Just a few years ago, applying to a prestigious university computer science program might have been a no-brainer for a student like Mahimn Patel.
Mr. Patel, 18, built software for fun in high school, including an app that helped his classmates track their volunteer hours, and an artificial intelligence agent for realtors in Texas. During a recent video interview, he had multiple AI agents running in the background debugging his latest hobby horse, an AI-enabled app for stock trading.
Getting into computer science, a notoriously competitive program at top Canadian schools, wouldn’t have been a problem for Mr. Patel. He graduated from Central Peel Secondary School in Brampton, Ont., in June with a 97 average.
But Mr. Patel decided not to apply for a computer science program. He chose to pursue a degree in applied mathematics at the University of Toronto, where he started classes last week.
“It’s mathematics and physics that develop your brain the most after four years of education. With AI, that development is what matters more,” he said. “Because if you can think more creatively and more rigorously on your own, you’re able to actually use the AI better.”
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Mahimn Patel uses AI for personal projects, such as a stock-trading app he’s developing.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Other Canadian high-school students – and their parents – are looking at how AI is revolutionizing higher education and the workplace and making a similar calculation, though the jury’s still out on how the job market will adapt to that change.
Applications to undergraduate computer and information systems programs have plunged at universities in Ontario, the only province that makes aggregate application data public. In the most recent admissions cycle, the number of applications to computer and information systems fell to 45,260, down 44 per cent from a high of just more than 80,000 applications in 2023, according to the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre. (Information systems degrees generally combine IT and business management.)
The decline in that period was more precipitous than for any other category of undergraduate programs. It happened as the overall number of applications grew in the face of Ottawa’s crackdown on international student visas, which hit colleges harder than universities.
And while there isn’t necessarily a straight line between the number of applications a program receives and the number of students it admits, about 2,500 fewer students have accepted offers to start undergraduate computer science degrees in Ontario this fall compared to two years ago.
“This is true all over the world,” said Mark Daley, the chief AI officer at Western University in London.
Government funding and university priorities factor into the number of students admitted to computer science, and emerging specializations in AI are becoming more popular. But computer science leaders at universities in other provinces are seeing the same overall drop in applications. This suggests Ontario’s figures aren’t an outlier.
Teenagers raised in the just-learn-to-code era worry that AI can already do much of a junior software engineer’s job, and they’re not sure that making “artisanal bespoke human code, like it’s the sourdough bread from the local bakery, is going to be a great job market,” Prof. Daley said.
Waning interest in computer science degrees is to be expected. Big Tech stalwarts such as Meta, Google, Shopify, Oracle, Amazon and others have laid off tens of thousands of workers in recent years. The internet is awash in stories of young tech workers struggling in a brutal job market. And it’s not the first time a broad technological shift has caused students to feel skittish.
In another sense, it’s a surprise. Artificial intelligence threatens jobs of all kinds. But it was born of computer science, and leaders in the field say students will still be the vanguard; programs are tailoring their offerings as such. Surely young people who understand how generative AI works and know how to build with it have the best shot at a safe future?
Either way, trends in computer science education underscore a dilemma facing many teenagers and twentysomethings, regardless of what they want to be when they grow up. AI is improving so fast that no students know what awaits them on the other side of a degree.
“We don’t know what the labour market is going to look like five or 10 years from now,” said Prof. Daley, who was also vice-chair of the Council of Ontario Universities’ AI Task Force. “I don’t think there’s going to be a complete apocalypse of jobs and there’ll be nothing for humans to do. But I think the nature of what we do is going to change.”
Richard Zhao is acting co-head of computer science at the University of Calgary. Students entering the program used to graduate high school with averages in the high 80s. That’s fallen to an average of 79.6 this fall as fewer students apply to computer science.
Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Crossed wires
Luigi Benedicenti, a professor and dean in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick, used to be greeted by big groups of students and their eager parents when he spoke at high-school recruitment fairs or university orientation events a few years ago.
Computer science – where students typically studied coding, computer architecture, advanced algorithms and computational theory, among other subjects – was a hot program. His audience viewed it as a ticket to the good life.
