For much of the past few years, conversations about artificial intelligence on college campuses have centered on how students use it in the classroom, with a special emphasis on academic integrity and learning. But AI is increasingly touching a much broader range of the student experience.
Recent initiatives and research show the technology influencing how colleges identify students who may need additional help, where young people turn for emotional support, how students learn and experiment, and the skills they’ll need after graduation. At the same time, students themselves have expressed concerns about their dependence on AI and how well their institutions are responding to its rapid rise.
Here are five ways colleges are drawing on artificial intelligence to reshape student success.
- Identifying struggling students.
Students often leave clues that they’re struggling before they stop attending classes or exit college altogether. But those warning signs can be scattered across different offices and data systems, making it difficult for college staff to see the full picture or intervene before a student reaches a crisis point.
As colleges increasingly experiment with artificial intelligence, some are exploring whether the technology can help connect those dots and make student support more proactive. Austin Community College, for one, is testing a new initiative designed to identify student needs earlier.
The public two-year institution recently announced the Digital Twin Initiative, a partnership with the Trellis Foundation, a Texas-based nonprofit, that will use AI and real-time student data to identify potential barriers before they derail a student’s progress. An $875,000 grant from the foundation will support the initiative.
The college plans to integrate information from across its systems to create a more holistic picture of individual students’ experiences, helping staff identify emerging needs and connect students more quickly with advising, tutoring, financial aid, mental health services and basic needs resources. This fall, ACC is rolling out an initial version of the platform to roughly 46,000 active credit students, with additional features planned for the spring.
Russell Lowery-Hart, chancellor of Austin Community College, said colleges already collect large amounts of student data and often use early-alert systems to identify struggling students, but implementing interventions can still require multiple steps before a student actually receives help. ACC wants to use AI to shorten the time between identifying a problem and connecting a student with support.
“The grade goes in, the student gets notified and the student then immediately has options to schedule tutoring. It could be right then and there with an online tutor or a tutoring center that’s closest to them, and give them the options of time and availability and how to get there. That’s what we’re trying to build,” Lowery-Hart said. “Early alerts are a great step, but AI gives us an opportunity to remove a lot of the clunky bureaucracy that makes interventions too late for a lot of our students.”
- Understanding why students turn to AI for emotional support.
As concerns about college student mental health continue to grow, new data shows that the next generation of students may arrive on campus with different expectations for where—and how—they receive support.
A new survey commissioned by Uwill, a digital mental health and wellness platform designed for college students, offers a glimpse into the mental health and help-seeking behaviors of students approaching college, compared with those nearing graduation. College Pulse conducted the survey in June among a nationally representative sample of 1,020 rising high school and college seniors enrolled at four-year institutions nationwide.
High school seniors were more than twice as likely as college seniors to turn to artificial intelligence at least weekly to discuss relationships or emotional issues, 26 percent compared with 12 percent. The survey also found just 41 percent of high school seniors rated their mental health as “very good” or “good.”
Among high school seniors who use AI for such conversations, 21 percent said they turn to the technology because they “don’t have anyone else to talk to,” compared with 7 percent of college seniors who responded that way. Some 11 percent of high school seniors said AI is more supportive than their friends, compared with 2 percent of college seniors.
Michael London, founder and chief executive officer of Uwill, said colleges will have to grapple with incoming students increasingly turning to AI for emotional support, particularly when they see the technology as a substitute for people they can trust.
“If a person says, ‘I have nobody else I can talk to,’ they’re essentially saying there’s nobody else I can trust. If that’s true, and they want to just use AI for that, it’s really troubling,” London said.
- Teaching students to use AI effectively and responsibly.
College students have complex feelings about artificial intelligence and how their institutions are responding to its rise. Data from Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice: Amplified survey of 1,038 two- and four-year students found that most are neither AI evangelists nor outright opponents, and many are actively using AI for coursework. Roughly four in 10 are concerned about dependence on AI tools, even as six in 10 see AI’s primary value to them in college as learning support.
“That’s not technophobia or avoidance for ethical reasoning, that’s students paying attention to what’s happening to their thinking,” said Tawnya Means, founder of the consultancy Inspire Higher Ed and a strategic innovation and AI adviser at Bowling Green State University who regularly writes about AI. “They’re using the tools and getting nervous about the relationship.”
Students also see room for colleges to improve their response. Just 10 percent of respondents said their institution was handling the rise of AI “very well,” while a plurality, 34 percent, described their institution’s efforts as inconsistent. When asked what they most want their institution to do, 56 percent identified teaching students how to use AI effectively and responsibly.
“Students are telling us they want AI woven into how they actually learn, and institutions are responding with policies and occasional workshops that go nowhere near that,” Means said. Regarding students’ worries about dependency, in particular, “The institutional response to that concern has largely been either to ignore it or to say, ‘Use AI responsibly’ and call it a day. Neither helps.”
- Creating spaces for students to experiment.
Santa Clara University’s AI Kitchen is a workshop launched this spring where students, faculty, staff and Silicon Valley professionals gather each week to experiment with emerging artificial intelligence tools.
Every Friday, about 50 participants test new AI tools and explore how they’re being used across fields ranging from medicine and marketing to education and real estate.
Kai Lukoff, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Santa Clara, said the name “AI Kitchen” was chosen intentionally.
“The kitchen metaphor is based on research that finds that if you create a [computer science] space or a space that is kind of stereotypical tech bro culture, a lot of women and underrepresented students will opt out,” Lukoff said. “It signals that we’re going for something that’s more familiar, communal and creative, as opposed to perhaps an AI hacker space.”
To reinforce that sense of accessibility, every session is intentionally kept “code-light,” allowing an anthropology major, a computer science student and a curious staff member to participate in the same hands-on exercises.
“What I wanted to start with AI Kitchen is not just a course about AI literacy, but what one might call AI fluency,” Lukoff said. “So not just having an understanding of the tools, but also hands-on ability to work with these tools, explore their strengths and weaknesses, and engage in real-world projects that apply them.”
- Preparing students for an AI-infused workforce.
Artificial intelligence has rapidly changed the landscape of career preparation and the early-career job market. A recent report from Handshake found that students pursuing a wide range of majors are building AI-related experience as they prepare to enter the workforce.
The job market platform’s Class of What’s Next report analyzed 12.4 million U.S. candidate profiles from current students and recent graduates in the Classes of 2024 to 2030 to understand how they’re acquiring AI experience and navigating the job market. The analysis, measured as of June, looked at AI-related experience gained through coursework, projects and certifications, among other measures.
The report found that nearly two-thirds of candidates with AI-related experience aren’t computer science majors. Even when the analysis expanded to include computing, engineering and math majors, it showed that more than a quarter of candidates with experience using AI come from outside those fields. Among the most common nontechnical majors were business, economics, biology, communications, psychology and marketing.
Kerry Haring, director of product and revenue marketing at Handshake, said the findings demonstrate how students across disciplines are thinking about ways to apply AI within their fields, rather than viewing it solely as a technology for computer scientists and other technical professionals to develop.
“They truly are the class of what’s next,” Haring said. “They’re diving into, ‘What is this new technology?’ They’re figuring out what they can do, and it means different majors and different job types are going to be able to automate and leverage different things with AI.”
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