More colleges are offering AI degrees — could they give job seekers an edge?

As artificial intelligence continues to attract attention and investors, colleges and universities are beginning to market undergraduate AI degrees to students, from Arizona State University to the University of Texas at Dallas.

New graduates are coming into a rough tech job market. While computer science degrees were once seen as a golden ticket to high-paying tech jobs, now, it’s become harder to land tech internships or entry-level positions with increased competition and major cuts across the industry.

But AI majors and professors are hopeful that a more specialized course of study may help graduates stand out.

NBC News identified 13 major colleges and universities that began offering bachelor’s degrees in AI in the last six years. 

With some of the first AI majors just graduating in the last several years, it remains an open question how the majors will fare, but early signs suggest the new degree could give young job seekers an edge.

Carnegie Mellon University was the first in the U.S. to launch a B.S. in Artificial Intelligence in 2018, saying at the time that the major would address the “growing demand for AI specialists.” The University of Pennsylvania will be offering a major in AI starting this fall, while colleges known for their STEM research like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Purdue University also currently grant undergraduate degrees in AI.

“This is a pioneering and forward-looking interdisciplinary program,” University of Southern California professor Yolanda Gil said while announcing her school’s Artificial Intelligence for Business degree. “With this program, we will empower business and organizational leaders to understand the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of AI technologies and to help them better understand the people they serve, predict trends and improve decision-making processes.”

According to Reid Simmons, director of the AI major at Carnegie Mellon, there were initially some doubts at his school about how interested employers would be in an undergraduate major in AI. However, he described the reaction as “very positive.”

“Some of the bigger tech firms indicated that they would hire everybody,” Simmons said. “That was six years ago.”

Simmons noted that most of his students went to Big Tech companies. Now, students are working in other industries like health care, finance and robotics as well. While AI majors are not necessarily guaranteed an internship or job at a Big Tech company like Google or Apple in 2024, Simmons said that many of his students have found internships and jobs this summer.

Among them is Mehmet Deniz Birlikci, who graduated with a B.S. in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon this past May and will be joining Amazon’s AGI division soon as an engineer. Birlikci was initially interested in studying computer science but switched to the AI major sophomore year.

“I was really viewing AI as a new computing paradigm which is a lot more flexible than hard coding rules,” Birlikci said.

He got an internship in 2022 with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, where he helped train and deploy AI models. Birlikci credited the “branding that CMU AI gave” with helping him land the position.

As more students graduate with AI degrees, the programs are becoming more popular with students. Out of the around 250 incoming freshmen to the School of CS, Simmons noted, 200 noted in a survey that they were “considering” the AI major. While he acknowledged that not all students will end up declaring the major, it marked a substantial increase from the 30 to 35 majors the department estimated when originally establishing the program.

Still, landing a Big Tech job is not students’ primary motivation for choosing the major, Birlikci said. “[Students] are much more interested in getting their hands dirty building things and really leaving an impact than just get[ting] pure jobs,” he said.

Birlikci also noted that since only a few colleges in the U.S. offer an AI major, it’s hard to tell whether the seeming success of these students on the internship or job hunt is due to their college’s general prestige or the skills learned in the major.

“There’s a radical difference between the top schools such as UPenn, MIT or Carnegie Mellon and what it means to come out of them,” Birlikci said.

Emma Twitmyer, a rising junior at Penn, is one of the first students at her school to major in AI. Twitmyer noted that she has already finished transferring her credits to her new major.

“In the world that we live in today, a technical degree is always an asset, and this degree will absolutely be technical in nature,” Twitmyer said, adding that she believes majoring in AI will allow students to pursue careers in many fields.

Twitmyer said that there are “plenty of us transferring this year,” with more students in younger grades to follow.

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 first started 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, with the company focusing on attracting “top talent.”

Steele said that although her current internship doesn’t directly involve AI, her past experiences have been AI-focused. Steele works as a researcher for MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was a Data Science & AI Engineering and Research Intern for Nasdaq, per her LinkedIn.

While she’s heard fellow students talk about how it’s been harder to find internships, Steele noted that the people she knows majoring in Course 6-4 have landed a variety of summer opportunities, including doing research or software engineering and finance-related internships.

According to Nancy Xu, founder of the AI-powered tech recruiting platform Moonhub, a bachelor’s degree in AI may appeal to employers who aren’t looking for AI researchers but “great software engineers who have an understanding of AI.”

“Ultimately, we don’t have enough people who work in AI and we need more people,” Xu said.