Computer science enrollment is plunging, but AI is taking over the rest of the college campus as it reshapes how students learn and work

For more than a decade, computer science was considered one of higher education’s safest bets, as tech companies’ appetite for skilled coders drove a surge in student enrollment.

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Now, enrollment is falling. Undergraduate enrollment in computer and information sciences at four-year institutions declined 8.4% in spring 2026 from a year earlier, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The decline followed a 3.6% drop from a year prior in fall 2025, when graduate enrollment in the field also fell 14% over the same period.

Still, the enrollment declines don’t mean students are losing interest in technology. Instead, they may be looking at increasing their tech knowledge alongside other interests, says one expert.

Colby College, a small liberal arts university in Waterville, Maine, is one example of how universities are responding to the enrollment shift by incorporating AI education outside the computer science department and teaching students to combine technical expertise with other fields they are interested in.

“The vision is really around an interdisciplinary approach to AI,” said David Watts, director of Colby’s Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “A lot of the challenges around AI go a lot further than the AI itself.”

A computer science major who graduated from liberal arts-focused Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., Watts joined Colby last year after a two-decade long career at IBM. Surprisingly, even at IBM, one of the largest technology companies in the world, Watts said he noticed even highly trained engineers sometimes struggled to adapt as technology changed. For his part, he attributed much of his own ability to move between fields and develop new ideas to his undergraduate liberal arts education.

At Colby, Watts is now trying to apply those learnings to a new generation of students on the verge of entering a shaky labor market just as generative AI changes how nearly every profession operates. 

The Davis Institute at Colby was established in 2021 with a $30 million gift as the first cross-disciplinary AI institute at a liberal arts college. The institute’s goal is to integrate AI across disciplines at the University while paying close attention to ethical considerations.

That strategy was on display this summer in an eight-week “Interdisciplinary Summer Bridges” program run by the Davis Institute in collaboration with Colby’s Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship. A group of 30 students representing 23 majors or intended majors participated, said Watts, ranging from rising sophomores to seniors. No previous programming experience was required.

Students spent the first half of the program learning AI fundamentals while examining ethical questions about its use. They then formed teams with students from different majors and backgrounds and developed seven projects addressing real-world problems, for example a no-code AI tool intended to eliminate legacy biases in automated hiring or an AI-assisted legal citation verification tool for law students and legal professionals, Watts said.

In the final week, the students used what they learned during the program to develop an idea combining tech with another area of interest and then pitched it to a panel of judges that included Kathryn Guarini, a former IBM chief information officer who now teaches at the Yale School of Management.

Kira Thornton ‘28, center, listens to classmates during a breakout session as part of the DavisAI Interdisciplinary Summer Bridges Program inside the Gordon Center for the Creative and Performing Arts on Wednesday, July 22, 2026.Gabe Souza

Colby is not the only university increasingly incorporating AI into education, even for non-computer science majors. The University of Florida now offers more than 200 AI-related courses across all 16 of its colleges, with 14,000 students enrolled annually. The university claims 71% of graduates in the Spring 2026 commencement cycle took at least one AI course during their time at the University. At the same time, Ohio State University last year introduced an AI fluency initiative to ensure every student, starting with the class of 2029, will be “fluent” in AI related to their major by graduation day.

Increasingly, universities are trying to prepare students for a world in which AI is present in nearly every job, even as the traditional computer science pipeline declines.

On the flipside, Watts said students are also starting to realize that they don’t need to major in computer science to learn technology—which might just be a good thing, he said. A psychology student, for example, might learn enough about AI to develop tools for behavioral health without becoming a software engineer, he added.

“The more you collaborate and bring additional fields to bear, the better you can tackle different perspectives,” he said. 

Still, Watts rejected the idea that programming expertise will become unnecessary anytime in the future. Engineers will still need to code, and, even more importantly, they’ll need to have the knowledge necessary to know when AI gets things wrong. 

Still, it’s clear, he said, that the future of technology in education can no longer be confined to the four walls of the computer science building.

“I’m not an advocate to say that computer science is no longer needed,” Watts said. “It’s just that the nature of how you apply that knowledge is changing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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