There’s a silent epidemic building in colleges and universities throughout the country — and as you might imagine, it has everything to do with AI.

As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.

“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.

Over the past few years, a veritable tidal wave of headlines, studies, and think pieces have flooded the internet with horror stories about the decline in literacy rates, social skills, and critical thinking abilities of the country’s college students. While there’s a kernel of truth that these factors had already been slowly dwindling prior to the widespread adoption of AI, the tech only seems to be accelerating the drop-off in real-life abilities, particularly among young people for whom it can serve as a cognitive crutch.

The state of higher education is so bad that many of today’s higher ed students are not only offloading their coursework to AI chatbots like ChatGPT — a shortcut, educators say, that’s even impacting their ability to participate in face-to-face discussions.

And though universities have many purposes beyond simply preparing students for the workplace, that is one function that they do undoubtedly serve. The results could be rocky: as Cal State Chico ethics professor Troy Jollimore told the New Yorker in 2025, “massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.”

While plenty of thought leaders have waxed lyrical about the importance of “AI literacy” — an understanding of how to effectively use AI tools, basically — the businesses these future students are heading toward are still heavily reliant on literacy literacy. For all its revolutionary potential, there’s ample evidence that AI has yet to meaningfully impact productivity in the US, meaning that students who go all-in on AI at the expense of other skills will likely find themselves ill-prepared for the actual demands of life after college.

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