Something strange happened at University of California campuses this fall. For the first time since the dot-com crash, computer science enrollment dropped. System-wide, it fell 6% last year after declining 3% in 2024, according to reporting this past week by the San Francisco Chronicle. Even as overall college enrollment climbed 2% nationally ' according to January data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center ' students are bailing on traditional CS degrees. This all might look like a temporary blip tied to news about fewer CS grads finding work out of college. But it's more likely an indicator of the future, one that China is much more enthusiastically embracing. As MIT Technology Review reported last July, Chinese universities have leaned hard into AI literacy, treating AI not as a threat but instead as essential infrastructure. Nearly 60% of Chinese students and faculty now use AI tools multiple times daily, and schools like Zhejiang University have made AI...
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