That began to change recently, Prof. Benedicenti said. Although UNB, like many Canadian universities, does not disclose application figures for individual programs, the dean said applications plunged two years ago. That’s when computer science suffered the one-two punch of federal restrictions on international student visas and a growing public recognition of AI’s coding prowess, he explained.
“Before we had a room full of parents when we were working on orientation,” Prof. Benedicenti said. “Last year, we had far fewer parents than we would have liked, and that is because, in my opinion, there is this perception that artificial intelligence is, if not a present, then a future danger to the career of young computer scientists.”
While some university officials, particularly outside Ontario, agree with Prof. Benedicenti that Ottawa’s curbing of international student visas contributed to the decline, federal policy changes don’t seem to be the driving factor behind fewer students applying to university computer programs in Canada’s most populous province.
OUAC reports separately on applications from students coming straight out of an Ontario high school and all other applicants, a category that includes international, out-of-province and mature students. Applications to computer programs fell similarly for both streams between 2023 and 2026.
Fewer applications don’t necessarily translate to fewer students majoring in computer science.
Take the University of Calgary, where the number of applications to computer science peaked for entry in the fall of 2023, and has dropped since, a university spokesman said by e-mail.
Despite the decline, registration in computer science was up to 1,745 students last fall from 1,483 three years earlier. That’s partly because the Alberta government funded an expansion of high-demand programs, including computer science, colleges and universities beginning in the fall of 2022.
At the University of Alberta, registrations rose 32.7 per cent between the autumns of 2020 and 2025 across computer-science related programs at the graduate and undergraduate level, a school spokesman said.
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At the University of Calgary, where Richard Zhao teaches, extra support is being provided to help students entering computer science with lower marks than in the past.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
In other words, regardless of softening demand, there are still enough students interested in computer science to fill the seats – even in a province that recently increased the supply.
They might just be able to get in with lower marks.
Richard Zhao, the acting co-head of computer science at the University of Calgary, said the average student starting his program this fall graduated high school with a 79.6 average, down from the high 80s at the peak of computer science’s popularity a couple of years ago.
“We are aware of students coming with slightly lower averages, and we’ve essentially adapted our curriculum to account for them,” he said. “We provide more support.”
There are upsides to some Canadian computer science programs being less selective. It opens the door to talented young people who love the logical problem-solving that defines the work, but who couldn’t at age 17 or 18 pull off the A+ marks to earn a spot.
“If you’re getting fewer applications and you’re accepting the same number of students, then the quality is probably going to go down a bit,” said Joanne Atlee, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo. “I think it’s also true that a lot of the students who might have applied and are choosing not to probably had less of a passion for the field.”
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Universities with top-rated computer science programs, including the University of Waterloo, say their applicant pools remain strong.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Still, getting into computer science programs remains a cutthroat game at the country’s most prestigious schools.
Dina Dawoud, the associate dean of undergraduate admissions and outreach at the University of Waterloo, said the school continues to receive 12 applications for every computer science student it admits.
Spokespeople for McGill University and the University of Toronto, where undergraduate computer science enrolments have been stable over the past couple of years, also say their applicant pools remain strong.
Eyal de Lara, chair of the Department of Computer Science at U of T, said the department froze undergraduate enrolment about a decade ago because it had already grown “quite large” for a selective program. Applications skyrocketed nonetheless until the volume started to taper off two years ago, he added.
“We had, effectively, an enormous applicant pool,” Prof. de Lara said. “Some students realize it’s going to be impossible to get to U of T and apply to other universities.”
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At U of T, where Mr. Patel is studying math, undergrad enrolment in computer science has been stable over the past few years.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
That’s another possible explanation for the drop in applications. As top Canadian computer science programs developed reputations for turning away academic superstars with intimidating resumes, some high-school seniors might have considered applying futile – or simply not worth it if the degree no longer guaranteed a six-figure salary straight out of school.
The reputed competitiveness of computer science played a part in 17-year-old Ella Poku’s decision to pursue a degree in physics instead. She started first-year classes in the discipline at U of T last week.
Although Ms. Poku had marks in the low 90s, coding experience, and two older brothers studying computer science at McMaster University, she feared she wouldn’t get into computer science.
