For the first time since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, computer science (CS) enrollment in the UC system has dropped, reflecting a national trend. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse, undergraduate enrollment in CS at four-year colleges declined by 8.1 percent in 2025. Across the UC system, the figure was 6 percent.
AI has been cast as the leading culprit in the decline as entry-level coding jobs are taken over by bots, creating deep uncertainty about the future of tech employment. A representative headline from the New York Times last August: “Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.”
At a college counselors’ conference in San Jose last September, the UC Santa Barbara admissions director told attendees, “The biggest surprise is us trying to fill computer science,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
But at Berkeley, things are more complicated.
While a widely cited UC database shows a 21 percent drop in Berkeley’s computer science enrollment, the statistic masks the fact that, as Tiffany Lohwater, assistant dean at the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society explained, there are “multiple pathways to study computer science” at Berkeley, including electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS), commonly classified under “engineering,” and data science, a new major launched in 2018. Counting all three programs together, total enrollment grew by nearly a thousand students from 2020 to 2025.
“When looking at the majors with the most enrolled students, computer science, electrical engineering and computer sciences, and data science are currently the top three most popular majors at UC Berkeley,” said Lohwater.
Among CS majors alone, however, Berkeley expects a steep decline. In March, Jelani Nelson, chair of Berkeley’s EECS department, posted on X that he projects CS graduates to plummet from 1,029 in 2025 to around 350 in 2027.
According to him, the reasons have little to do with AI or the job market. “At Berkeley, the enrollment dip has come from a supply-side constraint, not a demand constraint,” he said.
Starting in fall 2022, Berkeley reduced its admissions targets for students intending to major in CS (as distinct from EECS and data science) and began restricting access to most upper-division courses. According to Nelson, the policy shift is driven by the rising cost of instruction after a 2020 labor ruling pushed teacher assistant pay rates at Berkeley to as much as $80 an hour—more than triple the rate at comparable universities, according to a database he shared with California.
Whether or not labor costs are at the root of the problem, application figures support Nelson’s assertion about demand.
The number of prospective students who applied to Berkeley’s CS-related programs increased by nearly 25 percent between 2020 and 2025, although it dipped slightly in the last two years. Today, Berkeley’s CS program has a 6 percent admit rate and a yield rate that outpaces every other field at the university. “In general, I think application numbers are a better measure of interest than enrollment since the latter is restricted based on capacity,” Nelson said. “Lest there be any confusion,” he wrote on X, “the collapse of the CS major is not due to a lack of student demand.”
The strong demand nevertheless comes at a time of deep uncertainty about the future of the tech industry, in particular with the decline of entry-level jobs that heavily rely on coding. Hany Farid, a Berkeley professor and expert in digital forensics, has watched the job market change for his students. “I think it’s a confluence of many things,” he said on Nova’s Particles of Thought podcast. “I think AI is part of it. I think there’s a thinning of the ranks that’s happening.” Berkeley graduates who once fielded multiple offers throughout their four years, he noted, now scramble for one. “They would graduate with exceedingly high salaries.… They had the run of the place,” Farid said. “That is not happening today.”
For now, at least, Berkeley’s graduates are holding their own. Of 892 CS graduates from the Class of 2025 who participated in a UC Berkeley Career Engagement survey, only 11 percent were still seeking work six months after graduation. This was down from 23 percent the year before, and the respondents reported that their median salary rose from $129,000 to $133,000—a lot more than they’d make at Chipotle. The road there is narrowing, at least for now. While Nelson doesn’t foresee further enrollment drops in the near future, “our faculty—myself included—would love to accommodate all eligible students interested in majoring in CS,” he said. “Unfortunately, as with other high-demand majors across campus, we need to balance enrollment demand with resources to educate our students at the high level we expect.”