The AI@School Series
Eight reports on students and artificial intelligence, drawn from CHIP50 Wave 38.6 — the AI/employment supplement, fielded June 21–July 13, 2026.
Source: CHIP50 (Civic Health and Institutions Project / COVID States Project), Wave 38.6, fielded June 21–July 13, 2026; total unweighted N = 23,462. All figures are weighted estimates.
Reports
AI Goes to School: How Students Actually Use It
Two-thirds of currently-enrolled students have used AI for their coursework — but most use it lightly: about a quarter do none of their schoolwork with AI and only about 18% do most or all of it. Students treat it as a tutor at th…
I Learn, They Cheat: The Self-Serving Story Students Tell About AI
Currently-enrolled students extend AI's benefits to themselves and its harms to everyone else. They say AI helps them learn but makes their peers learn less; they use it lightly but believe their classmates lean on it heavily — ev…
The Rules Vacuum: AI Adoption Outran the Rulebook
Two-thirds of currently-enrolled students use AI for schoolwork, but only about one in ten says their instructors encourage it and half say it isn't built into any of their required courses. What governs a technology most students…
A Leveler With an Asterisk: AI, Access, and Equity in School
For the students least able to pay for academic help — and for those with a learning difference — AI is often the irreplaceable option, the free tutor that stands in for the paid one they can't afford. But the students who stand t…
The Credential Question: AI Is Repricing College, Not Killing It
Americans think AI is denting the value of a college degree — but the discount is uneven: bachelor's degrees and the humanities are marked down, STEM fields and advanced degrees hold or gain. And the people actually deciding — hig…
Curious and Afraid: How Students Feel About the Rise of AI
The generation that has folded AI into its coursework is also the most anxious about it. Among currently-enrolled students, concern, anxiety, and fear outrank every positive emotion except curiosity — and how a student feels track…
Fluent but Credulous: Students Know What AI Is — Not When to Doubt It
Two-thirds of currently-enrolled students rate themselves skilled with AI, and most correctly grasp what it is and that it can err. But on the specific misconceptions that matter when you actually use it for schoolwork — that its …
Engaged, Uneasy, and Uncritical: Using AI More Makes Students More Excited, Not More Careful
A capstone to the eight-report "AI Goes to School" series. Currently-enrolled students have adopted AI about as fully as any group in the country, and they are not comfortable with it. The pattern that ties the series together is …
AI@School · CHIP50 Wave 38.6 (Civic Health and Institutions Project / COVID States Project). All figures are weighted estimates.