A Growing Number of College Students Are Switching Majors — Here’s What’s Behind It

Close to half of college students are thinking about changing majors due to AI — and one in six students has already gone ahead and made the switch. 

A new survey from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation of 3,800 college students found that about 16% of students indicated that they had changed their major because they think AI is reducing the number of entry-level jobs on the market. Nearly half of college students, roughly 42%, have thought deeply about changing their major for the same reason. 

“This is one of the clearest signals we’ve seen that students are rethinking what their futures are in response to AI,” Dr. Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning at Lumina Foundation, told Business Insider.

Among the 16% of students who switched majors, most moved into the social sciences (26%), followed by business (17%) and tech (13%), per the survey.

“Students are moving in both directions when it comes to tech fields,” Brown said. “Some are switching into tech because they see opportunity in AI, while others are moving away because they’re worried about disruption.”

The survey found that students in tech and vocational programs are the most open to changing their majors — about 70% say they’ve seriously thought about it. On the other hand, students studying humanities, healthcare and natural sciences were the least likely to change their majors because of AI, the survey found. Students in those disciplines also used AI the least. 

“I don’t think students are seeing that AI is going to replace those,” Brown said.

AI’s effect on entry-level jobs

A 2024 Harvard University study tracking 62 million workers across 285,000 U.S. companies found that entry-level positions were “shrinking” at companies integrating AI since 2023. The researchers wrote that AI is “eroding the ‘bottom rungs’ of career ladders” with its ability to automate the “intellectually mundane tasks” that typically go to junior employees.

A separate Stanford University analysis from October reinforced this trend. The survey found that entry-level hiring declined 13% in AI-exposed jobs such as software development, customer service and clerical work. The results indicated that AI is beginning to have a “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers.”

Industry leaders have sounded the alarm about AI’s ability to replace entry-level workers in a variety of industries. Dario Amodei, CEO of AI giant Anthropic, said last year that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs by 2030 and cause unemployment to rise to 20%. Meanwhile, Victor Lazarte, general partner at venture capital firm Benchmark, said last year that AI is “fully replacing people” and that lawyers and recruiters especially should be wary of the technology as it encroaches on their work.

Another report finds increased interest in AI

In technical fields, students seem to be steering away from majors that AI could easily take over, according to a March report from Niche, a platform for researching and reviewing U.S. K-12 schools and colleges. Instead, students are showing more interest in areas of AI development, like software engineering and AI-focused specialties, rather than old-school programming.

Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Niche and author of the report, told Business Insider that it’s a good sign students interested in software development are starting to lean toward AI-related fields — it shows they’re adapting to where the tech world is headed.

“That’s a good response in terms of what we will need from the workforce in the future,” Shrivastava told the outlet.