In fall 2025, 90 percent of faculty surveyed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities said generative AI will diminish students’ critical thinking skills. The number should alarm us. But it also reveals something faculty rarely ask out loud: If a new tool can erode critical thinking this quickly, were we ever really teaching it in the first place?
As artificial intelligence has continued to infiltrate classrooms and dorm rooms, much of the public narrative has focused on preserving critical thinking in the age of AI. Conversations focus on cognitive offloading, how AI is reducing friction in the learning process and the risks of dependency on AI systems.
And yet, while we tout the importance of critical thinking skills for college graduates, we do very little to explicitly teach those skills. This has led to a long-standing but often overlooked critical thinking crisis, one that predated AI. In fact, one major study found that at least 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing over their first two years of college.
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