The numbers explain why. CS degrees doubled from 52,000 to 113,000 per year over the last decade. Universities kept expanding enrollment because the demand signal from 2021 said “hire everyone.” Then three things happened simultaneously: tech companies overhired, corrected with 250K+ layoffs across 2024-2025, and started replacing junior engineering tasks with AI tooling. The entry-level funnel collapsed while the supply pipeline was locked in at peak capacity.
CS unemployment for recent grads hit 6.1% in 2025. That’s nearly double philosophy majors at 3.2%. The “learn to code” era produced a generation of graduates competing for jobs that are either gone or now require 3+ years of LLM integration experience they couldn’t possibly have.
The split is geographic and institutional. If you’re at a top-15 program in a tech corridor with two internships on your resume, the market looks tight but navigable. If you’re at a mid-tier state school with no internship pipeline, you’re watching the career fair fill up with insurance companies while your $140K in loans accrues interest.
That faculty meeting fight about “pivoting to AI collaboration skills” is the right debate happening two years too late. The schools that retooled their curriculum in 2023 will survive. The ones still teaching data structures as the core value proposition while job postings demand LLM orchestration are training students for a market that no longer exists.