How Is AI Transforming Higher Education?

AI is transforming higher education in four main ways: students use it to study and write, universities buy it for whole campuses, advisors use it to spot students who are about to drop out, and it is forcing teachers to rethink how they grade. A 2024 Digital Education Council survey found 86% of students already use AI in their studies, while only 22% of respondents to the 2025 EDUCAUSE study reported an AI strategy covering their whole institution, so use has run well ahead of planning. We work with edtech companies on growth, and the change we watch most closely is the newest one, which is that students now ask AI tools where to study before they ever visit a college website.

How many students and faculty use AI today

Students started using AI well before most universities had a plan for it. The Digital Education Council reported in August 2024 that 86% of students use AI in their studies and 54% use it every week, with ChatGPT, Grammarly and Microsoft Copilot the most popular tools. In the US, Tyton Partners surveyed more than 3,300 students, instructors and administrators at over 900 colleges for its Time for Class 2025 report and found weekly use at 42% of students and 30% of instructors.

Institutions have moved more slowly. According to EdScoop’s report on the 2025 EDUCAUSE AI study, 57% of respondents called AI a strategic priority, up from 49% the year before, but only 22% had an institution-wide AI strategy, and 34% believed their leaders underestimate what AI will cost.

Where AI is changing teaching and learning

A major shift is that universities now license AI tools for everyone instead of leaving students to use free versions on their own. Arizona State University became the first higher education institution to work with OpenAI when it took on ChatGPT Enterprise in January 2024 (ASU and OpenAI), and in February 2025 the California State University system announced ChatGPT Edu for more than 460,000 students and over 63,000 faculty and staff across 23 campuses (CSUN News).

The tools themselves are also changing to suit learning rather than shortcuts. OpenAI launched study mode for ChatGPT in July 2025, which walks students through problems with guiding questions, hints and quizzes instead of handing over the answer (OpenAI). On the staff side, Cal State said faculty would use ChatGPT Edu to handle administrative tasks and free up time for teaching and research.

How AI helps with student support and retention

Georgia State University has some of the clearest evidence. In 2016 it launched Pounce, a text message chatbot built with AdmitHub, for half of more than 7,000 admitted students, and the group who could use it had a summer melt rate 21.4% lower than the group who could not, meaning fewer admitted students failed to show up in the fall (Campus Technology). Fewer than 1% of the more than 50,000 student messages needed a staff member to answer.

The university also runs GPS Advising, which, according to its testimony to the US Senate HELP Committee, tracks more than 30,000 students every day against 800 risk factors, with an advisor usually reaching out within 48 hours of an alert. In the year described, those alerts led to 43,000 one-on-one meetings, which shows where the real value sits, since the software only finds the student and a person still has the conversation.

What AI means for assignments, grading and cheating

Catching AI-written work with software has turned out to be unreliable. OpenAI withdrew its own AI text classifier on July 20, 2023, citing its low rate of accuracy (Search Engine Land), and a month later Vanderbilt University disabled Turnitin’s AI detector, noting that a 1% false positive rate applied to the 75,000 papers it submitted in 2022 could have wrongly flagged around 750 student papers (Vanderbilt University).

That is why many instructors are redesigning assessment instead of policing it, for example with in-class writing, oral exams, drafts submitted in stages or assignments that ask students to show how they used AI. Tyton’s 2025 report notes that many faculty feel burdened by this redesign.

The risks universities are still working through

The open questions are privacy, fairness and over-reliance on the tools. UNESCO published guidance on generative AI in education and research in September 2023, calling on governments to protect data privacy and to consider a minimum age of 13 for using these tools in the classroom (UN News). The US Department of Education’s 2023 report on AI in teaching and learning made keeping humans in the loop its first recommendation (Inside Higher Ed), which matches what Georgia State shows in practice.

Cost gets less attention than it should, since campus licenses, staff training and assessment redesign all take money, and in the EDUCAUSE study only 2% of respondents reported new funding sources for AI work.

How AI is changing the way students choose a college

Students now research programs inside AI tools as well as search engines. A 2025 study by UPCEA and Search Influence of 760 prospective adult students found that 50% use AI tools at least weekly, 79% read Google AI Overviews, and 56% are more likely to trust a brand cited in one (UPCEA). If a university or edtech company is missing from those answers, many prospects will never reach its website. Admissions and marketing teams are also putting AI to work on their own side, in the ways we describe in how AI is used in marketing.

We have seen this from the other side with Score Smart, the SAT prep platform we run growth for, where a test-prep article we published ranked #1 on Google and was cited in a Google AI Overview in June 2026. In our experience the pages that get cited answer the question directly in the first lines and are written for the exact search students type, which is the heart of what content marketing does.

Questions we get asked

Will AI replace professors?

We have not seen evidence pointing that way. The strongest results so far, such as Georgia State’s, come from AI doing the sorting and answering routine questions while people do the teaching and advising.

Is it cheating for students to use AI?

It depends on the course policy, and policies vary widely between and even within universities. Students should check each syllabus, and instructors should state plainly which uses are allowed, since detection software cannot settle the question reliably.

How should a university or edtech company show up in AI search?

Publish pages that answer the specific questions students ask, such as costs, entry requirements and outcomes, in plain language near the top of the page, and keep program facts consistent everywhere they appear. Our post on the pros and cons of AI in education covers the classroom side in more detail, and programs that also want to reach students on social platforms can follow our step-by-step social media growth plan.

What AI tools do universities give students?

The most common campus-wide AI tools are licensed chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu, used across the California State University system, and Google’s Gemini for Education, which Google offers at no cost to accredited higher education institutions and says reached more than 10 million students at over 1,000 US colleges by September 2025 (Google).

Licensed campus versions come with data protections for the institution, so students should use the campus version when one exists instead of a personal account.

Are colleges using AI to review applications?

Some colleges now use AI in admissions, and Virginia Tech, for example, pairs each essay’s human reader with an AI reviewer built on a large language model its researchers tested for accuracy and fairness, starting with the cycle that opened in August 2025 (Virginia Tech News). Final admissions decisions are still made only by trained admissions staff.

If the human and AI scores differ by more than two points on the 12-point scale, a second person reads the essay, so the AI replaces one of the two human readers the process used before, while a person still reads every essay.

How can students use AI without breaking academic rules?

Students can use AI safely by following each course’s written policy, using it to explain ideas, quiz themselves or check their understanding instead of writing the work they hand in, and keeping notes of how they used it in case an instructor asks. Tools built for learning, such as ChatGPT study mode and Gemini’s Guided Learning, are designed for exactly that kind of use.

If you run a university program or an edtech company and want to know how your site performs in Google and AI search, start with our free SEO audit, and see how we work with education brands on our edtech marketing and generative engine optimization pages.