She and her family had recently moved from Ghana to Ancaster, Ont., near Hamilton. “I only moved to Canada in 2023. I didn’t have as many extracurriculars or connections as other people, so that was, like, a big factor for me since I wasn’t too sure about if I would get in or not,” she said. “And if I didn’t, it would be a big problem.”
The job market for computer science graduates worried her, too, and led her to conclude she’d be better off with a more general hard science degree. “I still wasn’t too sure about going to computer science because I’m not the type of person who wants to always be nervous about my job or my stability.”
New circuitry
Are students like Ms. Poku right to be worried? There’s a fierce debate about whether, in the long run, artificial intelligence, which can already write and debug basic code, will steal jobs from computer scientists or create lucrative new opportunities for them.
In the short run, Statistics Canada reported last January that between the launch of ChatGPT in November, 2022, and December of 2025, coding-intensive jobs such as software engineering and web design grew at the same rate as other jobs. But the gains were concentrated among Canadian coding professionals aged 30 to 49; job opportunities stagnated for their counterparts under 30.
In the U.S., a trio of economists at Stanford University mined payroll data to report a widening employment gap between young workers in AI-exposed professions, such as software engineering, customer service, accounting and secretarial work, and their peers in less-exposed industries. As of last month, they pegged the gap for U.S. workers aged 22-25 at 19 per cent. There wasn’t a comparable gap for older workers.
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Canada’s job market is still adapting to AI, as are university students.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Leo Tenenbaum, 22, found the Canadian tech job market much tougher to crack than expected when they were applying to computer science programs in the fall of 2020.
Although they graduated from the University of Toronto in June, 2025, with a first-place win in an undergraduate student research contest under their belt, their resumes and cover letters went unanswered for months. They applied for about 50 jobs online before a friend of a friend opened the door at Mozilla, where Tenenbaum started as a software engineer in February.
“It was very discouraging at that time,” Tenenbaum said. “I was feeling like I’d never get anywhere.”
If job hunting is harder for new computer science grads today than it was a few years ago, all the blame shouldn’t be pinned on AI, said Tracy Camp, the executive director and CEO of the Computing Research Association, a U.S. non-profit made up of academic computer science departments, industry and government.
Some high-profile tech companies over-hired during the pandemic, then made AI a scapegoat for layoffs, she argued.
Still, Prof. Camp conceded that computer science undergraduates can no longer expect multiple six-figure job offers before they don a cap and gown. “So then the narrative is, ‘all the jobs are gone.’ But no, that’s not true at all. It just is a little bit more difficult to find a job, which is similar to how other students have been struggling for decades.”
In the U.S., enrolment in computer and information science programs as of this spring fell by 8.4 per cent at four-year institutions and 11.2 per cent at two-year colleges compared to spring of 2025, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The drop followed nearly two decades of growth.
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U.S. and Canadian schools have noticed shifting interests in computer science, and tried to adapt. Faith Maeba, a psychology major at Virginia Commonwealth University, is taking advantage of a new minor stream in AI.Moriah Ratner/The Associated Press
The Computing Research Association, which conducts regular surveys of university computer science departments in the U.S. and Canada, says the topline enrolment figures obscure rising interest in some subdisciplines of computer science. Software engineering and information systems are down, but data science, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence are up.
“That tells us that students are shifting their interest to more specialized disciplines,” said Kari George, a senior research associate at the association.
Indeed, postsecondary institutions north and south of the border are rushing to add AI courses earlier in their computer science curriculum, and to launch concentrations or degrees with artificial intelligence right in the name, according to Northeastern University’s Center for Inclusive Computing. It just added Canada to its map of AI programs in computer science at universities.
Applications could rebound as computer science departments rebrand their offerings for the AI era. If history is any guide, a rebound is inevitable, according to Prof. de Lara of U of T.
Applications and enrolments dropped in the early 1980s and again in the early 2000s, when personal computers and the early internet’s dot-com crash scared students into believing there would be fewer jobs for computer scientists. Both technologies created many more jobs for computer scientists than they killed.
“If you’re in any other degree, innovations in AI are happening to you,” Prof. de Lara said. “If you’re in computer science, you’re actually among the people driving the revolution. You’re an active agent making this new reality happen.”
With a report from Om Shanbhag
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Illustration by Coralie Mayer
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