Forbes Daily Newsletter: 10% decline in student CompSci enrollment

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From the Forbes daily newsletter June 17, 2026:

The decline in enrollment for computer science and computer programming majors at universities from 2025 to 2026. Goldman Sachs’ Pierfrancesco Mei believes this is evidence that undergraduates are changing their behavior to avoid career paths most easily destroyed by AI. “By contrast, enrollment rose by about 3% on average in majors linked to occupations with low AI displacement risk and strong recent job growth, most notably in healthcare and engineering,” he said in a note seen by Fortune.

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What's disturbing? I'm not surprised that CS enrollment is declining. Even before the AI boom, the CS new grad market was overcorrecting from the 2019-2021 era of CS grads easily being able to get jobs.
 
I think it will quickly rise again as students learn the new ways of software development being hammered out in the AI agent age.

I believe a human will have to have the right vibe programming skills to direct the AI agent to a good outcome rather like the way bosses do now with their employees.

AI agents even though they are more capable can easily go off the rails and someone needs to be there to bring them back inline.