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- A Harvard professor said interest in computer science is likely to "ebb and flow."
- Professor David J. Malan said interest in CS was declining before AI.
- Malan, who also teaches a popular online CS course, said "the downturn in tech offerings" is also to blame.
A leading computer science professor says that AI isn't solely to blame for the broader dip in CS enrollment.
"That was preceded, I think, over the past few years really by the downturn in tech offerings," Harvard computer science professor David J. Malan told podcaster Ryan Petterman during a recent interview, when asked about the current trend.
Malan said that it "absolutely seems to be the case" that AI is hurting interest in CS, but that the current dip began before chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and other generative AI models exploded in popularity.
In addition to student interest, Malan said some tech companies were also less keen to send recruiters to campus since there aren't as many entry-level jobs to fill.
"We were seeing this in the recruiting pipeline on campus, where there were just fewer opportunities, and there was less of an appetite among some of the big tech companies to even bother coming to campus if they just didn't have many entry-level roles for students," he said.
AI isn't going anywhere, Malan said. At the same time, interest in the field will swing back and forth over time.
"I think what we're going to see, if we sort of extrapolate out is that there's going to be these ebbs and flows over the years, much like we've seen," Malan said, adding, "just as humans have this tendency, I do think, especially in tech, to overreact to things both positively and negatively."
Overall, Malan said the fluctuations will likely continue until a "healthier medium" is reached in the discourse around tech, "where people appreciate the real value and not just the opportunistic value of it all."
Debating the future of CS has become hotter than the major itself
Once one of the most popular majors, recent data shows declining enrollment of computer science at four-year colleges and universities. According to the most recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse, which covers enrollment at 97% of all US universities, enrollment in computer science at four-year colleges and universities declined 8.1% in the fall of 2025.
The Washington Post reported that in terms of absolute numbers, "it's the biggest one-year drop of any major discipline going back to at least 2020."
The future of CS has been a major topic among leading names in AI and tech as generative AI models become increasingly adept at programming and coding. OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, and others still see value in CS, provided that graduates understand that the most critical concepts are not basic programming.
Malan is best known for teaching CS50, which he has turned into a popular online course. He stressed that computer science is not about learning languages, but rather about broader skills.
"The whole point of so many of these courses has been about getting better at problem solving," he said. "And like that is a life skill, whether you're going to stay in CS or tech more generally, or leave it for some other field in which there's still going to be problems, just different types of problems."