AI Is Changing What High School STEM Students Study

In the early 2010s, nearly every STEM-savvy college-bound kid heard the same advice: Learn to code. Python was the new Latin. Computer science was the ticket to a stable, well-paid, future-proof life.

But in 2025, the glow has dimmed. “Learn to code” now sounds a little like “learn shorthand.” Teenagers still want jobs in tech, but they no longer see a single path to get there. AI seems poised to snatch up coding jobs, and there aren’t a plethora of AP classes in vibe coding. Their teachers are scrambling to keep up.

“There’s a move from taking as much computer science as you can to now trying to get in as many statistics courses” as possible, says Benjamin Rubenstein, an assistant principal at New York’s Manhattan Village Academy. Rubenstein has spent 20 years in New York City classrooms, long enough to watch the “STEM pipeline” morph into a network of branching paths instead of one straight line. For his students, studying stats feels more practical.

Forty years ago, students inspired by NASA dreamed of becoming physicists or engineers. Twenty years after that, the allure of jobs at Google or other tech giants sent them into computer science. Now, their ambitions are shaped by AI, leading them away from the stuff AI can do (coding) and toward the stuff it still struggles with. As the number of kids seeking computer science degrees falters, STEM-minded high schoolers are looking at fields that blend computing with analysis, interpretation, and data.

Rubenstein still requires every student to take computer science before graduation, “so they can understand what’s going on behind the scenes.” But his school’s math department now pairs data literacy with purpose: an Applied Mathematics class where students analyze New York Police Department data to propose policy changes, and an Ethnomathematics course linking math to culture and identity. “We don’t want math to feel disconnected from real life,” he says.

It’s a small but telling shift—one that, Rubenstein says, isn’t happening in isolation. After a long boom, universities are seeing the computer-science surge cool. The number of computer science, computer engineering, and information degrees awarded in the 2023–2024 academic year in the US and Canada fell by about 5.5 percent from the previous year, according to a survey by the nonprofit Computing Research Association.

At the high school level, the appetite for data is visible. AP Statistics logged 264,262 exam registrations in 2024, making it one of the most-requested AP tests, per Education Week. AP computer-science exams still draw big numbers—175,261 students took AP Computer Science Principles, and 98,136 took AP Computer Science A in 2024—but the signal is clear: Data literacy now sits alongside coding, not beneath it.