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.
