America’s Colleges and Their Students Are Having an Identity Crisis

Being a college freshman has never been smooth sailing. Weird roommates, demanding professors, and unseasoned dining hall food are all standard fare in the bewildering transition to young adulthood. But has there ever been a more uneasy time to commit to a degree than right now?

The class of 2029 is on edge. Today’s 18-year-olds spent middle school locked down in a pandemic. They’ve grown up more online and socially isolated than past generations, and in the Healthy Minds Study, a survey conducted by a consortium of universities, more than 30% of students report feeling depressed and/or anxious. The campuses they’ve just arrived at are entrenched in a culture war, as the Trump administration has cut research budgets or pulled funding to enforce restrictions on student protests and free speech. International students face added obstacles to getting visas, and their numbers may plummet this fall. Tuition and fees at some colleges, meanwhile, have begun to surpass $100,000 a year. The average Gen Zer is carrying $23,000 in student debt, Experian found.

As for the dream jobs these colleges are preparing them for, many are wondering how much longer they’ll even exist, as companies look to embrace generative AI. And what, exactly, should they be doing with AI themselves? The most native GenAI users yet have been caught between admonishments that the world will leave them behind if they don’t master the ability to prompt ChatGPT and the risk of getting caught cheating on their assignments if they rely on the chatbot.

No wonder young Americans are increasingly skeptical that college is worth the time and money.

Amid all this uncertainty, colleges themselves are feeling their way through their own identity crises. The US college system is far from perfect today. It can be inefficient and full of bloated costs. Schools must balance appealing to employers by giving students workplace-ready hard skills while also providing chances for young people to stumble and become autonomous and resilient critical thinkers and collaborators. Those soft skills are the type that correlate to higher career success, especially as AI assumes more entry-level tasks.

“We have to revolutionize and reimagine higher education in ways that connect curriculum to career,” says Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. That means making students more “adaptable and flexible” to rapid change, she says, but colleges must be better incorporating internships or programs that connect students to their local communities to gain work experience and that real-world perspective. “At the same time, we have to take into account the fact that increasingly, students want more than just getting a job. They want lives of meaning and purpose.”

The idyllic college campus steeped in tradition is changing. Like many students, it just doesn’t know what it wants to be yet.

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Young people are inundated with messages that the value of a college degree is drying up and that lucrative alternatives abound. Palantir is offering fellowships to high schoolers who want to “skip the indoctrination” of college, and Silicon Valley still loves the young founder who leaves the dorm in the dust. Gen Z values both autonomy and wealth, and there are legions of young TikTok and Instagram influencers showcasing how to achieve both without a degree — as Airbnb hosts, realtors, drop shippers, video game streamers, plumbers, OnlyFans influencers, and sales course gurus. Sam Altman, himself a Stanford dropout, said on a podcast in July that college was “not working great for most people” but that “if you fast-forward 18 years, it’s going to look like a very, very different thing,” as AI changes the demands of the education system. A new study from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab found that since AI adoption became commonplace, employment rates among workers ages 22 to 25 dropped a relative 13% in roles highly exposed to AI, like software development and customer service.

A degree remains the most tried and true way to build wealth over time.

While the perks of earning a degree may feel elusive to some recent grads and students, a degree remains the most tried and true way to build wealth over time. “The level of uncertainty and risk is as high as it’s ever been when it comes to understanding what the value proposition of pursuing a degree is,” says Zack Mabel, the director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “What matters is, what’s a young person’s fallback option if they don’t go to college?”

Gen Z college graduates in 2024 brought home a median salary of $60,000, based on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, while high school graduates made $40,000. Over the course of their careers, men and women with bachelor’s degrees earn a median $900,000 and $630,000, respectively, more than their counterparts who graduate from high school, according to the Social Security Administration. And white-collar bosses still want to hire college-educated workers. “We’ve not seen an erosion from employers who suddenly can do without a four-year degree,” says Kevin Kruger, the president and CEO of FirstGen Forward, an organization focused on helping first-generation college students.

AI, meanwhile, also isn’t the college-killer some feared it to be when ChatGPT swept through campuses three years ago. “I don’t think higher ed loses its value, but I do think it has to adapt to technology very rapidly,” says Safinah Ali, a professor of educational communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School. She sees meaningful uses for AI being taught across disciplines — not just in technical subjects like computer science, but in the humanities and arts. The younger students are, Ali says, the better they tend to be at embracing changes and new tools without worrying about how different the world will look in four years. Even Altman thinks younger workers will be just fine — it’s the older workers without a willingness to adapt that he fears will be hurt. “A lot is going to happen in six months to 12 months, so the notion of trying to predict exactly where we’ll be in four years is nearly impossible,” says Christine Cruzvergara, the chief education strategy officer at the early career site Handshake. That sounds scary to the seasoned worker, but for a college freshman, a year can feel like a lifetime. “There’s probably also an element of optimism, because they’re just starting and they have four years ahead of them.”

