How AI Is Reshaping College Education
The New Campus Reality How Students Use AI
On a blustery spring Thursday at New York University, undergraduates Alex and Eugene met for noodles to discuss a topic sweeping through academia: the use of artificial intelligence in schoolwork. Alex, once an aspiring artist, had pivoted to a more practical career path in accounting. He admitted his initial claim of using AI just for organizing notes was a massive understatement. "Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.," he confessed. His toolkit included Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning, and Gemini for images, with ChatGPT handling more general tasks, even, he joked, helping him "text girls."
Alex's candidness revealed a new normal. He laughed when asked if AI helped schedule our meeting, replying, "Honestly, yeah. I'm not tryin' to type all that. Could you tell?"
A Code Red for Academia
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, it gained a million users in under a week. Unlike previous chatbots, ChatGPT could hold coherent conversations and simplify complex topics. This sent shockwaves through the tech world, with Google declaring a "code red," but the panic was even more profound among educators. The tool was a homework killer, capable of drafting a full essay in seconds.
Campuses scrambled to regulate AI, but their efforts were largely futile. To demonstrate, Alex pulled up a paper for his art-history class. He had visited the museum exhibition, photographed the art and wall text, and fed it all to Claude with the professor's prompt. "I'm trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I'm not hella fucking with," he said. After one revision, the AI-generated essay earned him an A-minus. He admitted that if pressed for details, he'd have been "so fucked."
Eugene, who used AI for computations but not writing, was both amazed and skeptical. "This passed the A.I. detector?" he asked. AI detection services like GPTZero analyze text for machine-generated patterns, but their reliability is questionable. A check of Alex's paper yielded conflicting results, with one detector flagging a 28% chance of AI use and another a 61% chance.
When asked if this was cheating, Alex's response was immediate: "Of course. Are you fucking kidding me?"
"There’s still one juror who hasn’t been properly intimidated."
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
Redefining Cheating in the Digital Age
Alex's use of AI extended beyond academics. He used it as a confidant and a life coach, asking for dating tips and motivation. The tool had even helped draft his application to NYU. "I guess it's really dishonest, but, fuck it, I'm here," he said. Eugene offered a more nuanced take, viewing the art-history essay as a victimless crime. It was about fulfilling a requirement, not pretending to be a scholar.
This sentiment reflects a broader generational shift. Today's students, who grew up Googling answers and using grammar checkers, often see AI as just another productivity tool. A 2024 Pew survey found that a quarter of teens use ChatGPT for schoolwork, a number many believe is a low estimate. While educators debated definitions of cheating, students were already masters of the new technology, with online influencers coaching them on how to "humanize" AI text and avoid detection.
Faced with an unwinnable war, many academic administrations shifted their stance from prohibition to hopeful integration. Universities like Oxford, Arizona State, and Penn's Wharton School began experimenting with AI in their curricula. In May, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a product designed for campus-wide use, signaling a future where personalized AI accounts could accompany students throughout their college careers.
The Faculty Response Back to Blue Books or Embrace the Bot
The rise of AI has forced a reckoning, particularly in the humanities. Why teach writing when a machine can do it instantly? Corey Robin, a political science professor at Brooklyn College, stopped assigning take-home essays after his high-school-aged daughter produced a sophisticated paper with ChatGPT. He reverted to in-class, blue-book exams. "Know the text and write about it intelligently," he said. "That was a way of honoring their autonomy without being a cop."
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at UVA, also returned to blue books and is even considering oral exams after students submitted suspected AI work for an assignment about AI. "Maybe we go all the way back to 450 B.C.," he mused.
However, other educators argue that the problem isn't the tool, but outdated teaching methods. Dan Melzer, who directs the writing program at UC Davis, calls the standard five-paragraph essay "outdated." He believes that years of standardized testing have taught students to produce robotic, formulaic writing. His solution is to lean into the process-drafting, peer feedback, and revision, even using ChatGPT as a collaborative partner. "If you assign a generic essay topic and don't engage in any process... it's almost like you're creating an environment tailored to crime," he said.
"Yes, of course we’ll chase the gazelle, just as soon as I hear a status update from everyone."
Cartoon by Kendra Allenby
The Student Calculus Opportunity Cost and Efficiency
College is a game of opportunity costs. While students in the 1960s reportedly spent 24 hours a week studying, today's estimate is closer to 15. This isn't necessarily because they are less stressed; rather, the pressure has shifted to extracurriculars and pre-professional pursuits. AI offers a powerful way to manage this pressure.
Eddie, a non-traditional student at Long Beach State, uses ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner but draws a line at letting it write for him. Still, he admits to using it for quizzes when pressed for time. May, a Georgetown sophomore, was initially resistant but now uses it for nearly all her classes to breeze through busywork. This allows her to engage more deeply with subjects she loves and, crucially, to get more rest. "I was trying to think, Where's all this time going?" she said. "I sleep more now."
This efficiency comes at a cost. The ability to bypass difficulty means students may also be bypassing learning. Many describe a trajectory from using AI as an assistant to off-loading their thinking entirely. Kevin, a Syracuse student, feels a sense of moral superiority for writing his own papers but also acknowledges the trade-off. "I would have loved to hang out with my friends more. What did I gain? I made my life harder for all that time."
A Tool for Learning or a Crutch for Thinking
Could AI revolutionize education for the better? Some researchers think so. A Harvard study on an AI physics tutor found that students who used it were more engaged and performed better on tests. But the dream of AI as a learning accelerant has its limits. Barry Lam, a philosophy professor at UC Riverside, decided to test this by giving his AI-using students a Ph.D.-level question for their final. "They fucking failed it miserably," he said.
Lam doesn't see AI use as a moral failing but as a potential waste of time. He tells his students, "If you're gonna just turn in a paper that's ChatGPT-generated, then I will grade all your work by ChatGPT and we can all go to the beach."
As AI gets better at mimicking human writing, some worry that we are starting to sound like it. One student ran her own essay through a detector because she feared her phrasing was becoming too much like ChatGPT's. This highlights a central irony: as the craft of writing is devalued, original human writing becomes an even more valuable resource for training the very models that threaten it.
The Unstoppable Force Who Is Really to Blame
Ultimately, the students may not be the ones to blame. They are early adopters navigating a system that they did not create. They didn't ask for laptops in elementary school, for Zoom classes during a pandemic, or for the creation of AI. They are adapting to a world that prizes high-speed takes over slow deliberation and sends conflicting messages about what skills are valuable.
Educational institutions have quickly moved from trying to ban AI to partnering with AI companies, deeming a technology that didn't exist a few years ago as essential to the future. Education rests on the belief that learning is a process of wrestling with difficulty, doubt, and failure. AI allows us to feel like an expert instantly, but it risks stripping away the very process that makes us human.
Alex and Eugene are not lazy; they are radically resourceful, editing out anything they deem extraneous from their college experience. A few weeks after our meeting, Alex e-mailed an update on his final papers for his humanities classes. He spent about an hour on two papers that would have normally taken him eight or nine. The grades? An A-minus and a B-plus. "I didn't retain anything," he wrote. "I couldn't tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha."
