85% of College Students Report AI Use (insidehighered.com) 57
College students have integrated generative AI into their academic routines at an unprecedented scale as 85% report usage for coursework in the past year, according to new Inside Higher Ed survey data. The majority employ AI tools for brainstorming ideas, seeking tutoring assistance, and exam preparation rather than wholesale academic outsourcing. Only 25% admitted using AI to complete assignments entirely, while 19% generated full essays.
Students overwhelmingly reject institutional policing approaches, with 53% favoring education on ethical AI use over detection software deployment. Despite widespread adoption, 35% of respondents report no change in their perception of college value, while 23% view their degrees as more valuable in the AI era.
Students overwhelmingly reject institutional policing approaches, with 53% favoring education on ethical AI use over detection software deployment. Despite widespread adoption, 35% of respondents report no change in their perception of college value, while 23% view their degrees as more valuable in the AI era.
85% of college students cannot find a job (Score:2)
four years later because a lack of even the most basic academic skills like creativity or reasoning.
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The U3-unemployment rate for recent grads is 5.8%, not 85%, but that is still higher than the national average of 4.2% for all workers.
The days when a college degree automatically led to a good job are long gone.
Students need to understand that they should not choose a major based on what they find most interesting, but rather something interesting that also leads to a job.
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It really is only in the last five or six years that college grads had higher unemployment. And hilariously the liberal arts degrees still have low unemployment. It's the tech industry getting its ass kicked. Fuck tons of h1b's brought in bulk.
Every now and then I see a little bit of rebellion on the internet over the sheer amount of cheap overseas work visa labor being brought in. But the right wing s
Re:85% of college students cannot find a job (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh great. Spend years studying some subject that bores you stiff just so you can then spend the rest of your life doing a job you hate.
Personally I think if people are not studying the thing they find most interesting and have the most passion for they should not be there. Without that drive they will not excel at it and they are wasting the educational resources that could have been used for someone with passion for it.
There is that (Score:3)
..but also a lot of graduate level jobs are going to be eliminated by AI, and those that are still open will be taken by displaced mid career employees desperate for work. I must admit I'm in two minds as to whether this is a realistic scenario, in general, but specifically I'd have thought a lot of database and coding jobs will be lost due to AI, even if it advances little further than its current state. I've often wondered about how someone who has used AI for 4 years will cope in their final exams, where
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a lot of graduate level jobs are going to be eliminated by AI
And a lot of other jobs will be created. Historically, the jobs created have been more numerous and more lucrative than the jobs eliminated. Maybe "this time is different", but that isn't clear. We are well into 3rd-Wave AI, and so far, we still have near record low unemployment.
Re:There is that (Score:5, Insightful)
I drive an 18 year old Jeep Wrangler.
Same vehicle I've driven for the last 18 years.
I've been employed for all of that time, minus a few weeks. So has my wife.
I make a good salary. So does my wife.
I've made a good salary for those 18 years. So has my wife.
Plenty of people drive a basic, old vehicle because 1). They don't give a fuck about "status symbols" and 2). They have better uses for their money than pissing it away on expensive depreciating assets.
Maybe you're seeing more of them on the road because more people are coming to their senses, not because they can't afford "better".
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Ever wonder if the reason people lost everything during the Great Depression was because for the 18 years prior to that life was good, and no one saw that shit coming with crystal ball clarity?
No doubt that people didn't see it coming.
But you know what? You can't see when you don't look.
Lets stop pretending seeing the future, is that easy.
It is not hard to see possibilities. It is not hard to consider this scenario:
1). Things will continue as they are.
2). Things will change.
It's just not rocket science. I think EVERYBODY can consider that scenario.
The big difference in people is their response and whether they choose to prepare for the second situation, or choose to ignore that possibility.
You and your wife could be forced into unemployed tomorrow.
You are absolutely right. In fact, I've been forced to leav
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Yeah, and I have no car at all. But that's not really the point.
Driving a paid off car (or not having to make car payments by not owning a car) is definitely the smart choice. I was laid off in June, and I'm still thankful that I don't have car payments to make on top of a mortgage.
But we're actually the weirdos. The AC is right: broadly speaking, when times are good, people loooooove wasting their money on cars they don't need. Look at every lifted F-150 on the roads. Mostly useless as an actual truck, bad
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Yeah, and I have no car at all. But that's not really the point.
Driving a paid off car (or not having to make car payments by not owning a car) is definitely the smart choice.
I don't miss that point at all. I agree with it and have made the same choice myself.
The AC is right: broadly speaking, when times are good, people loooooove wasting their money on cars they don't need.
Well, I don't disagree with that. If anything I said made it sound like I did, that is my fault for being unclear.
Look at every lifted F-150 on the roads. Mostly useless as an actual truck, bad on gas, only used to commute a few km to the office and pick up groceries. Nothing ever goes in the bed (it's too high to reach anyway), it never tows anything, and it doesn't fit in a driveway, let alone a parking spot.
