“I think our class that just graduated in the summer, spring of 2026 was a little over 200 computer science majors. The class that will graduate two years later is probably going to be less than half that.”
The Developing Dev · Software Engineering & Infra · October 2026
Context
Kernighan on falling computer science enrollment at Princeton. He says students are moving to electrical, mechanical and aerospace engineering, which feel more concrete and less likely to be replaced by language models, and that they may be overreacting.
Transcript
…majors than we did a few years ago. And that means classes are smaller. Not entirely because many of those people just went to other departments, but they're still taking our courses, but they're somewhat smaller. And that means that there's more contact with the students. And I think that's good.
What percent down would you say?
Our numbers are, I don't know where they're representing. I think they're more extreme for some unknown reason, but I think our class that just graduated in the summer, spring of 2026 was a little over 200 computer science majors. The class that will graduate two years later is probably going to be less than half that.
Less than half. Yeah.
Maybe even down to a third. We don't know because there's a staggered way in which majors appear, but I would guess that if it was 200, it'll be sort of 80-ish, 90-pure guesswork, quite a bit more. Those people have gone in here to electrical and computer engineering and mechanical and aerospace…
So the total number of students that go to Princeton is roughly constant. Oh, it's totally constant. But the proportion that goes to the computer in
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