These days, it’s not the orange light from the desert or the palm trees that greet you as you stroll around Arizona State’s Tempe campus. It’s how frequently students bring up AI in casual conversation, such as at the coffee cart, outside the library, or in between classes, just as a previous generation might have brought up Wikipedia or email. The majority of the nation hasn’t quite caught up to how quickly things have changed.
Universities across the country are moving swiftly, which is something they don’t typically do. According to surveys, between 80 and 90 percent of college students use AI for some portion of their coursework, and after a year or two of defensive posturing, the universities are starting to embrace the technology. Speaking with administrators gives me the impression that the industry has finally grasped the wave’s shape. It’s another matter entirely whether they can ride it.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Sector | Higher education in the United States |
| Estimated student AI usage | 80% to 90% of college students report using AI for academics |
| Institutions cited as early movers | Arizona State University, The Ohio State University, California Community Colleges, Illinois Institute of Technology |
| Ohio State AI research funding (2015–2022) | Over $235 million |
| Illinois Tech enrollment increase after AI-driven admissions overhaul | 30% |
| Transcript evaluation time at Illinois Tech | Reduced from 36 days to under one day |
| CCC fraudulent application losses (2024) | $11 million in financial aid |
| Share of organizations getting substantial value from AI | Roughly 5%, according to BCG research |
| Key federal AI initiatives | America’s AI Action Plan; Executive Order on the Genesis Mission |
| Ohio State requirement for class of 2029 | Demonstrated AI fluency in chosen field |
Consider Illinois Institute of Technology, a smaller Chicago institution with about 7,500 students pursuing degrees. Transcript evaluation, which previously took 36 days, now takes less than a day thanks to its leaders’ reconstruction of the admissions pipeline using AI and cloud technologies. Enrollment increased by thirty percent. In higher education, where committees may need a semester to set up a meeting, numbers like that typically don’t move very quickly. It’s difficult not to interpret this as a subliminal warning to peers who move more slowly.
Ohio State has expanded. All undergraduates, including those majoring in biology, English, or accounting, will be required to exhibit AI fluency starting in the class of 2029. Between 2015 and 2022, the university received more than $235 million in funding for AI research, and it currently operates a cross-college research hub that connects engineering, medicine, agriculture, and the humanities. According to Shereen Agrawal, who oversees the Center for Software Innovation there, AI fluency will become “ubiquitous” in three to five years. Perhaps she is correct. The timeline’s detractors would point out that ten years ago, universities made similar promises about coding, but those promises fell short.
The largest higher education system in the nation, with 116 institutions and 2.2 million students, is the California Community Colleges system. Scale and fraud are its problems, not ambition. Nearly one-third of applications were reported as fraudulent in 2024, costing the system $11 million in financial aid losses. Ironically, AI tools are now the primary defense, identifying twice as many fraudulent applicants as human reviewers could.
Not everyone feels at ease. The same debates about cheating, the gradual decline of writing as a discipline, and whether or not students are truly learning will be heard in faculty lounges at practically every school. These worries are not paranoid. According to a recent Chronicle of Higher Education survey, 67% of leaders lack a clear AI strategy or have not taken any action. The majority of anxiety resides in that space between adoption on the ground and direction from the top.
It’s remarkable how similar this is to the internet’s introduction on campuses in the 1990s: the same skepticism, the same uneven adoption, and the same few universities that took the initiative and succeeded. As this develops, there’s a sense that the schools making large bets now will be the ones standing in twenty years. For the next ten years, the others will have to explain why they didn’t.
