What AI is already canceling at the university China canceled 12,200 university programs in five years, the US saw its Computer Science enrollment drop for the first time in two decades, and in Mexico, the oversupply of Law degrees is older than ChatGPT. I toured nine university systems to measure, with data and not fear, what generative AI is really rewriting. Transcript of the narrated version (53 min). Narrated with a synthetic voice (Larry). The writing is Esteban Rey's — kilowatto.com. --- What AI is already canceling at the university. China canceled 12,200 university programs in five years, the US saw its Computer Science enrollment drop for the first time in two decades, and in Mexico, the oversupply of Law degrees is older than ChatGPT. I toured nine university systems to measure, with data and not fear, what generative AI is really rewriting. In 1806, a twenty-two-year-old man with no fortune loaded a brigantine in Boston with 130 tons of a product that nobody in the Caribbean had ever bought: cut ice from a frozen lake. The Boston Gazette reported it with the incredulity it deserved: "No joke. A ship has dispatched at the customs office to Martinique with a cargo of ice". Frederic Tudor lost $4,500 on that first trip and continued to lose money on subsequent shipments to Havana. It didn't matter: in less than a century, the industry he invented from scratch came to employ 90,000 people and 25,000 horses, capitalized at around $28 million in late 19th-century dollars. Cutting, insulating, and transporting natural ice became, for almost a hundred years, a lifetime career for tens of thousands of people in the Northern Hemisphere. And then, in a surprisingly short period, it ceased to exist. It wasn't competition that killed it. A technology — mechanical refrigeration — killed it, making the entire trade unnecessary: cutting blocks from a frozen lake, insulating them in sawdust, transporting them by ship before they melted. I return to that story at the end of this piece because it's the cleanest parallel I know of total technological disruption over an entire industry. But the topic today isn't ice. It's a much more uncomfortable question for anyone with a child, a career, or both: what is generative AI — not the kind that takes our jobs, but the kind that's already reconfiguring what can be studied — doing to the university's academic offerings worldwide? The clarification matters because almost everything discussed about AI and universities is measured with the wrong yardstick: job projections, sentiment surveys, headlines about "this career is going to disappear." I wanted to measure something else, much more verifiable: programs that open, programs that close, actual enrollment by field of study, in multi-year series — never a single twelve-month spike — in the US, Mexico, China, India, Germany, and the European Union, with the added context of the OECD, G7, G20, and BRICS, and what is known about Latin America. I spent several weeks cross-referencing primary sources from governments, statistics offices, professional associations, and academic reports. This is what I found, and it's not always what's said on social media. The trend is reversing: the first drop in twenty years. The number of undergraduate students in computer science in the US more than doubled in a decade, from around 56,000 students in 2013-14 to 122,000 in 2022-23, and had been growing steadily for sixteen consecutive years until 2024, with a +6.8% increase alone in the 2023-2024 cycle, according to the National Student Clearinghouse CRA Taulbee Survey. However, this trend has reversed. The 2025 survey by the Computing Research Association showed an abrupt reversal, with undergraduate degrees down 3.1%, master's degrees down 24.9%, and doctoral degrees down 2.2%. The National Student Clearinghouse, with data from the entire four-year university system, independently confirmed the pattern, with enrollment in computer science and information sciences down 8.1% in fall 2025, to around 606,000 students, and "computer science" specifically down 11.2%, and graduate programs down 14.0%, which is the first drop in CS enrollment in nearly twenty years. This decline was not a one-semester stumble, as it continued in spring 2026, with another 8.4% year-over-year decline and an additional 14% decline in graduate programs, according to the same report updated by Fortune in August 2026. This decline has been measured over three consecutive admission cycles by at least three independent sources. An analysis by Goldman Sachs, by economist Pierfrancesco Mei, found that computer science and programming each fell by more than 10% in the 2025-26 cycle, which is the first statistically significant evidence that students are actively avoiding careers with high exposure to AI. In contrast, health and engineering fields grew by around 3% on average. This trend is visible in specific institutions, with the University of California dropping to 12,652 undergraduate students in CS in 2025 after a 6% decline from 2024 to 2025 and a 3% decline from 2023 to 2024, resulting in a 9% cumulative decline over two years. Princeton's enrollment declined from 150 students in the class of 2026 to 117 in the class of 2027 and 74 in the class of 2028, while Arizona State fell by around 14% between 2024 and 2025. CUNY reported a 15% decline in the same period, and a survey of computer science programs found that 62% of them reported enrollment declines. Additionally, the number of high school students who took the AP Computer Science A exam peaked at 98,136 in 2024 and fell by around 17% by 2026, while overall participation in AP exams grew by around 7% and subjects like Biology, Chemistry, and Physics 1 grew by double digits. However, this data point has not been verified with a second independent source. A study by Jacob Light from Stanford found that the evidence does not show that artificial intelligence caused the decline in isolation, but rather a convergence of factors. The exact cause of the decline is