or decades, university halls were filled with students working through problem sets in physics, dissecting theories in sociology or studying the periodic table for a chemistry major. That picture is fading fast. Across the country, enrolment in what educationists now call the classical disciplines—including physical sciences, pure mathematics and social sciences; even engineering and medicine, is shrinking. Computer science, artificial intelligence and other IT-related programmes are bursting at the seams.

The numbers tell the story. Public-sector universities across the Punjab have reported admissions falling by 20 to 30 percent in 2025, with flagship institutions such as Punjab University, Lahore; Government College University, Faisalabad; and Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, all reporting less-than-expected intake. Public universities in Dera Ghazi Khan, Sahiwal and Narowal are struggling to fill seats even in their traditionally popular departments. Faculty members describe the trend not as a minor dip but as a structural crisis in the making.

Two forces are driving the exodus. The first is economic: inflation, currency depreciation and rising tuition fees have made a four-year degree an increasingly hard sell for middle- and lower-income families. The second, arguably more consequential, is a crisis of confidence in the job market. Humanities, social sciences and business graduates are finding that a degree no longer guarantees employment. Many end up underemployed in roles unrelated to their training. Faced with that reality, prospective students are voting with their feet—either skipping university altogether in favour of skill-based certifications or funnelling almost exclusively into computing, data science and AI programmes that promise a clearer route to a paycheck.

Public sector universities across the Punjab the have reported admissions falling by 20 to 30 percent in 2025, with flagship institutions such as Punjab University, Lahore; Government College University, Faisalabad; and Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, all reporting lower-than-expected intake.

The funnelling is real and well documented. Pakistan’s IT exports touched a record $3.8 billion in FY25, an 18 percent jump over the previous year. The National AI Policy 2025 has set a target of training a million people in AI-related skills by 2030. Universities such as the COMSATS, the GIKI and Habib have rushed to launch dedicated AI degrees. Traditional computer science programmes are being rebuilt around machine learning and large language models. Among Pakistani students choosing to study abroad, the shift is just as visible: the share of new entrants to the UK enrolling in computing and IT courses nearly doubled between 2017-18 and 2023-24, climbing past 13 percent, even as overall enrolment from Pakistan skewed further toward STEM at the expense of business and humanities.

The consequence of this one-directional stampede is a hollowing out of the disciplines that keep a modern economy and society functioning. Physics and chemistry departments feed research, pharmaceuticals, energy and manufacturing. Social sciences train the economists, planners, psychologists and policy analysts a country needs to understand itself. Medicine and engineering, though still respected, are seeing relatively less interest from top-scoring students than they did a generation ago, as the perceived ceiling on reward looks lower next to a coding bootcamp graduate landing a remote job with a foreign firm. If this trend continues unaddressed, Pakistan risks, a decade from now, finding itself with an oversupply of software developers and a shortage of researchers, teachers, doctors and policy specialists—the people needed to translate a booming tech sector into broad-based national development.

There is also a subtler cost: intellectual diversity on campus. Universities that once hosted lively cross-disciplinary debate risk becoming trade schools for one industry, narrowing the kind of thinking a society needs when technology itself needs to be regulated, ethically examined and applied to problems outside the tech sector.

The trend is not unique to Pakistan. It has been seen worldwide. Three decades ago, Pakistani campuses experienced a similar stampede toward the MBA. For years, a business degree was treated as the universal ticket to a good salary. The universities responded by opening MBA programmes at a pace far outstripping the market’s ability to absorb them. The result was predictable: the degree became common enough to stop signalling anything special, salaries for average MBA graduates stagnated and many found themselves in roles no better than what a bachelor’s degree could have secured. The value of the credential eroded precisely because everyone rushed to it at once.

The same rebalancing is now associated with the AI boom. In the United States, computer science enrolment had been the fastest-growing academic field for years until 2025, when it recorded its first enrolment decline in decades, dropping roughly 8 percent nationally at four-year institutions even as overall college enrolment rose. University of California campuses saw computer science enrolment fall 6 percent after a 3 percent decline the year before, driven by tech layoffs and growing uncertainty about whether entry-level coding jobs will still exist once AI tools mature. In their place, dedicated AI majors are surging; MIT’s AI and decision-making programme has already become its second-largest major, suggesting that even within the tech field itself, a further narrowing toward AI specifically, away from general computing, is under way.

If Pakistan follows the trajectory of the computer science boom and its own MBA experience, the AI and IT saturation may arrive faster than expected: a glut of graduates chasing a shrinking pool of entry-level tech roles, some of which may themselves be automated by the very AI systems these students are being trained to build. Meanwhile, the physical sciences, social sciences, medicine and engineering could face a talent shortage just as the country needs them most, whether to manage public health, plan cities, conduct scientific research or simply teach the next generation.

The remedy is not to discourage students from studying AI or IT—these fields are genuinely valuable and Pakistan needs more of that talent. However, we must also restore the credibility and career prospects of the classical disciplines with better funding for research, stronger links between social science degrees and public sector employment, modernised curricula in physics and chemistry that connect to real industry and clearer signalling to students that a one-track national bet on any single field, however hot it looks today, rarely pays off for a whole generation at once.

The writer is a tenured professor at the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Biomedical Materials (IRCBM), COMSATS University, Islamabad, Lahore Campus. He holds a PhD in materials from Shanghai, China. He can be contacted at: [email protected].