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Education AI

College Students Flock To A New Major: AI (nytimes.com) 52

Posted by EditorDavid from the major-differences dept.
AI is the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science, reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here and here.) Though that includes students interested in applying AI in biology and health care — it's just the beginning: This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa. At the University of California, San Diego, 150 first-year students signed up for a new A.I. major. And the State University of New York at Buffalo created a stand-alone "department of A.I. and society," which is offering new interdisciplinary degrees in fields like "A.I. and policy analysis...."

[I]nterest in understanding, using and learning how to build A.I. technologies is soaring, and schools are racing to meet rising student and industry demand. Over the last two years, dozens of U.S. universities and colleges have announced new A.I. departments, majors, minors, courses, interdisciplinary concentrations and other programs.
"This is so cool to me to have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this," one 18-year-old told the New York Times. Their article points out 62% of America's computing programs reported drops in undergraduate enrollment this fall, according to a report in October from the Computing Research Association.

"One reason for the dip: student employment concerns."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

College Students Flock To A New Major: AI More | Reply

College Students Flock To A New Major: AI

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  • Wrong major (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Sunday December 07, 2025 @06:55PM (#65842185)

    Chemical Engineering/MSE will be much more valuable for those that can hack it.

    • Re:Wrong major (Score:4, Insightful)

      by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Sunday December 07, 2025 @07:15PM (#65842221) Journal

      I get the feeling that many people who will be opting for AI/cybersecurity are hoping to somehow get the gold star of approval that allows them to get a paycheck for not actually doing work.

      Kind of like how a lot of people wanted to get hired by the big tech companies (meta, alphabet, apple, amazon, netflix, etc.) and draw a 6 figure salary for basically doing nothing - except maybe video blogging about how they were making a 6 figure salary for basically doing nothing.

      I would caution people trying to treat this as the new MBA with an observation - if there's sufficient supply of "AI" degree graduates, then the individual value of that degree drops, same as with the MBA. The people getting wealthy at this stage of the game are the ones starting their own companies, or who already have established research pedigrees that make them prime poaching material.

      Anybody trying to get a degree in "AI" right now that takes them out of the workforce for 4 years is going to get an incredibly rude shock when they graduate and find that most everything that doesn't relate to fundamentals (like data science, OSI, etc.) they learned is no longer relevant. Remember how hot "prompt engineering" was at one point? Yeah...

    • Because the last I checked chemistry majors like that had a rough time in the job market. If you could find a job the pay was good but the problem was they're just weren't enough of them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        As in any subject, unless there is a mindless hype (such as "AI" currently) finding a job with a specific degree requires you to have done well. Too many just want the paper but not the qualification that should come with it and for-profit "education" makes it easy to do so. Then they are surprised they have problems finding a job ...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Exactly this, I met a girlfriend after she studied in IT and I hate to speak against her but she wasn't that good although I tried to upgrade her knowledge back then. She never found a job in IT ever as far as I know. Sure she got jobs where her IT formation helped her get the job but those weren't real IT jobs like the programming jobs she was looking for initially.

      • ChemE and/or MSE are potential first steps into the wild world of semiconductor fabrication.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Obviously. But those that "can hack it" are still going into non-vacuous subjects, not into "AI". And "AI and Cybersecurity"? How utterly stupid are these people? AI helps attackers, not defenders. AI may make defense harder though, because AI generated code is riddled with vulnerabilities. (Yes, I am aware there is more AI than LLMs...)

      • And "AI and Cybersecurity"? How utterly stupid are these people? AI helps attackers, not defenders.

        Simply incorrect. It helps both.

        There have been EDR, XDR, NDR, and SOAR solutions that leverage AI long before the current AI boom was even a thing. The more recent AI advances have made a SOC analyst's job easier and facilitated faster response times.

        • The problem is asymmetric. It's easier to attack than to defend. AI scripts simply helps more attackers over the steep barrier to entry of the field.

      • That's . . . not entirely true. AI researchers are some of the most highly-sought-after professionals on the market today. Do they have degrees in "AI"? Probably not, since these degrees are fairly novel and it remains to be seen how well universities can train to meet the needs of companies hiring for AI research today. That being said, there's the distinct possibility that "AI degrees" may be mostly fluff.

    • Nah, son, you need to encourage your kids to go into orthodontics. I don't know what the coursework is like, but I know people dumber than me that managed, and after entering practice, their biggest problems were what to do with all of the money. Not even exaggerating. I worked for a small outfit of three doctors, and I remember them doing fuck all for actual work - the assistants did the majority with the docs doing some tweaks and final pass - and spending more time worrying about their race horses, an

    • Plastics.

    • Interesting that you mention chemical engineering. In some countries, like Germany, that are, often unwillingly, currently in the process of de-industrialization, Chemical Engineering does not look very promising. Production is in China and the engineering is moving to India. I would recommend to a yound chemical engineer to go into biotech: fermenter technology and the like. Foodstuffs and pharma are the two things that the "west" will keep producing and they both are fermenter-heavy. All other commodities

  • useing AI on the test is not allowed and you must buy an GPU at the book store with an 200% mark up.

