College students are voting with their feet on AI. Goldman has the receipts

At least one cohort isn’t waiting around to find out who’s right about AI and jobs. While executives debated “jobs armageddon” versus new opportunity at Fortune‘s Workplace Innovation Summit in May, college students were already acting—quietly abandoning the majors most exposed to AI disruption and flooding into the fields least likely to be automated away. Goldman Sachs has the data to prove it. A Goldman analysis published Monday found enrollment in computer science and computer programming majors each fell by more than 10% in the 2025–26 academic year, while healthcare and engineering surged roughly 3% on average—the first statistically significant evidence that students are rewiring their academic choices in response to AI’s assault on entry-level white-collar work. Prior to the 2024–25 academic year, no such pattern existed in the enrollment data. The shift is new, and Goldman’s economists believe it may be moving faster than any previous technological transition. The findings are consistent with academic research showing a relationship between college major choices and shifting labor demand, noted Goldman economist Pierfrancesco Mei, with students moving toward fields tied to jobs that saw stronger recent employment and wage growth. “Historically, such adjustments have taken a few years, reflecting both the time required for students to observe job market outcomes among graduating peers and the difficulty of reversing major choices made in the early college years,” he wrote. “But the current adjustment may be unfolding more quickly, given the heightened salience of AI disruption.” What Goldman actually measured Goldman’s analysis is more rigorous than the wave of surveys and anecdotes that have dominated this conversation. Rather than asking students how they feel about AI, researchers mapped where recent graduates from 180+ majors actually ended up working—using American Community Survey