Computer science was the safe bet. For twenty years, enrolment in the US only went up. In the 2025-26 academic year, it went down.
The reversal
The finding comes from Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Business Insider reported his research. His dataset is vast: more than 50 million course sections since 1996, across 1,019 US colleges. In it, computer science’s share of enrolment fell for the first time in roughly two decades.
At the average school, enrolment in CS classes dropped about 4.6% year on year. National figures point the same way. The National Student Clearinghouse reported undergraduate computer-science enrolment at four-year colleges down 8.1% in autumn 2025. That is about 659,700 students down to 606,100.
From boom to wobble
