A new survey from the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) and Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center is casting doubt on whether colleges and universities are ready for significant deployment of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools across their campuses.
The survey, which ran late last year, received responses from 337 university presidents, chancellors, provosts, rectors, academic affairs vice presidents, and academic deans who responded to questions about GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and CoPilot. The survey covered the current situation on campuses, struggles that institutional leaders are navigating, changes they anticipate, and sweeping impacts they foresee.
Currently, higher education institutions are seeing high student adoption of GenAI, but a lagging uptake among faculty and staff. The majority of respondents – 89 percent – estimated that at least half of students use the tools. On the other side, most say that much smaller numbers of faculty use GenAI as part of their jobs, with 62 percent estimating that fewer than half of faculty use the tools.
Despite high student adoption, the majority of respondents believe their institutions are not very – or not at all – ready to use GenAI to meet some of their goals, including:
- Preparing students for the future, 56 percent say their schools are not prepared for this;
- Preparing faculty to use GenAI for teaching and mentoring – 53 percent feel unprepared;
- Helping non-faculty staff use these tools for work – 63 percent feel unprepared; and
- Roughly 59 percent believe last spring’s graduates were not prepared for work in companies where skill in using GenAI tools is important.
Additionally, university leaders raised concerns about the challenges that come along with AI, including a rise in cheating. Slightly more than half of respondents believe that cheating has increased on their campuses since GenAI tools have become widely available and 21 percent said cheating has increased a lot.
Compounding that concern is the belief that GenAI detection tools aren’t all that great. More than half of university leaders do not think their faculty effectively recognize GenAI-created content. Roughly 13 percent believe their faculty are “not at all effective” in spotting this kind of content, and 41 percent think their faculty are “not very effective.”
In terms of what’s holding them back from adopting more GenAI tools, the university leaders cite challenges such as faculty unfamiliarity with or resistance to GenAI, distrust of GenAI tools and their outputs, and concerns about diminished student learning outcomes.
Most of respondents said that their institutions have taken some steps to adjust to the rise of GenAI. Roughly 69 percent report their schools have adopted written policies about appropriate and inappropriate uses of GenAI tools in learning and teaching. In addition, 44 percent report they have created new classes specifically devoted to AI, and 20 percent of respondents have created majors or minors in AI.
