There’s Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science

It’s a weird time to be studying computer science. Recent grads have a higher unemployment rate than those in just about every other major—yes, even philosophy. The internet is littered with rants from newly minted programmers who can’t find work. On one such You Tube video, the top comment reads: “Your first mistake is not being born earlier.” Students, meanwhile, are fleeing the field. Undergraduate enrollment in computer science dipped by more than 8 percent last year, representing the largest absolute decline across any major in several years. The falloff at the graduate level—14 percent—was even more severe.Learning to code was supposed to be a ticket to a good tech job. It wasn’t just Silicon Valley that spread the gospel of computer science: “Support tha american dream n make coding available to EVERYONE!!” Snoop Dogg once tweeted. Now the decision to major in CS is more complicated. Nowhere has AI refashioned work as dramatically as it has for programmers. Coding bots have become much more powerful over the past few years, and they excel at precisely the kind of programming that might previously have been delegated to entry-level workers. An Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, recently warned that “the value of more junior people is a bit more dubious,” as some 90 percent of the company’s new code is apparently now AI-generated.The popular narrative around CS has flipped to such a degree that some Silicon Valley insiders are now actively discouraging people against the major. John Coogan, a co-host of TBPN, a popular tech-news podcast, recently asked if it would be a “contrarian move” to study computer science “at a time when coding jobs are going away.” But studying computer science is not contrarian, and the major’s waning relevance has been overstated.It’s true that the work situation is more dicey than it once was. “Forget Python, study Plato,” The Economist advised students last week. But although the unemployment rate for new CS grads is spiking, they hav