still up for debate, but the decline itself is confirmed and has been sustained over three cycles, for the first time in twenty years. Ironically, while generic "computer science" is declining, the number of US institutions with a formal degree dedicated to artificial intelligence grew from 4 in 2020 to 23 in 2025, AI master's programs increased by over 200%, and PhDs with a specialization in AI/ML rose from around 9% of all PhDs awarded in 2015 to around 25% in 2024. Students want the specific label "AI" on their degree, not the generic "CS" that no longer distinguishes anyone in the market. The rumor about "universities closing Law schools": yes, no, and it depends on which Law school. The correct answer to the rumor about universities closing law schools is partially, with a distinction that almost no one makes. The total enrollment of JD students in ABA-accredited law schools dropped by just 1.2% in fall 2024, to 115,410 students, but rebounded to 120,039 in fall 2025, a 4% increase, with the first-year class rising 7.9% and non-JD programs growing 6.3%, according to the ABA Journal and TaxProf Blog. This is the opposite of a collapse, it's a one-year rebound after a one-year decline. There is a sustained and verifiable contraction in the non-ABA accredited segment, spanning over a decade, not just a cycle. California's state and non-accredited law schools decreased from 40 in 2012 to 28 in fall 2023, mostly due to voluntary closures, as reported by the ABA Journal. At the same time, Purdue Global Law School received approval in January 2025 to add a full-time JD program to its existing part-time offering, also according to the ABA Journal. What's shrinking is a specific niche, small, non-accredited, low-prestige state schools, while the large accredited segment is breathing, and even expanding in some areas. What did change, and measurably so, is the curriculum, not the enrollment. A 2024 survey by the ABA Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence of 29 faculties found that 55% already offered specific AI courses, 62% integrated AI into first-year classes, and 85% of respondents contemplated curriculum changes. The follow-up report from the same task force, published in December 2025, concluded that AI has gone from being an experiment to being infrastructure for the legal profession, as stated in the ABA AI Task Force, Year 2 Report. Law schools aren't closing down, they're rewriting what they teach within law, while enrollment remains remarkably stable. The rumor of mass closures doesn't hold up to hard data, which only measures academic supply. Graphic design: panic arrived before the decline. The other specific case I was asked to review is graphic design, and here the finding is almost a mirror image of the one for Law: there's real alarm from the industry side, but it hasn't shown up in the degrees awarded yet. Data USA, the aggregator built on the raw data from NCES/IPEDS, reports 10,676 graphic design degrees awarded in 2024 in the United States, with the number growing 16.3% from the previous year. I'm highlighting this because it's still just one aggregator, and I haven't cross-checked the raw IPEDS table directly, but up to 2024, there's no sign that the concern about AI is reflected in fewer degrees awarded nationally. All that anxiety does have a counterpart on the employment side, and it's the only aspect I'll discuss in relation to the job market instead of academic offerings: the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on interviews with 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers in 55 countries, ranks graphic designers as the 11th fastest-declining profession globally by 2030, a drastic shift from the previous report. But, as we just saw, that employment alarm still hasn't translated into fewer enrollments or degrees awarded. Minnie Moll, CEO of the UK's Design Council, responded to these reports by acknowledging both challenges and opportunities, and betting on retraining a million people in sustainable design skills by 2030, rather than declaring the discipline dead. What did actually close down in the world of design and arts weren't programs within large universities, but entire specialized institutions: the Art Institutes closed completely, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will stop awarding degrees after the 2024-25 cycle, and the Delaware College of Art and Design closed, explicitly citing declining enrollment, changes in FAFSA rules, and rising costs. It's an important distinction: it's not "graphic design as a discipline" that's dying within large universities, but a business model, the small, specialized college, almost entirely dependent on undergraduate enrollment in art and design, that can't survive the combination of fewer students and rising costs, with or without AI. A German study by Kunstfonds on generative AI and visual arts found that 45% of surveyed artists fear the devaluation of art by AI, and 55% fear increased competitive pressure, the fear is real and measured, but it still lives in perception surveys, not in fewer people enrolling. What is actually dying, with hard data: humanities, languages, and journalism. If the goal is to find a sustained, multi-year decline, measured in degrees awarded, the most compelling case in the entire United States isn't computer science or design, it's humanities. In 2024, the United States awarded 165,489 humanities degrees, the lowest number since 1991, and 30% below the 2012 peak of approximately 236,000, according to the AAAS Humanities Indicators. That discipline went from representing 13.1% of all the country's degrees in 2012 to just 8.4-8.5% in 2024. The declines between 2012 and 2024 are brutal and consistent: languages other than English declined by 48%, English by 43%, history by 41%, religious studies by 59%, area studies by 55%, classical studies by 43%, and comparative literature by 32%, as reported by the AAAS Humanities Indicators. This started long before massive generative AI, with the peak in 