Students are choosing college majors based on what they think AI will eat. Their teachers want AI out of the classroom entirely. Those two things are happening at the same time, in the same buildings, and nobody has figured out what to do about it yet.
A new Lumina Foundation/Gallup poll found that AI is actively pushing college students to change what they study. Some are walking away from fields they assume AI will hollow out, including computer science, and pivoting toward areas they think it can't touch as easily, like nursing, teaching, and the trades. Four-year plans are now getting drafted around a guess about what the job market looks like after the models keep improving.
The people teaching them aren't feeling the same urgency. According to a June NPR/Ipsos poll, 73% of K-12 teachers said AI's impact on education will be bigger than the internet or computers. Only 9% called that impact positive. 40% called it negative. The rest landed somewhere in the middle, leaning skeptical.
What's actually bothering them isn't the fear of being replaced. Only 20% said they were worried about that. The bigger problem is trust. 59% said AI is eroding the relationship between students and teachers. 65% said it's hurting kids' ability to form real-world friendships. 57% said it's making it almost impossible to tell what a student actually knows.
So they're retreating to paper:
- 39% of teachers now require more assignments done by hand
- 39% are pushing more work into class time so they can watch it happen
- 16% are assigning less homework altogether
- Only 13% have redesigned assignments to actually allow AI
"I'd rather deal with all of your typos and know that they're yours than to wonder how much you're standing on other people's shoulders to do your work for you," Josh Kauffman, a 7th-grade English teacher at Alabama Destinations Career Academy, told NPR.
Parents are pulling the other way. A YouGov poll found that parents of kids under 18 are noticeably more likely than the general public to say parents should let their kids use AI tools. A Walton Family Foundation survey found 47% of parents wanted schools to use AI more, against 36% who wanted less. Among Black and Hispanic parents, the share asking for more climbs to around 55%.
The teachers aren't being paranoid, though. A piece in The European Business Review flagged early research showing that students who lean too heavily on chatbots are starting to lose some of the effortful thinking that actually builds skill. The same research also showed that students who used AI as a coach, instead of a crutch, ended up receiving feedback nearly as useful as that from human editors. The tool itself isn't the problem. The way it gets used in the classroom is the entire problem.
Christa Corricelli, a special education teacher near Boston, put the worry in plain terms to NPR. The top sliver of intrinsically motivated kids, the ones who already love thinking, are going to be fine. Everyone else is the open question, and right now nobody is answering it.
Teachers are reaching for handwriting and in-class essays because that's what they can actually control. What they can't control is that their students already picked a side, and their students' parents picked the same side. Dr. Dale Allen once told the Department of Education that AI in education can only grow at the speed of trust. The trouble is everyone outside the classroom is moving faster than that, and the schools that figure out how to close the gap are the only ones who get to decide what the classroom looks like next year.