Sure. It's a fashion statement. Not one I particularly care to make (I'm far too practical and boring) and I'm always happy to laugh at a stupid looking truck, for sure. But I can't really claim to own the one true truth when it comes to fashion.
Then there are the luxury cars, the top-end EVs, etc.
I dunno if you've looked at the news lately...
I read the news all day, every day. I'm a news junkie. I'm annoyed
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Okay, I see where you're coming from, and I know people like you that are very pedantic about language and I'm not going to be critical of it in particular. That's how you interpret things, okay. :)
(Also, don't think that I'm ragging on your choice of vehicle. Every time I see one that's obviously fairly old, I know it's because it's a practical choice. I don't actually have any problems with trucks over any other sort of car, I just detest that knowing what we know now, it's popular to buy huge trucks that
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A few years ago, everyone had a new Tesla, Mercedes or Audi. Now, we are seeing people grateful they found a ten year old Corolla because it runs and the previous owner took decent care of it.
So what happened to those new cars?
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a lot of graduate level jobs are going to be eliminated by AI
And a lot of other jobs will be created. Historically, the jobs created have been more numerous and more lucrative than the jobs eliminated. Maybe "this time is different", but that isn't clear. We are well into 3rd-Wave AI, and so far, we still have near record low unemployment.
If AI even gets halfway decent this WILL be different this time. Because it is. At NO other point in human history have we looked to replace the human mind. We are doing that now. And there is no “go get an education and learn something else” answer for that, like we gave every OTHER time in history.
Capable AI doesn’t merely make people temporary unemployed. It’s looking to make humans permanently unemployable. Counting waves of AI won’t matter. The last wave will be the
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Things aren't quite *that* bad. The unemployment rate for recent graduates is 5.8%. https://apnews.com/article/col... [apnews.com].
Sure, a lot of those students are classified as under-employed. But it's 52%, not 85%. https://www.insidehighered.com... [insidehighered.com]
Many students are under-employed because they majored in subjects that are not in demand. Sorry, that humanities major just doesn't lead to a wide variety of job offers. For those students, being under-employed seems reasonable, until they figure out something more substant
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Many students are under-employed because they majored in subjects that are not in demand. Sorry, that humanities major just doesn't lead to a wide variety of job offers. For those students, being under-employed seems reasonable, until they figure out something more substantial to sink their teeth into.
Many students are lucky to be employed at all because they majored in subjects that have never been in demand and never will be outside of a classroom.
You’re assuming the one who spent six figures on a degree in lesbian dance theory is capable of a more substantial thought process. They've kind of already proven they are not.
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Such people can still work at Walmart or Starbucks. They would fall into the under-employed category.
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Things aren't quite *that* bad.
The comment is tongue and cheek, not a literal description of the current job market statistics. The author feels extensive use of AI by college students will damage their employability in the future.
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A /s notation might have helped express your humorous intent. (Did you just out yourself???)
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85% would have more problems to find a job before AI, because their grammar was abysmal. Now their cover letter may have some signs of AI text, but is written that it is pleasing to read for most humans.
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four years later because a lack of even the most basic academic skills like creativity or reasoning.
This all comes down to how well universities adapt the existence of LLMs. Bridges didn't start collapsing after calculators were invented because engineers couldn't do arithmetic anymore. My daughter's middle school already makes sure all her graded writing is done in class on paper or on monitored devices. My 11 year old already uses LLMs (and Khan Academy and ProWritingAid) to improve her writing, but assessments are always done in a way that makes LLM use impossible.
PSA: this is your brain on AI. (Score:2)
Is this anything like drug use?
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I tried asking ChatGPT to quiz me on some stuff that I was learning, and some of its own quiz answers were wrong. So, it can't be trusted.
But I have also asked it some very technical questions for stuff I needed to get up-to-speed on for work, and the info was very useful and turned out to all be correct.
So, it seems like it is still hit-or-miss.
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Is this anything like drug use?
Yes, drugs won the war on drugs and automated systems will win the war on thinking.
Cheating isn't OK, but... (Score:3)
College (and school at all levels) have had crap homework for a long time. Many schools have substituted make-work for real learning. And AP classes are worse. They aren't more intellectually stimulating, they just have more tons of homework.
Specifically...
Multiple choice tests are usually poorly designed. Two of the four answers are usually ridiculously wrong, so much so that it's possible to exclude them without knowing the material. Then it's usually a 50/50 chance of guessing the right answer from the other two choices. That gives a savvy test-taker an average 75% score without any preparation.
True/false questions are even worse. There are so many wording errors in true/false questions, that a smart kid can argue for their wrong answer, and get it right on a technicality, most of the time. Yeah, I did that a lot in school.