2012, but the decline didn't stop after 2022, on the contrary, it accelerated, with a 13% decline just between 2021 and 2023, and the 69,254 traditional humanities degrees awarded in 2024 are the lowest since 1987. Enrollment in languages other than English dropped by 16.6% between 2016 and 2021, almost 236,000 fewer students, a cumulative decline of 29.3% since the 2009 peak. Of the fifteen most taught languages in the United States, only three saw growth: American Sign Language increased by 0.8%, Biblical Hebrew by 9.1%, and Korean by 38.3%, likely driven by K-pop and K-drama, not academic strategy, according to Inside Higher Ed, citing the Modern Language Association's census from fall 2021. A notable case that illustrates what this means on the ground is West Virginia University, which eliminated 32 of its 338 majors, including 12 undergraduate and 20 graduate majors, and 7% of its faculty in 2023, including the entire world languages department, comprising French, Spanish, Chinese, German, Russian, linguistics, and TESOL, although it later said it would preserve instruction, not full majors, in Chinese and Spanish, as reported by Inside Higher Ed. Journalism has its own notable case and long series: at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, journalism enrollment dropped from a high of 281 students in 2013 to a low of 171 in 2022, a decline of 20.8% from the 1998 level, according to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's program trends. It's worth noting a nuance within the humanities crisis itself: visual and performing arts degrees didn't collapse in the same way, they fell from a peak of 97,799 in 2012-13 to a low of 88,507 in 2017-18, but partially recovered to 90,022 by 2020-21, just a 3.2% decline in that more recent period, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, table 325.95. In other words, the performing and visual arts didn't follow the same downward trajectory as languages, history, and religious studies. The American Association of University Professors' own tracker of humanities program closures, built from media coverage, explicitly warns that it's not exhaustive and only reflects the cases that the press covered, so there are likely more humanities program closures than any public list captures. What's growing quietly: health, trades, cybersecurity, and the "AI" label. While generic computing and humanities grab the headlines, one for falling unexpectedly, the other for falling over the past decade, there's a third group of fields that are growing sustainably, year after year, with almost no press coverage. Nursing is the clearest example, with enrollment in entry-level BSN programs growing 7.6 percent in the 2024-2025 cycle, an increase of 19,830 students, to 283,303, the third consecutive year of growth. Master's programs rose 6.8 percent, and the Doctor of Nursing Practice has seen twenty-two years of continuous expansion since 2003, when there were just 70 students, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Technical trade education is also growing sustainably, with enrollment in public two-year colleges focused on trades rising around 20 percent from spring 2020 to 871,000 students in spring 2025. Certificate programs rose 28.3 percent from fall 2021 to 752,000 students, and fields like engineering technologies, which grew 8.3 percent, mechanics and repair, which grew 10.4 percent, and health professions, which grew 10.1 percent, continue to grow, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Cybersecurity has its own long and sustained series, with the total number of degrees and certificates in information security, auditing, and assurance growing 271 percent from 2012 to 2022, with around 25,000 titles in the specific cybersecurity program and 259,000 in the broader set of 26 related categories for 2022, according to the NCSES/NSF. There's even a field that breaks the stereotype of all non-STEM fields being in crisis: political science. The American Political Science Association's annual survey found that in the 2023-24 cycle, more than 5 percent of departments reported a significant increase in enrollment, and another 5 percent reported a moderate increase, compared to just 1.5 percent and 22 percent respectively in the previous cycle, as reported by the American Political Science Association's publication, Political Science Now. Although the exact percentages have nuances that weaken the simple narrative of sustained growth, it still contradicts the idea that any social science field is automatically in decline. Within the arts themselves, there's a similar nuance, with enrollment of new undergraduate art students growing 2 percent in 2022-23, while new graduate art student enrollment fell 9 percent in the same period, according to the NASAD, based on the encuesta HEADS survey. Germany and the European Union: the best data set on the planet. Germany has, by far, the best data, with the federal statistics office, Destatis, publishing annual series by exact field, going back several decades, something no other country in this investigation offers with the same level of detail. The data shows that computer science enrollment in Germany grew steadily over three consecutive winter semesters, with 260,078 students in 2023/24, 267,249 in 2024/25, and 273,941 in 2025/26, a cumulative increase of 5.3% in three years, with female participation rising by nearly 12%, according to Statistisches Bundesamt, also known as Destatis. Computer science is the largest individual discipline within the entire German MINT block, which includes mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology, and it's moving in exactly the opposite direction of the US. However, not everything in Germany is growing. Mathematics and natural sciences fell from 301,197 in 2023/24 to 297,937 in 2024/25 and 293,379 in 2025/26, a decline of 2.6% in two years, while engineering remained almost stable, from 748,705 to 752,687, according to Destatis. New enrollments in the first semester decreased in almost