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TEXAS — Tucked away in the engineering building at the University of North Texas (UNT), Dr. Lotfi Ben Othmane is working on lesson plans for this fall.
“They’re going to start having courses on AI,” said Othmane.
He’ll be teaching a new course on artificial intelligence.
“The program is loaded with basics like software engineering, and for computer designs, we know that to help the student to acquire more things… we need to lower the bar in the foundation and give them that chance,” Othmane said. “And how can we do that? Through a degree.”
UNT already offers a master’s in AI, which isn’t uncommon among universities in Texas. But only a select group of universities offer undergraduate degrees in AI.
Spectrum News first began reporting about the option for a Bachelor of Science in AI in 2024 at the University of Texas in San Antonio. The list is growing and now includes the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Texas at Dallas and Angelo State University.
Other schools like Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin allow students to get a degree in computer science with specialized AI courses and certificates.
UNT will join the list of schools offering bachelors in AI in the fall, wanting to get ahead of the demand for workers.
“The industry, they discovered an added value of the machine learning, so they started hiring,” said Othmane.
According to the nonprofit Think Tank, 2036, it comes as AI jobs are expected to increase in Texas by 27% over the next decade.
Othamne said his students are just as eager to apply for those jobs.
“They know it’s needed in the market, so they ask us to teach them, so that’s also actually driving that,” said Othmane.
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