Graham McNicoll

CS degree enrollment is dropping, and I do not blame the students. If I were eighteen right now, watching what AI is doing to software engineering, I am not sure I would bet four years and a tuition bill on a career that might not exist in the shape I trained for. AI has not removed the need for quality engineering. It has compressed the pyramid. Fewer people, producing more output, operating at a higher level of abstraction. That is a real shift. CS degrees never mapped well to the day-to-day job anyway. Most of what engineers actually do was learned on the job. AI just exposed a gap that has always been there. A friend asked what I would tell my kids to study. I half-joked that plumbing is a growth industry. What would you tell an eighteen-year-old to study right now?