Princeton expects computer science majors to fall sharply

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 54:10

   I know you still lecture here at Princeton from time to time, and it seems like more recently the education may be changing because of some of this LLM AI stuff. I mean, unprecedented access to answers, I guess. Do you believe that LLMs are a net negative or a net positive when you look at education? I think it's too early to tell. I can see plenty of elements of both sides of that. One concrete example that I have heard reported by all kinds of people around here is that students don't come to office hours.

2. 54:52

   They're presumably getting whatever it is from their favorite large language model, and so they don't come in and talk to faculty or the preceptor grad students or whatever it is. They just don't do that very much. And I think that one's a net loss. The bandwidth when you're talking to somebody in person is enormously higher than when you're talking to Claude or whatever. And the other thing is that the human contact that you get from this is useful in all kinds of ways, not the least of which is that if you come in and talk to some faculty member, that person now knows who you are.

3. 55:29

   And they can say, oh, did you know? Here's an opportunity. Here's somebody looking for a job, whatever. So they're missing the kind of, it's not transactional, that they're missing that human connection that helps in the future. So I'm sorry to see the office hours go away. I think a weird, I don't know why I called it an upside or a downside of this in computer. science in particular enrollments are down. So we have many fewer computer science majors than we did a few years ago. And that means classes are smaller, not entirely because many of those people just went to other departments, but they're still taking our courses, but they're somewhat smaller. And that means that there's more contact with the students. And I think that's good.

4. 56:21

   So what percent down would you say? Our numbers are, I don't know where they're, I think they're more extreme for some unknown reason, but I think the class that just graduated in the summer, spring of 2026 was a little over 200 computer science majors. The class that will graduate two years later, it's probably going to be less than half that. Less than half. Yeah. Wow. Maybe even down to a third.

5. 56:53

   We don't know because there's a staggered way in which majors appear, but I would guess that if it was 200, it'll be sort of 80-ish, 90s, pure guesswork, but quite a bit lower. Those people have gone in here to electrical and computer engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering because those, I think, are more concrete, hardware-oriented, less likely to be replaced by large language models.

6. 57:21

   So the kids are voting with their feet. I think to some extent, that's totally understandable. I think they may be overreacting, but I don't know. And if you just read the popular press, my God, we don't need programmers anymore. I think that's fortunately oversimplified, but it's not my problem in the sense that I have a job and they quite rightly are worried about what they're going to do when they get out of here.