Nearly 9 in 10 Americans say they are worried about the growth of artificial intelligence, according to a recent CNN poll. On campus, the opposite is happening. College students are declaring AI majors as fast as universities can invent them.
That gap is the story. The public hears the warnings. Young people are placing a bet.
Julia Schneider was among the first students at MIT to major in artificial intelligence. She says she wants to work on technology that helps people. Since MIT launched its “AI and Decision-making” program in 2022, enrollment has jumped from a few dozen students to more than 300. It is now the school’s second-most popular major.
Tracy Camp, CEO of the Computing Research Association, calls the demand “tremendous” across majors, minors, and concentrations. Seventy-four U.S. colleges now offer an AI major. Ninety-four offer a minor. Many of those programs appeared in the last year. Northeastern’s Center for Inclusive Computing has been tracking the surge.
MIT’s version leans hard on ethics and safety. Schneider says those questions are not a footnote at the end of a technical class. They are the point of semester-long courses. She and her friends even have a group chat that is supposedly about the gym and is, she jokes, 80 percent AI safety.
That framing will sound familiar to anyone who has watched higher education for the last decade. Every new field arrives with a required seminar on harm, bias, and power. Some of that is legitimate. Models can fail. Data can be sloppy. Bad incentives produce bad systems. But campuses have a habit of turning technical training into moral instruction. Students who want to understand why a model does what it does can end up spending as much time on the politics of the technology as on the technology itself.
The timing of the boom is also awkward for the official narrative. After an Anthropic researcher resigned with a warning about existential risk, industry leaders called for a slowdown and lawmakers started talking about new guardrails. Schneider’s reaction was the opposite of retreat. “Now is definitely the time to study more AI, not less,” she said. What is needed, she added, are people who actually understand the models.
That is the adult answer. Fear does not ship products. Neither does a pause that only the United States observes.
Americans have reasons to be uneasy. Job postings and early-career hiring in parts of computing have already cooled as companies adopt coding tools. Students know it. Polls show large numbers of undergraduates have thought about changing majors because of AI. Some have already done it. The rational response is not to flee the field. It is to learn it well enough to stay useful.
Colleges, for their part, are doing what colleges do when enrollment and headlines line up: they add programs. That is not automatically a scandal. Employers keep asking for AI skills. Students keep showing up. The risk is that universities treat AI as another branding exercise—new major, new institute, same bureaucracy—while China and private labs keep training people who can build.
Public concern is real. A CNN poll is not a hallucination. What the poll does not measure is whether the people most alarmed have any plan beyond regulation, slowdown language, and more ethics modules. Students appear to have noticed. They are not waiting for Washington to decide whether the technology is allowed to exist.
The useful question is not whether AI is popular on campus. It is whether the new majors teach students to build, test, and constrain systems—or mainly to talk about them. One of those paths produces engineers. The other produces commentators. The country will need the first group more than the second.
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