When Chris Callison-Burch started teaching AI courses at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, his first class had about 100 students. Seven years later, enrollment has grown to 400—not including 250 distance-learning students and another 100 to 200 on the waiting list. The professor now teaches in the largest classroom on campus. If his studies get bigger, he will have to move to the school sports field.
“I’d like to think it’s because I’m a strong teacher,” Callison-Burch told the Observer. “But it’s actually a testament to the popularity of the platform.”
The demand for AI courses and degrees has increased throughout higher education as technology plays an important role in everyday life and begins to seep into once popular fields such as computer science. Despite uncertainty about the future of the job market, students want to prepare for an economy dominated by AI by immersing themselves in the field.
Universities have done the same. Schools such as Carnegie Mellon and Purdue University are among the number offering undergraduate or graduate degrees in AI, a trend that is expected to accelerate in the coming years. The University of Pennsylvania recently became the first Ivy League school to offer undergraduate and graduate AI programs. Its graduate curriculum includes courses in natural language processing and machine learning, in addition to required classes in technical ethics and broader law.
The demand has increased. The University of Buffalo’s AI master’s program enrolled 103 students last year, up from five in its first cohort of 2020. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undergraduate enrollment in AI jumped from 37 students in 2022 to more than 300. Miami Dade College has seen a 75 percent increase in enrollment in its AI programs through 2022, while its other programs have remained strong alongside “slight declines in computer science,” the school told the Observer.
Callison-Burch, who also serves as director of Penn’s online AI master’s programs, has seen a similar decline. “There’s an interesting trend right now where it looks like computer science enrollment is catching on,” he said, pointing to the rise of AI-powered automation across the field. More than 60 percent of undergraduate computing programs saw a decrease in jobs in 2025-2026 compared to the previous year, according to a recent report by the Computing Research Association.
That decline comes as AI is reshaping some of the most prominent jobs in its development. In fields like coding, early career workers are already 13 percent less likely to be employed, according to an August research paper from Stanford.
AI leaders’ advice to students
Experts offered a range of advice as the technology they helped develop began to reshape the labor market. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, encouraged immersion in AI tools, while renowned researcher Geoffrey Hinton suggested that prospective students focus on a well-rounded education that combines math and science with the liberal arts.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, advises young people to have the ability to learn, as their work will “probably change” over time. “My suggestion is to take courses in important and long-lasting topics,” he told the Observer by email, pointing to math, physics and engineering as key areas of focus.
Students are not the only ones who experience these shifts. Callison-Burch noted that professors, too, are trying to adapt and decide how to integrate AI into their classrooms. One thing, he said, is certain: technology will become more saturated. That makes it very important for young people to familiarize themselves with its tools.
Still, he acknowledged that predicting how AI will reshape the labor market remains incredibly difficult, making it difficult for readers to bet confidently on any one path. “I don’t think there is an easy way to choose something that will be future proof, even though we haven’t seen that future yet,” he said.