all engineering fields in 2025/26, including computer science, which decreased by 2.3% with 46,100 new students, mechanical engineering, which decreased by 3.3% with 23,000 new students, electrical engineering, which decreased by 0.3% with 14,100 new students, and civil engineering, which decreased by 0.6% with 10,600 new students, as reported by Destatis. This represents a generalized slowdown in new enrollments, although total computer science enrollment continues to rise due to the accumulation of previous generations. The sustained decline in Germany is in the humanities, where first-semester students fell 22% in twenty years, from 63,500 in 2003 to 49,500 in 2023, with their share of the total decreasing from 17% to just around 10%, while the total number of new students in all disciplines grew 28% in the same period, according to Destatis. This pattern is similar to the one documented in the US, but with one key difference: in Germany, it started and was sustained long before generative AI existed, so attributing the decline to ChatGPT would be simply false. In Germany, the number of students of Rechtswissenschaft, or legal science, almost doubled between 1975, with 51,566 students, and 2000, with 102,889 students, continued to grow until a peak of 119,285 in 2020, and have since fallen to 116,760 in 2025, a decline of just 2%, with over half a century of previous growth behind it, as reported by Destatis. Looking at just one year, 2023, new students in the law, economics, and social sciences block were 191,000, an increase of 0.3%, engineering had 128,400 new students, an increase of 2.3%, mathematics and natural sciences had 51,100 new students, an increase of 0.9%, humanities had 49,600 new students, an increase of 2.5%, and arts had 15,500 new students, a decrease of 0.6%, resulting in a general increase of 1.6%, according to Destatis. The "demographic cliff" likely explains more of Europe's aggregate behavior than AI itself, as the European Union's fertility rate hit a historic low of 1.34 in 2024. In the Netherlands, first-year enrollment dropped 3.3% for the 2025-26 cycle, and in the UK, total enrollment for 2024-25 fell 1%, with non-EU postgraduates decreasing 10%, as reported by AcademicJobs.com. A specific study on the history of computer science in Germany confirms a real fluctuation pattern, with sustained growth from 2008/09 to 2019/20, surpassing 35,000 new students, a drop to around 33,500 in 2021, a new record in 2022/23, and a decrease of 2.3% in the most recent academic year, but that's exactly what it is, a multi-year fluctuation without a single direction, not a sustained decline attributable to generative AI, according to the Gesellschaft für Informatik. On a Union-wide scale, the 2024 landscape confirms the relative stability that Germany suggests, with 21.9% of all tertiary education students enrolled in "business, administration, or law", followed by engineering, manufacturing, and construction, and health and wellness, both with 14.7%, and arts and humanities with 11.1%, as reported by Eurostat. What has been moving in a sustained manner over a full decade is the absolute volume of STEM graduates, from 18.5 per 1,000 people aged 20-29 in 2014 to 22.4 in 2023, according to Eurostat. On the employment side, with training in information technologies, the EU workforce with ICT education grew from 2.5 million people in 2016 to 3.3 million in 2025, with the proportion holding a tertiary degree increasing from 71.5% to 74.8% over the same period, an average annual growth of 5.2% over a decade, as reported by Eurostat. A finding worth highlighting is that the EU actually graduates very few ICT specialists relative to its young population, with 2.6 per 1,000 young people, compared to 4.6 in the UK, 3.9 in Canada, and 3.7 in the US, despite 26.9% of all EU tertiary students being in some STEM field in 2023, according to the Education and Training Monitor. Within the bloc itself, Germany leads in tertiary STEM enrollment with 35.5%, followed by Finland with 35.3% and Greece with 33.7%, while Malta has the lowest figure, 13.9%, as reported by the Education and Training Monitor. Mexico: the oversupply of law degrees is older than ChatGPT. Total higher education enrollment in Mexico grew from 1,933,907 students in the 2010-2011 cycle to 3,493,562 in 2021-2022, a 44.64% increase over twelve years, according to Scielo México. Within this national growth, Engineering, Manufacturing, and Construction rose from 592,454 to 823,308 students, an increase of 28.03%, and Social Sciences and Law from 241,499 to 340,704 students, an increase of 29.11%, both below the national average growth rate. The area that truly fell behind was Information and Communication Technologies, with only 5.12% growth over the same twelve years, which is a contrast almost opposite to that of the US, where computer science was growing non-stop until just two years ago. In Mexico, the tech area has been growing much slower than the rest of the system for over a decade. When it comes to law, the Mexican trend isn't that it's disappearing, it's actually the opposite. Law remains the most popular major in the country. In the 2024-2025 cycle, law had the most new enrollments, with 94,367 students, consisting of 53,252 women and 41,115 men, making up about 8% of all new enrollments nationwide, according to ANUIES. What really matters is that this oversupply isn't new and it's not caused by generative AI. Back in the 2014-2015 cycle, Mexico already had 813 institutions and 1,535 law programs, with 278,170 enrolled students. Between 2011 and 2015, private institutions almost doubled their number of law programs, from 753 to 1,401, and their enrollment grew from 95,565 to 143,146 students. The oversupply of law schools in Mexico is a structural phenomenon that's at least 15 years old, it didn't start with ChatGPT. On the AI front, ANUIES reports that Mexican universities offer 43 educational programs directly related to artificial intelligence, consisting of 24 undergraduate