Not unlike young adults who enrolled in college at the outset of the Great Recession, today’s freshmen may be sheltered from the worst of the AI storm. “We’re in the disruption phase at the moment,” Cruzvergara says. “My guess would be in four years, we will have gotten out of some of that disruption phase, and we will be more in the calibration phase.” And as businesses calibrate, students have the relative freedom to experiment.

At the same time, if a college goes too all in on AI, it risks not preparing students with the critical thinking and soft skills also necessary for successful careers. Recent research from MIT suggests that relying too heavily on ChatGPT can make people lazy and dependent on the tech. In the study, those who used ChatGPT to help write essays “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared with control groups. The Atlantic reported last year that students were arriving at elite colleges and struggling to read and parse novels. “Even for well-intentioned students, who don’t want to cheat, it is impacting their ability to think and grow,” says Annie Chechitelli, the chief product officer at Turnitin, which offers plagiarism and AI detection software. Because AI is changing so rapidly, she thinks colleges should focus more on developing broad-ranging soft skills rather than hyperfocusing on specific AI tools in a field. “We’re going to get back to generalists, because things are changing too quickly,” Chechitelli says. “If you’re not a mental athlete, you’re not going to be able to adjust.”

If words are no longer a reflection of learning, you’re going to have to assess learning differently.Jenny Maxwell, head of education at Grammarly

Some professors are opting to shun GenAI entirely and have students complete more tests and essay assignments in class, but there’s a growing consensus that old-school assessments should be left in the past. In August, Grammarly released eight AI agents built on OpenAI and other large language models. The agents can take on tasks like evaluating a drafted essay against an assignment rubric, giving students suggestions for how to improve the paper and assigning a predictive grade.

Generative AI has upended traditional essay assignments, and that calls for changing how students are tested and graded. “If words are no longer a reflection of learning, you’re going to have to assess learning differently,” says Jenny Maxwell, the head of education at Grammarly. She sees the company’s agents not as just ways to level the playing field in the five-paragraph essay, but as evidence that the way students are evaluated needs to change. It’s less now about catching cheaters and more about finding new ways to show mastery of concepts. “What I’m actually hoping happens is the essay game is no longer the essay game,” Maxwell says. Maybe, she says, AI can push students to think deeper about concepts, so there’s less expectation to regurgitate what they’re taught in a standardized essay.

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Professors are still figuring out the best ways to evaluate students while they use AI, and there’s no consensus yet. Dennis Yi Tenen, a professor of English at Columbia University, is teaching a course called Writing AI this fall, focused on the ways AI tools are reshaping the writing process and their limitations to do so, and he says it quickly filled up with about 80 eager students who think there will be big returns on mastering AI. Teaching AI as a writing partner has already reshaped how he interacts with his students, he says. “Rather than performing expertise and lecturing, I’m much more brutally honest,” Yi Tenen says, explaining that he’s become more candid about what we know and don’t know about how AI works best. “With a class on AI where stuff is so open-ended right now, nobody knows that answer. Let’s experiment with this.”

With colleges and professors still figuring out how to navigate AI and the cultural backlash to higher ed, there’s room to reevaluate how students are assessed. Highly driven perfectionists arrive on campus with a history of straight A’s and an avoidance of failure, and the hefty weight of tuition can discourage risk-taking — yet that’s exactly what the protective bubble of a college experience should provide. “We’re not born with a specific set of talents, and we learn from failure,” Pasquerella says. “But you have to have a curriculum that allows people to learn from failure and not kick them out if they fail their first few assignments.”

Outside of the financial perks, college is a sandbox in which young people take baby steps to adulting. Part of the disconnect in the value of college comes from what young people actually get from four years spent eating processed foods and pledging sororities or fraternities. If you try to play a numbers game and break down the cost, plus interest, add the four years of your time, and then weigh that as an exact exchange for a specific job or salary, that misses some of the less tangible benefits. Colleges have to sell a bigger idea with their high ticket price. “You need to make the value proposition more attractive in the immediacy for students to be willing to make the investment, because it looks so scary initially,” Mabel says. “These are people that haven’t lived much of their life, and they’re hungry to have a crack at having some money in their pocket and being able to live their life as they want to.”

Convincing some that the time and money invested in a degree won’t be wasted is becoming a harder conversation for colleges in a world loudly criticizing higher ed. But coursework and campus life teach young people resilience and collaboration and expose them to new ideas and people. They spend those years learning to problem-solve, and the growth is about much more than the dozen or so hours a week spent in class. It’s not the kind of skill or lesson that AI can undermine. The appeal of college isn’t dead; it’s just stuck in an awkward phase.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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