How Colleges and Students are Navigating AI

The report finds that student attitudes toward AI are mixed. Many students use AI tools regularly and recognize their potential benefits, but growing numbers also express concerns about learning quality, critical-thinking skills, environmental impacts, academic integrity, and future employment. Surveys cited in the report suggest students are simultaneously curious about AI and skeptical of its long-term effects on education and society.

The report highlights how faculty members are moving beyond concerns about cheating and instead redesigning courses, assessments, and teaching methods for an AI-enabled world. Across institutions, educators are experimenting with new approaches that emphasize critical thinking, human judgment, collaboration, communication, and reflection—skills viewed as difficult for AI to replicate. Rather than banning AI outright, many professors are teaching students how to evaluate and challenge AI-generated content while understanding the technology’s limitations.

Myers argues that AI has the potential to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration by enabling students outside computer science to contribute more meaningfully to technology-focused projects. At the same time, he emphasizes that foundational coding knowledge remains essential because students need a deep understanding of how software works in order to effectively direct and evaluate AI-generated code. As students advance, he believes coursework should increasingly focus on higher-level skills such as idea generation, refinement, testing, and problem solving, while allowing AI to automate some coding tasks. Looking ahead, Myers predicts that despite possible short-term fluctuations in interest in computer science, employers will continue to value graduates with strong technical fundamentals who can strategically apply AI tools and assess their costs and benefits.

Overall, the report concludes that higher education’s challenge is not simply adopting AI, but helping students develop the judgment, adaptability, and human-centered skills needed to use it responsibly and effectively.

Read the full report here.