and 19 graduate programs, with about 3,600 students enrolled nationwide. An ANUIES coordinator noted that this number will increase significantly by the end of 2026, with a regional focus on Querétaro, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and Baja California, tied to the automotive and aerospace industries. These numbers are still small compared to the size of the system, but they're the only hard evidence that Mexico is building formal academic programs around the AI label, not just talking about it. China: the power that cancels the most majors, and the one that publishes the least detailed enrollment data. China is the country that most aggressively uses academic program offerings as a tool for industrial policy, and at the same time, it's the one that provides the least transparent data on actual enrollment by major. The Chinese government happily publishes the number of programs it opens and closes nationwide, but it barely publishes series with exact enrollment numbers, year by year, by major and university, similar to those from Destatis or NCES. Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate programs while introducing 10,200 new ones. The cuts focused on arts, humanities, foreign languages, and administration, while engineering accounted for 1,322 of the newly approved programs, which is 39% of the total, according to the South China Morning Post. The annual series of discontinued programs confirms that this has been accelerating for several years, with 367 programs cut in 2019, 925 in 2022, 1,670 in 2023, a historic record, and 1,428 in 2024. This totals more than 5,000 canceled programs between 2019 and 2024, with Management and Information Systems, Public Administration, Fashion Design, and Product Design among the most cut, as reported by the China News Service. A March 2023 directive from the Ministry of Education sets the explicit goal of optimizing around 20% of all undergraduate programs in the country by 2025, which indicates this is a state policy with a published target number, rather than a spontaneous market effect. The new major catalogs confirm this direction, with the batch of 24 approved majors in March 2024 including high-power semiconductor science and engineering, rare earths, smart materials, national security studies, and sinology, as well as coffee science and ice dancing, according to RADII. The April 2026 catalog added 15 more interdisciplinary majors, including embodied intelligence, brain-machine science and technology, and agricultural robotics, which are explicitly framed as a response to the changing needs of national strategies, as stated by the Gobierno de China. In the 2025 catalog, the Ministry added 29 new majors, most of them oriented towards STEM, while top-tier universities simultaneously cut enrollment and eliminated programs like public administration, musicology, and broadcasting, as reported by Sixth Tone. Law has its own pattern in China, with several universities, including China University of Petroleum-Beijing, Taiyuan Institute of Technology, Tianjin Medical University, Dalian University of Technology, and Northeastern University, canceling their law majors as part of the Ministry of Education's optimization plan, according to NetEase. The boom in artificial intelligence as a formal career is cross-verified by two independent sources, which arrive at the same number, giving this data more weight. Universities with AI majors went from 35 approved in 2018 to over 600 by 2026, with exactly 626 in 2025, and at least 90 Double First-Class universities opening schools or faculties dedicated to it, as reported by Sina Finance and China Daily. In the first batch of approvals in 2018, those 35 universities ran in parallel with 101 universities authorized for Robotics and 203 for Data Science and Big Data. By 2021, AI was already the discipline with the most new additions in the country, with 130 universities adding it in just one year, according to CERNET. This is probably the fastest expansion of a single academic field in any country in this research. However, the underlying finding is that the equivalent series of real enrollment semester by semester, which is available for Germany or the United States, is not available for China. China counts programs, but it doesn't publish, or doesn't publish openly, how many students actually fill them. India: the noisiest thermometer, but also one of the most solid in numbers. India is the country that offers the clearest and most sustained signal of reassignment towards computing among the five countries in-depth in this research, which is the opposite of what's happening in the United States. Enrollment in B.Tech engineering reached 12.53 lakh, or 1.253 million, students in 2024-25, which is the highest level in eight years and a 67% increase compared to 2017-18, driven mainly by AI/ML, data science, and computer engineering. The national vacancy rate fell to 16.36%, according to Education Post India, based on data from AICTE. The series of occupancy of seats over five consecutive years is the most cleanly sustained of all the data gathered in this research. The filling rate rose from 53.73% in 2020-21 to 75.07% in 2024-25, which is an increase of 21.34 percentage points in five years, driven by computing, AI/ML, data science, and IoT, according to Careers360, based on data from AICTE. Computing and related disciplines already occupy more seats than any other, with 390,245 B.Tech places filled in 2024-25, compared to 236,909 in mechanical and 172,936 in civil, out of a total of 14.90 lakh approved seats, or 12.53 lakh filled, according to Careers360. The national AISHE 2023-24 survey confirms the same pattern from another angle, with Computer Engineering being the most popular engineering branch in India, having 18.4 lakh students enrolled, which accounts for 39.7% of all engineering enrollment. Total STEM enrollment crossed the crore, or 10 million, for the first time, and female participation in STEM rose from 38.4% in 2014-15 to 44% in 