  • That's most of what the guts of AI is.

    • Statistical analysis is an important skill for any scientific field. But it's hardly the "guts" of AI.

      AI is so much more: wide areas of applied math (linear algebra, differential equations, optimization theory, etc.) combined with computer science, all to support the actual "guts" of AI, which are neural nets. I'm sure I left out a ton of other things.

      • Why were neural nets alone unable to do context-sensitive natural language? Is the attention mechanism which is not a neural net the real paradigm shift?

      • It's definately helpful for machine learning folks to learn the classical statistical models and techniques (and terminology differences between the fields, in case you have to work with a stats major or read a stats paper), but stats models are quite different from machine learning models. The difference comes from whether or not you have to explain why the model works or whether it is enough for the model to perform well in testing. Statisticians insist on knowing the why and how - in machine learning i

      • I was referring to the common usage of "AI", which (at this point in time) refers exclusively to LLMs.

        • I was referring to the common usage of "AI", which (at this point in time) refers exclusively to LLMs.

          And LLMs are generally run on neural nets, which are substantially more than just statistics, as I was saying.

          I agree that LLMs are what most people think AI is right now. But they're not the only kind of AI. And granted, some of these kinds arise from the realm of statistical modeling.

  • This might be a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Sunday December 07, 2025 @07:03PM (#65842199)

    Move away from the insanity of LLMs and massive data centre build outs and get more focused on efficient local hardware uses.

    • Either you're posting to the wrong story, or I shudder to think what you mean by "local hardware" when applied to a story about college students.

    • I've never heard someone in the AI space talk about computational complexity.

      I HAVE heard someone rather famous in the AI space try and fail to play down the importance of this concept that he had never heard phrased that way before. I have heard executives from AI companies try to engage with NP completeness as a business opportunity.
      My faith that this is a computer science degree rather than an information technology one is non existent.

  • I suspect a lot of these people are signing up because they heard about seven figure salaries and huge sign-on bonuses. But, assuming the AI bubble hasn't burst by the time they graduate, I doubt those types of positions will still be a thing by then. The FAANG are spending big bucks to grab talent now in a race. Talent that's already got a decade if experience under the belt in comp sci and machine learning. Not a wet behind the ears undergrad.

  • Better as a minor (Score:3)

    by will4 ( 7250692 ) on Sunday December 07, 2025 @07:15PM (#65842223)

    Conjecture that (degree X) with an applied AI minor would be a better combination.

    Conjecture 2: Some company, with a stock market capitalization of $2+ billion today, will announce an AI induced failure causing an AI induced collapse in its share price and bankruptcy before 2033. I'd expect it to be when they apply AI to commodity trading with success for the first 5 years, then increasing the AI's impact afterwards. How would a company explain the AI, it's commodity trading rules, risk management and validate it's testing in non-production to the company's financial auditors?

  • Quality Education (Score:3)

    by RonVNX ( 55322 ) on Sunday December 07, 2025 @07:32PM (#65842247)

    Oh boy. And you just *know* most of the people teaching all these classes don't know anything about it. It's going to be students turning in assignments LLMs wrote for them, graded by LLMs.

    • Just Math professors with high IQs teaching themselves then teaching; some did better than others.
      • Way back in the dawn of CS - around late '80s - my compsci teacher was an EE that got roped into teaching an Intro to C class. How hard could it be? Ha. I'd already spent a year playing with Turbo C, copying programs from Dr. Dobb's - there's a blast from the past - so that when the prof occasionally slipped up while giving the lessons, I gently hopped in and said, "I think you mean $this," for whatever value of $this. He knew he wasn't an expert, so he welcomed the corrections.

        • Way back in the dawn of CS - around late '80s - my compsci teacher was an EE that got roped into teaching an Intro to C class. How hard could it be? Ha. I'd already spent a year playing with Turbo C, copying programs from Dr. Dobb's - there's a blast from the past - so that when the prof occasionally slipped up while giving the lessons, I gently hopped in and said, "I think you mean $this," for whatever value of $this. He knew he wasn't an expert, so he welcomed the corrections.

          Even when I studied in the late 90s it was like this for anything applied. There was a push to make the degree more 'industry relevant' - i.e. companies want people who could do Java or Protel, not solve partial differential equations or analyse matrix decomposition techniques. The university wasn't really setup for this, so some of the younger professors who had used those tools as part of their research would run the courses.

          Most of the faculty at my school were pretty switched on, so I think it was fine

  • Bunches of everyone gets and A grads! Might just pop this bubble.

  • Seems like a win for lazy students!

  • They should actually have AI prompt design as part of core curriculum nowadays. I see many people who are clueless of how to actually write prompts for AI and are using it inefficiently. I think a semester or quarter wherein students learn to do nothing but prompting for various things would be of immense value.

  • That the AI will be replacing junior jobs and there will be a large number of people with experience who were let go as the bubble burst.

    Maybe a job as a guinea pig testing homeopathic remedies could be your future ?

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