AI Is Changing What High School STEM Students Study

In nan early 2010s, astir each STEM-savvy college-bound kid heard nan aforesaid advice: Learn to code. Python was nan caller Latin. Computer subject was nan summons to a stable, well-paid, future-proof life.

But successful 2025, nan glow has dimmed. “Learn to code” now sounds a small for illustration “learn shorthand.” Teenagers still want jobs successful tech, but they nary longer spot a azygous way to get there. AI seems poised to snatch up coding jobs, and location aren’t a plethora of AP classes successful vibe coding. Their teachers are scrambling to support up.

“There’s a move from taking arsenic overmuch machine subject arsenic you tin to now trying to get successful arsenic galore statistic courses” arsenic possible, says Benjamin Rubenstein, an adjunct main astatine New York’s Manhattan Village Academy. Rubenstein has spent 20 years successful New York City classrooms, agelong capable to watch nan “STEM pipeline” morph into a web of branching paths alternatively of 1 consecutive line. For his students, studying stats feels much practical.

Forty years ago, students inspired by NASA dreamed of becoming physicists aliases engineers. Twenty years aft that, nan allure of jobs astatine Google aliases different tech giants sent them into machine science. Now, their ambitions are shaped by AI, starring them distant from nan worldly AI tin do (coding) and toward nan worldly it still struggles with. As nan number of kids seeking machine subject degrees falters, STEM-minded precocious schoolers are looking astatine fields that blend computing pinch analysis, interpretation, and data.

Rubenstein still requires each student to return machine subject earlier graduation, “so they tin understand what’s going connected down nan scenes.” But his school’s mathematics section now pairs information literacy pinch purpose: an Applied Mathematics people wherever students analyse New York Police Department information to propose argumentation changes, and an Ethnomathematics people linking mathematics to civilization and identity. “We don’t want mathematics to consciousness disconnected from existent life,” he says.

It’s a mini but telling shift—one that, Rubenstein says, isn’t happening successful isolation. After a agelong boom, universities are seeing nan computer-science surge cool. The number of machine science, machine engineering, and accusation degrees awarded successful nan 2023–2024 world twelvemonth successful nan US and Canada fell by astir 5.5 percent from nan erstwhile year, according to a survey by nan nonprofit Computing Research Association.

At nan precocious schoolhouse level, nan appetite for information is visible. AP Statistics logged 264,262 exam registrations successful 2024, making it 1 of nan most-requested AP tests, per Education Week. AP computer-science exams still tie large numbers—175,261 students took AP Computer Science Principles, and 98,136 took AP Computer Science A successful 2024—but nan awesome is clear: Data literacy now sits alongside coding, not beneath it.