2023-24, out of a record total enrollment of 4.50 crore, according to AISHE 2023-24. On the other hand, mechanical and civil engineering have been consistently declining since 2022-23, with up to 50% of civil engineering seats left vacant in Bengaluru for two or three consecutive years. States like Telangana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu are actively resisting converting those vacant seats to computing, according to Careers360. The national regulator, AICTE, closed 58 colleges and discontinued over 950 courses for the 2025-26 cycle, which is in continuation with 800 institutions derecognized in 2018-19 and 179 closures in 2020-21, resulting in a cumulative decline of over 27% in traditional engineering undergraduate enrollment since 2012-13, according to Times Higher Education. A specific case is the Delhi Skill Development University, which closed five complete BTech branches, including civil, mechanical, electrical, network engineering, and mechatronics, on three campuses, by order of September 2, 2024, citing low enrollment, according to Careers360. India's top institutions, the IITs, are documenting this shift with specific examples, such as IIT Madras launching its Bachelor's in Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics with the first cohort of 50 students admitted through the JEE exam for the 2024-25 cycle, and IIT Bombay launching an 18-month executive postgraduate diploma in AI and Data Science, industry-oriented, starting January 2025. By 2025, eleven of the country's twenty-three IITs already offered a formal AI program, with Kharagpur and Madras joining in 2024, and Mandi in 2025, after Roorkee opened its School of Data Science and AI in 2022, according to Shiksha. However, there are two counterbalances that break any simplistic reading of the situation. CLAT exam registrations, the national law admission test, had a few years of ups and downs, with 75,183 registrations in 2020, dropping to a low of 54,253 in 2023, but ended at an all-time high of 92,344 in 2026, which is 17% above 2025, with new national law universities still being added for the 2026-27 cycle, according to PW Live. Interest in design is also growing steadily, with UCEED applicants increasing by over 13% and CEED by over 23% in two years, with over 15,400 applicants in 2025 for just 245 spots in seven institutions, according to Shiksha. In India, neither Law nor Design is in decline, which is the opposite of the pattern dominating the conversation in the US and the anticipated panic in Western graphic design. Indian transparency is generally good but uneven, with AICTE data on engineering seats being solid and consistent year after year, almost on par with Germany. However, the official AISHE survey itself contains an inconsistency worth noting as a data quality finding, with one synthesis reporting that Arts/Humanities participation dropped from 30.2% in 2020-21 to 29.4% in 2021-22, while another synthesis from the same survey reports 34.2% in 2021-22 dropping to 32.1% in 2023-24, according to Online Manipal, a synthesis of AISHE. Both agree on the direction, which is dropping gradually, and that it remains the largest disciplinary group of all, but they don't agree on the exact magnitude, a discrepancy that would be unacceptable in Germany or the US, and is simply the state of the art of available data in India. Brazil, Colombia, and the rest of Latin America: aggregate growth, almost no career-specific breakdown. The pattern found in Brazil and Colombia is almost a mirror of what was found in China, though for completely different reasons: solid aggregate growth, with high-quality official data, but almost no multi-year breakdown by specific career comparable to what Germany or the US offers. Brazil's 2024 Higher Education Census, conducted by INEP, shows that between 2023 and 2024, undergraduate enrollment grew 2.3%, while teaching licenses dropped 2.8% and technologists dropped 1.9%. Distance education already accounts for 50.7% of all undergraduate enrollment, with a 5.6% increase in the same year. Among the country's twenty largest undergraduate programs, Direito has 57.9% female participation and Ciência da Computação has 85.0% male participation. The gender composition data is solid, but the census doesn't offer a multi-year enrollment series by career comparable to the German one. Colombia, according to the Ministry of National Education's official 2024 enrollment statistics, showed a national growth of 3.14% in total enrollment, exceeding 2.553 million students. Public institutions grew by over 67,000 enrolled, which is a 5% increase, and private ones by over 10,000, which is a 0.88% increase. Technical professional enrollment grew 5.01% and technological enrollment 5.14%. However, specific figures broken down by Law versus Software Engineering for Colombia in 2024 were not found in the public sources consulted, which is noted as a limitation of the available source, not an actual absence of change. The overall picture for the entire region comes from UNESCO-IESALC, which reports that the gross enrollment rate in higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean rose from 40% in 2013 to 53% in 2023. Female participation in total enrollment increased from 19% to 41% over the last two decades. Despite this increase in access, the regional graduation rate has stalled at 24%, significantly lower than in high-income regions, with especially high dropout rates in Mexico, at 42%, Costa Rica, at 62%, and Chile, at 54%. This report also does not break down enrollment by field of study. The regional finding is therefore as important as any specific statistic: outside of Mexico and Brazil, Latin America simply does not publish, or does not publish in an accessible way, the series of data on which careers are growing and which are shrinking, which does exist for Germany, the United States, and even India. This is a regional data gap, not an absence of real change. The overall picture: OECD, G7, G20, and the BRICS gap. I explicitly