How is AI shaping students’ career choices? Are budding philosophers becoming dental assistants instead? And how are the workplaces they expect to enter changing as a result of AI?
It’s complicated.
About 16% of 3,800 undergraduates interviewed by the Gallup/Lumina Foundation in the fall of 2025 had changed their majors due to worries that AI would undermine their intended careers. The researchers speculate that these students have moved into vocational and technological areas.
As many as 47%–particularly young men—had considered changing their majors based on concerns about AI and may yet do so, according to the widely-cited study. Students in health care and natural sciences were the least likely to consider changing their pathways.
Locally, students’ choices mirror those concerns. At Cabrillo College, enrollments in Career and Technical Education—CTE—have been trending upward since 2023; Chat GPT was released in November of 2022. Of course, students are likely conscious of other economic uncertainties post-Covid; they surely feel the backwash of inflation, interest rate hikes, and trade wars. This awareness may be why enrollment in fields like Business and Commerce, Medical Assisting and Office Technology grew sharply in 2022 and has stayed consistently strong, according to available data from Cabrillo.
“Enrollment for career education programs has been on the upswing,” Regina Ip, Cabrillo’s Public Information Officer, confirms. “Whether the classes are for allied health professions, like certified nursing assistant or dental hygienist, or HVAC and drone technology professions, Cabrillo College continues to offer in-demand courses to the community.”
Students in Cabrillo English instructor Victoria Bañales’s first-year course echo some of the national patterns. In an informal survey, 35% said they were at least to some degree rethinking their career pathways due to AI; at the same time, their comments suggest a belief that AI cannot replace humans in all ways. As one student wrote, “In health care AI is already being used for multiple things…It does scare me some, but at the same time, the skill will never be as good as what humans do.”
Bennett Rosenthal, a recent UCSC graduate in Computer Science, confirms that while companies are using AI for routine tasks, unless software developers understand the underlying principles, they cannot correct the AI when it gets stuck or makes mistakes.
At UCSC, the enrollment patterns are mixed. Some fields in the Humanities—such as Literature and Linguistics—have lost enrollments over time, and career concerns may be behind this phenomenon. However, fields that would appear to be vulnerable to AI—such as Computer Game Design—have shown steady growth in enrollment, according to the Office of Institutional Research data, and science enrollment has held steady.
An increased interest in STEM fields, along with “consistent, strong engagement in the building and construction trades and automotive service,” is apparent to Julie Edwards, who oversees career-connected pathways for students in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD).
In the PVUSD, all career pathways–including those in the trades–are college preparatory, she points out; because given the rate of change, the jobs students imagine may not be there—and so learning to learn and to collaborate in teams are priorities. In the PVUSD, the old-time divide between vocational and academic education no longer prevails, so students have flexibility as they consider careers. “It’s their right to have choice and it’s our job to help them understand what those choices mean and how they can get there—to kick doors open so that they can go through,” she says.
While apocalyptic headlines predict massive job losses ahead, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) suggested in July that rather than widespread impacts, AI may be causing “pockets of disruption,” negatively affecting “demand for young white-collar workers.” Surprisingly, though, in tech fields specifically, demand for workers is holding steady; as Guillermo Gallacher from Indeed’s Hiring Lab pointed out in July, “Software development job postings have rebounded over the past year.”
​SIEPR also points out that employers​ may be attributing their decisions around reduced hiring or layoffs to AI when in fact, they may want to increase cash flow.
Some UCSC students believe AI is taking their future jobs, Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at Merrill College and in Education, notes. But students he talks with are also deeply critical of AI, the way it gets things wrong and fabricates information. “They are surprised by the bias in the machine,” he says. “The way that the data–racial content, for example—are reproduced,” along with the way the algorithms are weighed.
Higdon anticipates that as AI pilots fail and as companies see that AI errors can have liability consequences for them, human—or human-supervised—jobs will return. (Higdon’s book, Critical AI Literacy: From Silicon Valley to Democratic Resistance, is coming out from Routledge in the spring.)
For students—and those teaching them—the messages are clear: Wherever you focus, learn the substance of your field, not just how to prompt an AI. Develop the human skills you will need anywhere. And remember that learning to learn in a time of disruption may be the most valuable skill of all.
