New survey data from Nova Learning shows one of the clearest shifts in secondary student academic interest in recent years: Computer Science and AI, once the dominant choice among students in Nova Learning's network, is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share.
Nova Learning surveyed 463 students in 2025 and 677 students in 2026, recording each student's stated primary academic interest through interest forms distributed by Nova Learning. Engineering was the single largest area of growth, adding 11.1 percentage points, more than any other category gained.
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The growth wasn't spread evenly across engineering disciplines. It was concentrated in two.
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering together accounted for more than 60% of students choosing Engineering in 2026 and drove 81% of the category's growth. Electrical & Computer Engineering also grew, adding 2.1 points, while Robotics and Materials Science grew in raw numbers but shrank as a share of the category. The new wave of engineering-interested students is concentrated in Aerospace and Mechanical specifically, rather than spread across the category.
The pullback from Computer Science and AI wasn't uniform either.
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Within the category, Cybersecurity and Human-Computer Interaction held up best. The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional "learn to code" pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2 points. The category did not decline uniformly. Students moved away fastest from the pathway most associated with entry-level software work, while the more applied and human-facing subfields held their ground better.
Healthcare and Business both gained share. Sciences and Law & Humanities saw smaller declines.
The pattern isn't unique to Nova Learning's network. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's Clearinghouse Enrollment Insights: Final Fall Enrollment Trends report, published January 15, 2026, found that undergraduate enrollment in Computer and Information Science programs fell 8.1% at four-year institutions in fall 2025, down to roughly 606,000 students, with declines across award levels and institution types nationally.
The subfield-level data point the same direction.
Cybersecurity and Human-Computer Interaction, both closer to applied, physical, or human-facing problems than general software development, held up better than Software & Data Science, the subfield most associated with entry-level coding work. The data does not suggest that students are moving away from technical fields altogether. Rather, their interests appear to be changing within them. Engineering saw the biggest increase, concentrated in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, while Computer Science & AI declined across all four of its subjects.
The timing is notable. Students are seeing headlines about layoffs across the tech industry while hardware, aerospace and other physical technologies attract growing investment. The survey does not tell us whether those trends are influencing students directly, but they provide a possible backdrop for the shift we are seeing.
Nova Learning surveyed 463 students in 2025 and 677 students in 2026, recording each student's primary academic interest through interest forms distributed by Nova Learning. Students selected one primary interest from 25 subject areas across six categories:
The sample consists primarily of middle and high school students from the U.S. West Coast and was not designed to be nationally representative.
The 2025 and 2026 cohorts are two separate groups of students. No individual student appears in both years. These results describe a difference in the composition of two cohorts, not a change in any individual student's preferences over time. They should be read as a shift in what a new group of students is choosing, not as evidence that students are switching interests mid-journey.
Nova Learning is a white-label platform for academic mentorship. Education companies run research, enrichment and test-prep programs under their own brands on Nova Learning's mentor network, curriculum and program operations software. Founded in 2024, Nova Learning has served thousands of students through partner organizations in more than 15 countries, supported by a network of more than 450 mentors. For more information, visit novalearninggroup.org.
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