As artificial intelligence continues to attract attention and investors, colleges and universities are beginning to market AI degrees to students, from Arizona State University to the University of Texas at Dallas.
Recent graduates find themselves in a tough tech job market. While computer science degrees were once considered a golden ticket to high-paying tech jobs, it has now become more difficult to land tech internships or entry-level positions with a high pay rate. increased competition and Major cuts across the industry.
But AI specialists and educators are hopeful that a more specialized course of study could help graduates stand out.
JOBsNews identified 13 major colleges and universities that began offering AI degrees in the past six years.
As some of the first AI graduates have graduated in recent years, it is not yet known how these graduates will fare, but early signs suggest the new degree could give young job seekers an edge.
Carnegie Mellon University was the first in the US to launch a bachelor’s degree in Artificial Intelligence in 2018, saying At the time, the degree would address the “growing demand for AI specialists.” The University of Pennsylvania will offer a degree in AI starting this fall, while universities known for their STEM research such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Purdue University also currently award undergraduate degrees in AI.
“This is a pioneering and forward-thinking interdisciplinary program,” said University of Southern California Professor Yolanda Gil. saying while announcing his school’s Artificial Intelligence for Business degree. “With this program, we will train business and organizational leaders to understand the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of AI technologies and help them better understand the people they serve, predict trends, and improve decision-making processes.”
According to Reid Simmons, director of the AI program at Carnegie Mellon, there was initially some hesitation at his school about employers’ interest in an AI degree program. However, he described the reaction as “very positive.”
“Some of the biggest tech companies said they would hire everyone,” Simmons said. “That was six years ago.”
Simmons noted that most of her students went to Big Tech companies. Now, students are also working in other industries, such as healthcare, finance and robotics. While AI students aren’t necessarily guaranteed an internship or job at a big tech company like Google or Apple in 2024, Simmons said many of her students have found internships and jobs this summer.
Among them is Mehmet Deniz Birlikci, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University last May and will soon join Amazon’s AGI division as an engineer. Birlikci was initially interested in studying computer science, but switched to AI in his sophomore year.
“I actually saw AI as a new computing paradigm that is much more flexible than rigid coding rules,” Birlikci said.
In 2022, she completed an internship at the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team, where she helped train and deploy AI models. Birlikci attributed her success to the “branding that CMU AI gave her” in landing the role.
As more students graduate with AI degrees, the programs are becoming more popular among students. Of the roughly 250 incoming freshmen in the School of Computer Science, Simmons noted that 200 indicated on a survey that they were “considering” the AI major. While he acknowledged that not all students will end up declaring the major, this marked a substantial increase from the 30 to 35 majors the department estimated when it originally established the program.
Still, landing a job at a big tech company isn’t students’ main motivation for choosing the career, Birlikci said. “(Students) are much more interested in getting their hands dirty building things and actually leaving an impact than just landing jobs,” he said.
Birlikci also noted that since only a few universities in the US offer an AI major, it is difficult to determine whether these students’ apparent success in their internship or job search is due to the overall prestige of their university or the skills learned in the major.
“There’s a radical difference between top schools like UPenn, MIT or Carnegie Mellon and what it means to leave them,” Birlikci said.
Emma Twitmyer, a junior at Penn, is one of the first students at her school to major in artificial intelligence. Twitmyer said she has already finished transferring her credits into her new major.
“In the world we live in today, a technical degree is always a plus, and this degree will absolutely be technical in nature,” Twitmyer said, adding that he believes majoring in AI will allow students to pursue careers in many fields.
Twitmyer said “there are a lot of us transferring this year,” and more students will be joining in the lower grades.
Julie Steele, also in the class of 2026, is majoring in course 6-4, Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which began offering the major in 2022.
This summer, Steele is interning at Citadel as a software engineering intern. An internship at Citadel is one of the most coveted among college students; recently, Business Insider reported that out of tens of thousands of applicants, only 300 were selected this year, and the company was focused on attracting “top talent.”
Steele said that while her current internship does not directly involve AI, her previous experiences have focused on AI. Steele works as a researcher for MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was an AI and data science research and engineering intern for Nasdaq, according to her LinkedIn profile.
While she’s heard peers talk about how difficult it’s been to find internships, Steele said people she knows who are majoring in Course 6-4 have landed a variety of summer opportunities, including research, software engineering and finance-related internships.
According to Nancy Xu, founder of Moonhub, an AI-based tech recruiting platform, a bachelor’s degree in AI can be attractive to employers who are not looking for AI researchers, but rather “great software engineers who have AI knowledge.”
“Ultimately, we don’t have enough people working on AI and we need more people,” Xu said.
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