AI causes number of IT students to drop: 'We actually need them'

We can’t leave everything to AI, but chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT are actually quite good at programming. Once, you had to learn a programming language and type out code yourself; now, you can go a long way with just a few prompts. Perhaps that explains why fewer and fewer young people are choosing to pursue an IT degree.

The number of IT freshers at Dutch universities has fallen by over twenty per cent compared to 2022, the year ChatGPT was launched. That's according to a survey conducted by the association of Dutch universities, UNL. That is nearly 1,000 fewer students.

Not only have major degree programmes such as computer science, technical computer science and informatics become less popular, but so have bachelor’s programmes in artificial intelligence.

The same is happening at universities of applied sciences, where bachelor’s programmes such as computer science, game technology and multimedia design attracted around 7,400 first-year students combined in 2022. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 5,600.

And the decline shows no sign of stopping. The University of Groningen is seeing a “worrying” drop in applications for IT programmes, says its president, Jacquelien Scherpen, although she is not yet able to provide exact figures.

Misled
According to her, prospective students are being misled by news articles about the consequences of AI for programmers. The nature of their work will certainly change, but "we actually need enterprising, creative and critical IT professionals,” Scherpen says. The president of Groningen University is an applied mathematician specialising in control engineering, a field related to IT.

She cites higher education as an example: Dutch universities aim to become less dependent on American tech companies such as Microsoft and Google, which will require “a great deal of brainpower from IT professionals.”

The same applies to the government, as the Netherlands also wants to become more digitally autonomous. That is one of the reasons why the government recently blocked the sale of the IT company behind DigiD to an American company.

Labour market
Scherpen is not the only one who believes we need IT professionals. It is difficult to predict what impact the advent of AI will have on the labour market, but it is likely to happen more slowly than one might think.

Research into previous technological breakthroughs shows that companies usually adopt innovations gradually, says Jessie Bakens of the Maastricht Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA). “Quality must remain high, so companies do not take huge risks.”

The ROA is attempting to predict the labour market of the future and is therefore also keeping a close eye on the rise of AI, says Bakens. “In the Netherlands, we are not yet seeing the predicted decline in IT jobs.”

The number of IT jobs could even rise slightly in the next few years, the ROA predicted on Tuesday. However, the figures are small: the number of new jobs will increase by a few thousand, while nearly half a million IT professionals work in the Netherlands.

“Perhaps we won’t see the impact of AI reflected in the figures until later, but IT professionals certainly won’t become redundant en masse,” says Bakens. Their work may change, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be out of work. Moreover, AI could also create new jobs.

Bakens cites cybersecurity as an example: “It seems that AI makes hacking easier. There is a chance that more people will be needed in the near future to keep software secure. And in a world of increasing geopolitical tensions, cybersecurity is becoming even more important.”

New entrants
New entrants do have a slightly harder time in the labour market than before. Young lawyers, consultants and IT professionals are finding it harder to secure jobs, and that could well be down to AI: chatbots could take over the simple tasks usually performed by new entrants.

But perhaps this isn’t down to AI. When there are economic headwinds, entry-level workers are often the first to be affected anyway, wrote Professor Anna Salomons earlier this year. She is researching how technology is changing our work at Tilburg University and Utrecht University.

She expects that generative artificial intelligence will radically transform the labour market, and that this will certainly have negative consequences for some workers. But it is still too early to make any definitive statements; the data is simply not available yet.

That is precisely why Jacquelien Scherpen, from Groningen University, wants to offer a counter-perspective. Prospective students seem to have already drawn their own conclusions. Scherpen said: “In the coming years, we will need people who are creative, capable of critical thinking and who can take the initiative. If enrolment in IT programmes continues to decline at this rate, society will face a real problem.”