Artificial intelligence is changing what STEM students study in high school

Early 2010s, almost all It stemsThe smart kid going to college heard the same advice: Learn programming. Python was the new Latin. Computer science was the ticket to a stable, well-paid, future-proof life.

But in 2025, the glow has faded. Now it seems that “learn to code” is a bit like “learn a shortcut”. Teens still want jobs in technology, but they no longer see one path to get there. Amnesty International It seems poised to snatch up programming jobs, and there aren’t a ton of AP classes in Atmosphere coding. Their teachers scramble to keep up.

“There’s a shift from studying as much computer science as possible to trying to take as many statistics courses as possible,” says Benjamin Rubinstein, assistant director of Manhattan Village Academy in New York. Rubinstein spent 20 years in New York City classrooms, long enough to watch the “STEM pipeline” transform into a network of branching paths rather than a single straight line. For his students, studying statistics seems more practical.

Forty years ago, inspiring students at NASA dreamed of becoming physicists or engineers. Twenty years later, the attractiveness of jobs in… Google Or other tech giants sent them to computer science. Now, their ambitions are shaped by… Amnesty InternationalWhich leads them away from things AI can do (programming) and towards things it still struggles with. Such as the number of children pursuing degrees in computer science He stumbleshigh school students interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics investigate fields that blend computing, analysis, interpretation, and data.

Rubinstein still requires every student to study computer science before graduation, “so they can understand what happens behind the scenes.” But his school’s mathematics department now links data literacy with purpose: an applied mathematics class in which students analyze New York Police Department data to suggest policy changes, and an ethnomathematics course that links mathematics to culture and identity. “We don’t want mathematics to feel disconnected from real life,” he says.

It’s a small but telling shift, and one that, Rubinstein says, doesn’t happen in isolation. After a long boom, universities are experiencing a cool boom in computer science. The number of computer science, computer and information engineering degrees awarded in the 2023-2024 academic year in the United States and Canada fell by about 5.5 percent from the previous year, according to a recent study. reconnaissance By the non-profit Computing Research Association.

At the secondary school level, the desire for data is clear. AP Statistics recorded 264,262 registrations for the test in 2024, making it one of the most in-demand AP tests, per Education Week. AP Computer Science exams are still drawing large numbers — 175,261 students took AP Computer Science Principles, and 98,136 students took AP Computer Science A in 2024 — but the signal is clear: data literacy is now alongside programming, not underneath it.