Yeah was surprised to see Computer Science and some other 'hot fields' in the list of programs getting downsized as well, wonder if there just wasn't that much demand for these majors in this particular college?
I have a theory as to why: Most other departments get to enjoy the "PhD glut" allowing them to score candidates from top graduate programs and then pay them around $60K/year, and then filling things out by with adjunct professors who are often paid in the range of $1500-$4500 to teach a class for a semester. It's why it's not unheard of for adjunct profs to be on some form of welfare to make ends meet.
I suspect it's far more difficult to recruit Computer Science PhDs who will work at these prices, so they probably have to rely on more expensive full-time, tenure-track faculty who likely are paid more than their peers. If you're passionate about teaching or your area of research, you'll probably cope with the lower pay - but that greatly narrows the pool of applicants, especially when FAANGs will pay you 5x more to work for them.
Because despite all high paying jobs being in STEM or economics fields, the enrollment is actually dropping in those directions. And yes this is very confused by recovery from COVID, but the reality is that there was a dropping trend that started long before COVID, and today CS (or Math, or Physics, or economics for that matter) enrollment hasn't even recovered to the point it would have been at had the drop continued without COVID happening.
But yes last year we saw an increase, for obvious reasons, and the speed at which enrollment is currently dropping is lower than it was before COVID, but there's still less STEM graduates every year. Not just in the US, essentially everywhere.
On top of that young people are still running away from STEM degrees to liberal arts degrees of various kinds (but that doesn't work as well as you'd think because there's other problems there). Not even to all of liberal arts, just a few core directions.
