things that this [decline] has allowed us to do is not have to drop an immense number of course students from our intro courses the way that we've had to do over the past decade," he said.

Faculty members at a number of institutions told MarketWatch that their computer-science departments scrambled to hire faculty when interest in the major peaked around 2023, and now the departments have a surplus of instructors. Many schools relied on adjunct professors during the boom to manage the influx of computer-science students, but those schools that added tenure-track faculty could be in a tight spot.

Rosenberg, the former Macalester president and author of "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education," told MarketWatch that universities often confront problems reallocating tenured faculty members. "[W]hen it comes to full-time tenure-track faculty, you're kind of stuck," he said. "You know, if you hired 10 tenured computer-science professors five years ago, there's not a lot you can do to move those resources around."

Michael Clarkson, a computer-science professor at Cornell University, said that the Ivy League university in Ithaca, N.Y., experienced a roughly 15% decline in students declaring the major in the last year. He noted that it's important in an academic setting to not react instantly to shifting student preferences, and to make thoughtful changes.

"Part of that is developing good pedagogy, and courses take a huge amount of investment and effort in terms of training, [teaching assistants] and even what the faculty themselves know," Clarkson said.

The chair of a computer-science department at a small liberal-arts college on the East Coast, who requested anonymity, told MarketWatch that the college, which graduated roughly 50 computer-science majors in 2023, plans to graduate roughly 30 in 2027. Despite that shift, he said, colleges and universities tend to be "somewhat conservative in terms of change."

"You don't want to be too responsive to economic forces," the chair said, adding that computer-science departments are traditionally focused on "fundamentals we can cover that, in some sense, are eternal." He added that he's encouraged students to remain optimistic, even if they are struggling in the job market.

"They've sent out a hundred internship applications, and they haven't gotten a single bite," he said.

See also: The murky AI milestone that has some of the industry's leading voices increasingly on edge

-Hannah Pedone

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