requested OECD data for this piece, and it's worth presenting because it contradicts the alarmist tone of almost everything I've written so far. The OECD's Education at a Glance 2023 report is clear, stating that the distribution of new entrants has remained largely unchanged. In 2021, STEM accounted for 27% of new entrants, business/law 24%, health 14%, arts/humanities 10%, and social sciences/journalism 10%. On the graduate side, the same report confirms that the distribution of graduates by field of study has not changed substantially since 2015, with only a +3 percentage point increase in STEM in short-cycle programs. Women accounted for 23% of ICT graduates in 2021, and Canada and Turkey are the only countries in the bloc with a decline in female participation in ICT since 2015. The most recent report, Education at a Glance 2025, with two more years of post-massive generative AI data, continues to show relative stability by level. At the bachelor's level, STEM accounts for 23%, business/law 23%, arts/humanities 22%, and health 16%. At the master's level, business accounts for almost three out of ten students, approximately 29%, and STEM 22%. At the doctoral level, STEM rises to more than two-fifths, almost double that at the bachelor's level, with business falling to just 8%. This is the most authoritative confirmation possible of something I've been suspecting: at the level of the rich country bloc as a whole, there is no massive shift in the distribution of careers. Instead, there are strong movements within specific subcategories, such as generic computing declining in the United States, formal AI growing everywhere, and humanities declining since before AI, that cancel each other out when aggregated at the level of entire country blocks. The most useful historical contrast comes from the United States versus the rest of the G20. An NCES analysis with 2015 data found that the United States awarded 41% of its first university degrees in social sciences, business, and law, compared to just 16% in science, mathematics, and engineering, the lowest proportion in the entire G20. Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States were, at the time, the only three G20 countries where science/mathematics/engineering did not exceed arts/humanities. This is pre-2020 data, but it explains why the recent decline in CS in the United States has such a strong narrative impact: it's part of a relative base that was already more oriented towards business/humanities than most of its G20 peers. I have to be as honest as I was about the opacity of Chinese data: I couldn't find a reliable public source with a comparable series of academic offerings by field of study specifically for the BRICS block as a unit, or for the G7 as a unit. The closest thing that exists is what I've already covered country by country, the US and Germany representing the G7, China and India representing BRICS, and Brazil providing the third available BRICS data, without an official aggregator equivalent to the OECD for those two political blocks. This is a finding of this investigation in itself: BRICS and G7 are useful geopolitical and economic labels, but no statistical office publishes a single figure for how much BRICS' academic offerings are changing. The global distribution of majors remains almost unchanged, and the country gap in computer science and humanities is notable, with details available in the report. The radar: who's really changing, and who just seems to be. With all the above gathered, a comparison was made between the US, Germany/European Union, Mexico, China, and India on the key aspects of how fast their university academic offerings are changing. The comparison is based on five main factors: the overall speed of change in offerings, specifically how far the system is today from where it was in 2015-2020, the rate of opening formal AI programs, the rate of closing or discontinuing existing programs, the degree of direct state intervention in the curriculum, and the transparency of available data to measure all this from the outside. China leads in the first three factors by a wide margin, with over 12,000 programs changed in five years, hundreds of new universities offering AI, and a state directive with a published numerical goal. However, China falls short in the transparency factor because the volume of change is measured in program count, not verifiable real enrollment series. India is in an intermediate position, with genuinely fast and sustained change, including a 21 percentage point increase in engineering enrollment in five years, real state intervention through AICTE, and better data transparency than China. The US has almost no state intervention in the curriculum, with decisions made by each university, but a decentralized market change resulted in a rapid change, particularly in computing, with the best data transparency of the five. Germany and the European Union are the most stable, with slow change, almost no direct state intervention in existing careers, and the highest data transparency. Mexico, on the other hand, has slow change, minimal state intervention, and limited data transparency, with only a single academic aggregator study, and no equivalent of a Destatis or an NCES of its own, and its law school overcapacity has remained unresolved for fifteen years. The crystal ball: what a five-year-old today will probably not be able to study. This is a speculative part of the piece, a reasoned projection based on everything above, not a verified fact like the data above. After going through nine different university systems, there are patterns consistent enough to make some concrete bets on what will exist, and what will be increasingly hard to find, when a child who is five years old today reaches the age to choose a career, in thirteen or fourteen years. I'm starting with what will likely shrink to practical irrelevance or only exist in a handful of elite universities, rather than being widespread like it is today. Monolingual degrees in pure