A survey by academic mentoring platform Nova Learning found that the share of middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their top academic interest dropped from 42.3% in 2025 to 27.9% in 2026, while Engineering's share nearly doubled, rising from 11.9% to 23%, led largely by Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Separately, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported an 8.1% drop in undergraduate Computer and Information Science enrollment at four-year institutions, to about 606,000 students, even as Engineering enrollment grew.
A university research lab is publishing a week-long series of open-source releases instead of a traditional paper, arguing that AI agents have made individual research projects fast and cheap, which undermines the value of isolated publications. The author challenges both student pessimism about job prospects and PhD students' rush to join frontier AI labs, claiming academia is positioned for a resurgence precisely because of its resource constraints.
Dartmouth College is developing its own AI-based systems, modeled partly on approaches used by companies like Google, to help students and alumni navigate career decisions as artificial intelligence reshapes hiring. The tools are meant to help people identify suitable career paths and job opportunities amid growing uncertainty in the entry-level labor market caused by automation and AI-driven recruiting.
MIT researchers released a report on education finding that many students increasingly rely on AI chatbots to complete coursework, sometimes offloading thinking entirely rather than just seeking assistance. The study links this overreliance to declining critical thinking, weaker memory, reduced confidence, and diminished mastery of course material, with some students unable to engage in class discussions.
A new whitepaper, 'Opening Doors Through Education: The William Louey Effect,' tracked scholarship recipients from the William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation over three decades, from lower-income backgrounds in China into careers spanning business, finance, academia, engineering and education. Rather than stopping at graduation, the research examined their later leadership roles, financial outcomes and tendency to mentor others.
Vermont's Mountain School enrolls high schoolers for roughly $40,000 per semester, having them cook, clean, farm and care for animals on its 418-acre campus instead of following a typical classroom schedule. About 30% of students receive financial aid, and many come from wealthy families unfamiliar with basic chores like cleaning a composting toilet or sweeping a floor.
Oak Park High School students Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi, working with UCLA postdoctoral researcher Daniel Soskin, published a 75-page arXiv paper resolving an open question about coefficient ratio bounds in Lorentzian polynomials, a theory associated with Fields Medalist June Huh. The work generalizes earlier results on quadratic polynomials to arbitrary degree, pinning down which coefficient ratios have universal upper bounds and what those optimal bounds are. The students used AI tools, including Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, for exploration and drafting, while independently verifying every calculation and proof step.
College students are increasingly engineering workarounds to avoid AI-detection tools used by professors, according to a New York Magazine report. One NYU student built a bot with AI coding tools that completes his WebAssign calculus homework slowly, mimicking human typing speed to avoid raising suspicion from timestamp checks, and has since shared the tool with classmates.
Employers and educators are increasingly pointing to anthropology and other humanities disciplines as valuable preparation for an AI-driven workplace. The emphasis is shifting toward understanding human behavior, culture, and context—skills that complement rather than compete with technical AI capabilities.
A 2025 OECD PISA study of over 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries found that, after controlling for socioeconomic status, students who never use AI generally outperformed AI users in science. The performance gap was largest for those using AI to summarize texts or draft assignments, and for those using it either rarely or daily, while moderate, intentional use—especially paired with training to critically evaluate AI outputs—showed smaller drops or even slight gains over non-users.
Nature's careers team is organizing a 60-minute webinar examining how doctoral programmes are adjusting to the growing use of AI tools among graduate students, who increasingly rely on them for literature searches, coding, presentations and summarizing papers. Three panellists will discuss the benefits of AI in research alongside concerns that it may weaken essential skills PhD training is meant to instill.
Kenyan freelance writers who long earned income producing custom essays for cheating students abroad are seeing that work dry up as AI writing tools take over the task. The shift marks the collapse of a once-thriving informal outsourcing industry built around academic dishonesty.
GoKawiil