Artificial intelligence is the hot new college major. This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
At the University of California, San Diego, 150 first-year students signed up for a new AI major. And the State University of New York at Buffalo created a stand-alone “department of A.I. and society,” which is offering new interdisciplinary degrees in fields like “AI and policy analysis.”
The rapid popularity of products like ChatGPT, along with the skyrocketing valuations of tech giants like chipmaker Nvidia, is helping drive the campus A.I. boom.
Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have poured billions of dollars into the technology. And this year, Google and Microsoft announced company efforts to train millions of students and adult workers on AI.
Now, interest in understanding, using, and building AI technologies is soaring, and schools are racing to meet rising student and industry demand.
Over the last two years, dozens of U.S. universities and colleges have announced new AI departments, majors, minors, courses, interdisciplinary concentrations, and other programs.
In 2022, for instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a major called “AI and decision-making.” Students in the program learn to develop A.I. systems and study how technologies like robots interact with humans and the environment. This year, nearly 330 students are enrolled in the program, making A.I. the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science.
“Students who prefer to work with data to address problems find themselves more drawn to an AI major,” said Asu Ozdaglar, the deputy dean of academics at the M.I.T. Schwarzman College of Computing. Students interested in applying AI in fields like biology and health care are also flocking to the new major, she added.
Some college students said that the new major seemed timely and that they hoped the AI branding would open up more job opportunities.
Leena Banga, a first-year student from Fremont, Calif., said she had become interested in AI after trying out chatbots and wanted to understand more about how the underlying technology worked.
After participating in an AI summer program for high school students at the University of Pennsylvania, she decided to pursue the new major at UC San Diego.
“This is so cool to me to have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this,” said Ms. Banga, 18.
Had universities not yet offered new AI degrees, Ms. Banga said, she would have chosen computer science. This popular major teaches computer programming and fundamental computing concepts, like the algorithmic building blocks of AI.
Over the past 15 years, the boom in smartphones and social media, along with industry promises of high-paying tech jobs, has helped fuel enrolment in computing at colleges. Nearly 173,000 undergraduates majored in computer science in the spring of 2024, compared with about 65,000 students a decade earlier, according to the Computing Research Association. This nonprofit collects annual data from about 200 universities.
But this fall, 62 percent of computing programs reported undergraduate enrolment declines, according to a report published in October by the Computing Research Association.
One reason for the dip: student employment concerns
Some large tech companies are laying off thousands of workers, and recent computing graduates say they have faced increased challenges in landing tech jobs this year. Companies like Amazon have also begun asking their software engineers to use AI tools that can write code, potentially reducing the need for junior programmers.
Among 133 computing programs participating in the Computing Research Association report, 66 percent somewhat or strongly agreed that computing majors who graduated this year were having difficulty getting jobs.
“It’s a noticeable difference,” said Andy Meneely, the undergraduate program director for software engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, “especially when I see outstanding students struggling to get a job.”
While computer science enrolment generally declined this year, many schools reported increased enrolment in subfields like AI Tracy Camp, the executive director of the Computing Research Association, called the shift “a new era for computing degrees becoming more specialized.”
That’s true of the AI major at U.C. San Diego, which is based in the department of computer science and engineering. As part of the program, the university developed two new courses in the foundations of AI and machine learning.
Students must also take advanced math and grapple with the social impacts of emerging technologies, said Mia Minnes, the university’s vice chair for undergraduate computer science education.
Ms. Banga, the first-year student there, said her siblings were initially skeptical of her chosen degree program.
