EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Generative AI in Higher Education: Evidence from an Elite College

Zara Contractor and Germ\'an Reyes

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Generative AI is transforming higher education, yet systematic evidence on student adoption remains limited. Using novel survey data from a selective U.S. college, we document over 80 percent of students using AI academically within two years of ChatGPT's release. Adoption varies across disciplines, demographics, and achievement levels, highlighting AI's potential to reshape educational inequalities. Students predominantly use AI for augmenting learning (e.g., explanations, feedback), but also to automate tasks (e.g., essay generation). Positive perceptions of AI's educational benefits strongly predict adoption. Institutional policies can influence usage patterns but risk creating unintended disparate impacts across student groups due to uneven compliance.

Date: 2025-08
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00717 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2508.00717

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().

 
Page updated 2025-10-04
Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2508.00717