On November 30, 2022, OpenAI officially released ChatGPT, igniting a global wave of generative AI. More and more top US universities are starting to offer separate undergraduate programs in “Artificial Intelligence.”
The list is impressive: the University of Pennsylvania—the first Ivy League university to offer an undergraduate engineering degree in AI; Carnegie Mellon University—the first undergraduate AI program in the US; the University of Southern California—newest in 2026, with three specializations; and MIT, Rice, Northwestern, Duke… But I must first pour some cold water on this: although these programs are all called “AI,” after four years, some students become AI engineers capable of writing algorithms and tuning models, some become tech-savvy business professionals, and some go straight to a PhD. The name is the same, but the knowledge and career paths can be completely different.
Today, we’ll clarify the history of undergraduate AI programs in the US: Why did it suddenly become so popular? Which schools are now offering such programs? What does the curriculum look like? What are the career prospects? Finally, I’ll give you a set of six hard criteria for choosing a major to help you avoid the pitfall of “same name, different fate.”
PART.01 Why are there so many AI undergraduate majors suddenly appearing?

Let’s start with a commonly misunderstood fact: traditional Computer Science (CS) hasn’t “cooled down and disappeared,” it’s just become more specialized.
For the past few decades, CS was the most popular STEM major. Almost every student wanting to pursue artificial intelligence had to start with CS and then take machine learning and AI-related courses within it. However, in recent years, as AI has transformed from “laboratory technology” into “infrastructure for the whole society,” universities have found that the original CS curriculum can no longer accommodate AI.
We can summarize the changes of the past two years into a “three-stage trend model”:
Stage 1: AI is just one direction within CS. The traditional model involves offering a few elective courses in machine learning and artificial intelligence within CS, which students who want to study AI choose in their junior or senior year.
Stage 2: AI becomes independent from CS. Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Penn, Rice, Northwestern, and USC have all established independent undergraduate AI programs, allowing students to “directly study AI” from their freshman year without having to go through a circumventing CS first.
The third stage: AI begins to intersect with other fields. AI + Business (USC), AI + Robotics, AI + Healthcare, AI + Finance, AI + Cognitive Science… the main axis of future professional expansion is the combination of AI with other fields.
Therefore, the top 30 universities have collectively completed a “structural adjustment”—independent AI degrees, AI becoming a core CS course, and AI + X interdisciplinary programs have become the three key words.