The sheer quantity of homework is ridiculous. Again
My solution? Use class time for assignments. Yeah, there's enough class time for the most important stuff. It's a lot harder to use AI to cheat while in class. Let kids be kids when they go home. Sure, some homework is a good thing, but schools have gone way, way overboard with it.
Re:Cheating isn't OK, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Use class time for assignments
That how a Flipped classroom [wikipedia.org] works.
Students watch a video of the lecture and then complete the "homework" in class, applying what they learned from the video, while the teacher moves around the classroom to help those who are stuck.
This prevents cheating and also helps ADHD students who struggle to sit still through a lecture.
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Cool, I'm glad the concept has a name. Maybe AI will help give it some traction, as it makes the old hyper-homework model more difficult to implement.
So to be fair this was 8 years ago (Score:3)
I have mentioned before but even going back to high school I would sometimes wake up at midnight to take a whiz and find my kids still working on homework.
In college my kid had all the regular general education stuff you would expect on top of a ton of on-the-job training they had to do to graduate.
Naturally we had to pay for all that and naturally when they got out of college h
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I mostly agree with you, especially about the "too much homework" sentiment.
But not this:
The kids especially are literally competing for who gets to have food and shelter at this point
No, they aren't. The college grad unemployment rate is just 5.2%. https://apnews.com/article/col... [apnews.com]. If you can't beat out the bottom 5.2% of graduates for a job, you aren't competing, you're slacking.
For high school unemployment rates, I don't have current numbers, but in 2022 it was 4.2%. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2... [bls.gov].
As for competition for classes, this is only true in big name-brand schools. There are plenty of
The bottom 5% (Score:2)
One of the problems with people who lean right is they are perfectly okay with letting 5% of the population just fuck off and die.
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Did you know that most homeless people actively resist housing, when offered? If you had ever volunteered in a homeless shelter, you would know this. Many of them literally build outdoor courtyards because the homeless people who do come to them for help, don't want to be confined indoors. Things are not so black and white as you think they are. Not everyone *wants* the lifestyle you consider to be your human right.
And as for homeless people dying, there is NO shortage of food for anyone who wants food. The
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It's the opposite in Australia. There's a lot less homework now than there was in the '80s and '90s.
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The struggles your kids have are obvious. You are trying to fix stupid with education. That does not work. No amount of studding will help with the fact they are obviously borderline retards.
You can get between 3 - 4 GPA in most American high schools by keeping a chair warm and scrawling thru your homework in a single study hall period and the bus ride in the morning.
If your kids were working that hard the problem was THEM not the school.
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You know you're going to die into death camps with everyone else right? Stalin was not nice to his supporters.
Doomed as doomed can be. (Score:3)
But it also depends on instructors getting a clue and grading on original thought and not rote recital.
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You won't need like 60% of high school stuff later. But it differs which percent you need. And much more important is, that you learned how to learn and that cannot be replaced by an LLM. If you cut off the knowledge at end of highschool, most LLMs can already replace you. But they won't replace you after you've got some job experience. And in particular people can now build the experience on top of letting AI doing the annoying parts. Yes of course you can do your multiplications always on paper. Or you do
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It is all about climbing the ladder before the AI takes the ladder away.
We all know it is inevitable, so rush before the train leaves the station. As you really don't want to be left behind.
College was quite a bit different back in my day (Score:2)
We had 85% of students with a case of a sexually transmitted disease, except for the engineering department of course.
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We had 85% of students with a case of a sexually transmitted disease, except for the engineering department of course.
Except..engineering? Was this in the 60s? Like before personal computers or the internet?
Just trying to understand how far back the Nerds have to go in history to find when they were getting laid on the regular, because they sure as fuck don’t recall..
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Engineers were self-quarantining before it was cool.
15% are lying (Score:2)
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"AI usage" is becoming meaningless (Score:3)
We need more differentiation.
Because, for example, gemini is better at translating whole sentences than google translate. So if I use gemini to translate one sentence in a foreign-language source, that's "AI usage" - but if I throw the same sentence into google translate, it's not?
Some stuff I write both for work and my hobbies, I through into a local LLM (for confidentiality) and ask it to flag grammar and spelling mistakes as well as confusing sentences. That's essentially a better spellchecker. Is that "AI usage"?
Heck, I figure that within the year your built-in spellchecker will be AI-based. Most IDEs already have AI doing code checking.
In some areas, we are trying. "AI assisted" is already a term I see often to contrast with "AI generated".
So in essence, the clickbait article needs to be more clear where it draws the line before its numbers have meaning.
AI: The Great Humanity Slayer (Score:2)
AI is here to stay, so deal with it (Score:3)
It's like when calculators became prevalent. Schools will have to find ways to teach and test with AI in mind so that students aren't using it as a crutch, but rather a useful tool that needs skills to use properly.