The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting
The work of the future Perhaps already exceeded its peak. For years, young people looking for a lucrative career have been invited to do all IT. From 2005 to 2023, the number of COMP-SCI majors in the United States quadrupled.
All this makes the last batch of figures so surprising. This year, registration has only increased by 0.2% nationally, and in many programs, it already seems to be in decline, according to interviews with teachers and presidents of the department. In Stanford, widely considered to be one of the country’s best programs, the number of COMP-SCI majors has stalled after years of blister growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, President of the Princeton IT Science Department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduate compli majors in Princeton should be 25% smaller in two years than today. The number of DUKE students registered with IT science introductory courses has dropped by around 20% in the past year.
But if the decline is surprising, the reason is quite simple: young people respond to a dark work prospect for entry -level coders. In recent years, the technology industry has been filmed by layoffs and job gels. The main culprit of the slowdown is the technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proven to be even more precious as a computer code writer than as a writer of words. This means that it is perfectly suited to replace the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study revealed that Americans think that software engineers will be the most affected by a generative AI. Many young people are not waiting to know if it’s true.
“It’s so counter-intuitive,” said Molly Kinder, a Brooking Institution’s scholarship holder who studies the effect of AI on the economy. “It was supposed to be the work of the future. The way to stay ahead of technology was to go to university and get coding skills. ” But days of “learning to code” could end. If the figures are an indication, we may have managed to pass the maximum computer.
Chris Gropp, A doctoral student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, spent eight months looking for a job. He tripled in computer science, mathematics and computer sciences at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and took the courses of a doctorate-test. He would prefer to work instead of finishing his diploma, but he found almost impossible to find a job. He only knows two people who recently succeeded. We sent personalized cover letters for 40 different roles and organized meetings with people in companies. The other submitted 600 requests. “We are in an AI revolution, and I am a specialist of the kind of AI with which we are doing the revolution, and I can’t find anything,” said Gropp. “I found myself a month or two Do I just take a break from this thing for which I train for most of my life and that I will be an apprentice electrician?“”
GROPP faces a low labor market for recent university graduates in general and the technological sector in particular. Although employment for 22 to 27 year olds in other areas has increased slightly in the past three years, employment for computer jobs and mathematics in this age group has dropped by 8%. Not long ago, graduates of the best COMPI programs – like those of Stanford, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon – would have spent recruiters from Google and Amazon. Now, the teachers of these schools told me that their graduates had to try much harder to find work. GROPP’s father William GROPP heads the National Center for Supercominuting requests at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. “I can say, as the father of a master’s degree in computer science with an expertise in automatic learning that is still looking for a job, that industry is not what it was,” he told me.
In the ultimate irony, candidates like GROPP may not be able to work the jobs on the AI because the AI itself takes the jobs. “We know that AI affects jobs,” said Rusinkiewicz, Princeton. “It makes people more effective in some or many aspects of their work, and therefore, perhaps companies feel that they can get away by doing a little less hiring.”
The best proof that artificial intelligence moved technological workers from the fact that the most integrated industry is that which has such unusually high unemployment. Technology chiefs publicly said that they had no longer as many entry -level coders. The leaders of Alphabet and Microsoft said that AI wrote or helps write more than 25% of their code. (Microsoft recently dismissed 6,000 workers.) The anthropic product director said recently The New York Times That senior engineers give work to the company’s chatbot instead of a low -level human employee. The company’s CEO warned that AI could replace half of all entry -level workers over the next five years. Kinder, the Brooking Stockier, said that it worries that companies will soon eliminate the lower scale of the career scale. The fate of technological graduates, she said to me, could be a warning for all entry-level white collars.
Not everyone agrees This AI provokes turbulence in the labor market. The technological industry frequently involves booms and busts. The largest companies exploded when the economy was good. Now, with high interest rates and the spectrum of new prices, managers are probably expanding and workers are hesitant to leave their jobs, explains Zack Mabel, research director at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the WorkForce. Companies have an incentive to blame layoffs on AI instead of the forces under their control, said David Deming, professor of economics at Harvard. “Before seeing major changes compared to AI on the job market, companies must internalize this new capacity and change what they ask for. And this is the thing I have not seen,” he said. “It could be AI, but we just don’t know.”
Registration for the major in computer science has historically fluctuated with the labor market. When jobs are rare, people choose to study something else. Finally, there are not enough computer graduates, wages are increasing and more people are attracted. Previous declins have always rebounded at higher registration levels than where they started. (And some universities, such as the University of Chicago, have not always seen any drop in registration.) Sam Madden, professor of computer science at MIT, told me that even if companies use a generative AI, this will probably create more requests for software engineers, no less.
Whether the past few years increases a temporary lull or a brutal reorganization of professional life, economists suggest the same answer for students: major in a material that offers sustainable and transferable skills. Believe it or not, it could be the liberal arts. Deming’s research shows that the majors of male history and social science end up overcoming their long-term engineering and composition counterparts, because they develop the general skills that employers are looking for regularly. “It is actually quite risky to go to school to learn a special job or skill, because you do not know what the future has in store for us,” said Deming. “You must try to think about acquiring a set of skills that will be the test of future and last for 45 years of professional life.”
Of course, faced with enormous uncertainty, many young people adopt the opposite approach and continue something with a safe path to an immediate job. The question of the day is to know how many of these paths will seize soon.
