The student “AI revolt” is mostly a myth. Business students just want to be taught how to use it.

The boos at last spring’s graduations suggested a student revolt against AI. The data points the other way. Among business students at one Washington school, regular AI use has quietly become the norm, and the loudest demand is not to ban it but to teach it.

The figures come from a three-year survey at American University’s Kogod School of Business, shared first with Axios. The share of students using AI 11 or more times a week climbed from 6.2% in 2024 to 29% this year, the report found. More than 80% had used AI for coursework in the past six months.

Employers are pulling

Part of the pull comes from the job market. Interviews with AI questions rose from 11.6% in 2024 to 42.6% this year. Students have noticed. Prompt engineering is the top skill they want taught, and coding has leapt into second place, from under 4% to nearly 20% in a year. It reads like a shift from dabbling to the interview room.

The tools split by age. Undergraduates favour ChatGPT; graduate students lean towards Claude. Perplexity topped raw usage, though every student surveyed had free Perplexity Pro through a campus deal, which flatters the number. When students picked a tool, accuracy mattered most.

The anxiety underneath

None of this means students are uncritical. Nearly half of those at Kogod said they worried about academic integrity. In a separate Inside Higher Ed survey, 40% said they feared AI was eroding their ability to think for themselves. The message is not rejection. It is a request for clearer rules.

There is a paradox buried in the numbers. Brainstorming is the single most common use of AI, and has been for three years. Yet Wharton researchers found that people generated a wider range of ideas using their own thoughts and web searches than when they leaned on ChatGPT. The most popular use may be the one that quietly narrows thinking.

Schools are still working it out

Institutions are lurching between extremes. Faculty first tried to make assignments “AI-proof,” Kogod’s interim dean Casey Evans said, then gave up on it. The new approach is blunter: staff drop a student’s work into AI, tell them the result is a C, then coach them towards an A. She says resistance has been rare.

Elsewhere the mood is the opposite. Some universities have handed AI the job of watching students sit exams, and others, including Brown, have retreated to in-person, handwritten papers. Detection tools and cheating tools keep chasing each other. The classroom has not settled on an answer.

The Kogod numbers carry a caveat. They are self-reported, from 483 students at one school. But larger surveys point the same way: Inside Higher Ed found 85% had used AI for coursework, and Gallup put weekly use at 57%. The graduation boos were real. So is the adaptation. Students walking into an AI-shaped job market may not love it, but they are preparing for it.