foreign languages, such as a full major dedicated solely to French, German, or Russian with no technical component, have already dropped 48% in the US over the past decade, with cases like West Virginia University eliminating the entire department. If high-quality machine translation becomes the norm over the next ten years, it's likely that these programs will only survive as concentrations within international relations or computational linguistics, not as standalone majors outside of a small group of research universities. History, religious studies, classical studies, and comparative literature, all of which have seen drops of 40% to 59%, are at similar risk of only surviving in large universities with sufficient endowments to maintain small departments for prestige, not market demand. The case of generic computer science is more nuanced, and the label itself, not the discipline, is what's at risk of disappearing in its current form. What's being seen in the data isn't that programming will stop being taught, it's that the generic Computer Science label is fragmenting into more specific fields, such as AI, data science, cybersecurity, and robotics, which are already growing while the generic label declines. A five-year-old kid probably won't find, thirteen years from now, a prestigious university offering a plain Computer Science major, instead, they'll find a half-dozen majors with much more specific names competing for the same student. Traditional journalism, the kind that trains generalist reporters for print or linear radio/TV, without specialization in data or digital production, has already seen a drop of over 20% in at least one university program with a long track record, and the underlying trend, fewer advertisers, fewer newsrooms, more automated text generation, shows no signs of reversing. It's likely that journalism will survive almost exclusively as a concentration within communications or as specialized graduate programs in investigative or data journalism, not as the massive undergraduate major it was twenty years ago. On the other hand, what will be widely available, without kids having to look very far, includes nursing and health professions in general, with three consecutive years of documented growth and an aging demographic in almost every country in this study, cybersecurity, which has already grown 271% over the past decade and has no visible ceiling as long as there are digital systems to protect, two-year technical trades, such as mechanics, repair, engineering technologies, which are growing sustainably precisely because they're the hardest to fully automate with software, and any variant with the explicit label Artificial Intelligence, which has gone from 4 to 23 institutions in the US over five years, from 35 to over 600 in China over eight, and already has formal programs in eleven of India's twenty-three IITs. Civil and mechanical engineering is the most ambiguous case of all, it's declining in India due to historical over-supply and in the US due to student preference, but remains stable in Germany, which suggests that its fate depends more on each country's industrial policy, whether the country builds its own factories and infrastructure, or imports them, than on AI itself. The most uncomfortable bet of all is that Law, contrary to popular intuition, probably won't disappear in any of the countries in this investigation, not even in China, where some specific universities have already canceled their programs. What's going to change is the relative volume of generalist lawyers at the entry level versus certified specialists using AI tools in law, and probably a greater concentration in a smaller number of high-prestige schools, with the segment of small and unaccredited schools, which has already been shrinking in California since 2012, absorbing most of the adjustment. Law isn't dying, it's just becoming more concentrated. What would I do if I had to advise a student today?. If I had to advise a student today, I would not give the generic advice to learn to code or to study what you're passionate about without thinking about the market. The data from this investigation points to something more specific. First, if the career you're interested in has a generic label from thirty years ago, such as Computer Science, general Business Administration, or un-specialized Journalism, you should ask the specific program how recent their curriculum is and how specific it is. The fragmentation into more specific fields, including AI, cybersecurity, data science, and sustainable design, is more consistent across countries than any other trend, based on the data I gathered. You should be skeptical of any headline that uses a single year of data as if it's destiny. For example, the rebound of Law in the US in 2025 does not prove that Law is back, and the decline of Computer Science does not prove that programming is over. You should always ask for a series of at least three or four years of data before taking a decline or increase as a real signal. Additionally, you should explicitly ask if someone has already tried to attribute a single cause to that movement, like the Stanford study, which refused to attribute the decline of Computer Science solely to AI. You should also look at what the university system in your own country is doing, not just what dominates the conversation on social media in English. The narrative of everyone fleeing computer science is real in the US, but it does not exist with the same force in Germany or India, where computer science continues to grow without visible brakes. Finally, if your child has a genuine talent for something that seems at risk today, such as design, languages, or arts, the hard evidence I gathered says that the discipline itself rarely disappears completely. What changes is how many institutions offer it and how competitive it becomes to get into the ones that survive. This is literally what happened with Law in Mexico since 2014, with visual arts in the US, and with the ice industry.