Photo credit: Student Defense, modified by Causeartist
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping higher education.
Professors are using AI to prepare lectures, develop assignments, grade work, and support students.
Admissions teams are exploring AI to process applications and recruit prospective students.
Universities are also using predictive tools to identify students who may be at risk of dropping out.
The challenge is that adoption is moving faster than institutional policy.
In a conversation for the Intelligence for GOOD podcast, Aaron Ament, cofounder and president of Student Defense, discussed how colleges can adopt AI responsibly while protecting students from discrimination, privacy risks, unequal access, and the loss of meaningful human relationships.
Student Defense is a nonprofit organization that uses litigation, advocacy, and policy development to protect students and ensure higher education remains a pathway to economic mobility.
Through its Shape AI initiative, which stands for Safeguarding Higher Education Through AI Practices and Ethics, the organization is working with students, faculty members, administrators, policy experts, and AI leaders to develop practical governance standards for colleges and universities.
Student Defense was founded in 2017 as federal protections for higher education students were being rolled back.
Much of the organization’s early work focused on predatory practices within the for profit college sector, including misleading advertising, aggressive recruitment, student lending, and consumer protection.
Over the past several years, however, students have increasingly contacted the organization with concerns about how colleges are using technology.
These concerns extend far beyond whether students should be allowed to use ChatGPT to complete an assignment.
AI is being introduced throughout the student experience, including:
Student recruitment
College admissions
Financial aid
Academic advising
Classroom instruction
Grading and assessment
Mental health resources
Basic needs support
Career preparation
The question is no longer whether AI will be part of higher education.
The more important question is whether colleges will implement it in ways that genuinely benefit students.
Student Defense launched Shape AI in partnership with the American Council on Education.
The initiative brought together college administrators, students, faculty members, policy advisors, and AI experts to examine both the potential benefits and the risks of AI adoption.
The work was organized around four major areas:
Admissions, recruitment, and financial aid
Student success and support services
Education delivery
Workforce preparation
Across these areas, Student Defense is examining several broader considerations, including whether students are receiving appropriate value for their tuition, whether AI could weaken learning communities, and whether universities are protecting students from algorithmic bias and data misuse.
One of the largest challenges facing colleges is the speed of implementation.
Faculty members are already using AI to prepare courses, create assignments, and assist with grading. Administrators are also looking for ways to use AI to address staffing shortages, process growing application volumes, and improve operational efficiency.
But many institutions still lack formal rules governing these tools.
Student Defense submitted public records requests to state colleges and universities seeking information about their policies for using AI in admissions.
According to Ament, the organization did not receive a clear institutional governance policy explaining how AI could be used in admissions decisions.
This gap creates significant risk.
When an algorithm affects whether a student is admitted, receives financial aid, or gains access to support services, institutions need to understand how that decision was made.
Without oversight, historical biases embedded in data can be reproduced at scale.
Student Defense has developed guidance for colleges using AI during the admissions process.
The recommendations center on five core principles.
A person should remain responsible for every major decision that affects a student.
AI can help staff organize information, identify patterns, or increase efficiency, but it should not become the unaccountable final decision maker.
Applicants should know when AI will be involved in reviewing their application.
Transparency should begin before a student applies, not after a disputed decision has already been made.
Universities need written policies governing how admissions staff can use AI.
These policies should define approved use cases, prohibited activities, oversight responsibilities, and compliance processes.
Staff members need to understand the capabilities and limitations of the systems they use.
Training should cover bias, privacy, data security, appropriate human review, and the risks of relying too heavily on automated recommendations.
Colleges should minimize the personal data they collect and place clear restrictions on how third party AI vendors can use student information.
A company providing services to one university should not automatically gain the right to use student data for unrelated commercial purposes.
Despite these risks, Ament believes personalized learning represents one of the most promising uses of AI in higher education.
Traditional education often follows a one size fits all model. Every student receives the same lecture, assignment, and timeline, even though students learn at different speeds and respond to different forms of instruction.
AI can help tailor support to an individual student’s needs.
An AI learning assistant could explain a difficult concept in several ways, offer additional exercises, adjust the pace of instruction, or ask questions that help a student reach an answer independently.
Used correctly, these tools could make tutoring and personalized academic support available to far more students.
The goal should not be to replace professors or human teaching assistants.
Instead, AI can expand their ability to support students and give educators more time for the interactions that require empathy, context, and human judgment.
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AI can also help colleges recognize when students are at risk of falling behind.
Ament pointed to Georgia State University as an example of an institution using data to identify students who may need additional assistance.
The university tracks hundreds of risk factors that could affect whether a student remains enrolled.
A student may be missing class because of transportation problems. Another may be struggling to secure childcare. Someone else may need help accessing food benefits or emergency financial assistance.
These challenges may have little to do with academic ability, but they can determine whether a student completes a degree.
By identifying these risks earlier, colleges can connect students with transportation assistance, food support, childcare resources, emergency grants, or academic advising before a temporary setback becomes a reason to leave school.
The value comes from connecting insights to meaningful human support.
Access to advanced AI tools is another issue colleges need to confront.
Some universities provide students with institutionally licensed AI platforms. Others leave students to purchase their own subscriptions.
That creates a potential divide between students who can afford premium models and students limited to free versions.
A twenty dollar monthly subscription may appear relatively affordable, but it can still represent a real barrier for students already struggling with tuition, food, housing, transportation, and other expenses.
The difference could become especially important in technical fields.
An engineering student with access to a more capable AI system may be able to analyze complex information, write code, model solutions, and complete projects more efficiently than a classmate using a limited free tool.
Without institution wide access, universities could unintentionally widen existing economic disparities.
Colleges should therefore consider providing approved AI tools as part of the educational infrastructure available to every student, similar to university libraries, research databases, software licenses, and computer labs.
Universities also have a responsibility to prepare students for a job market that will look very different within the next five to ten years.
Many entry level tasks are already being changed by AI.
In legal work, for example, tools can increasingly assist with proofreading, citation checking, document analysis, and research tasks traditionally assigned to junior employees or paralegals.
That does not necessarily mean these roles will disappear.
It means the people entering them will need different skills.
Students will need to understand how to:
Work effectively with AI tools
Evaluate the accuracy of AI generated information
Protect sensitive information
Recognize bias and errors
Use AI to improve productivity without surrendering judgment
Apply human creativity, empathy, and expertise where automation falls short
AI literacy should not be confined to computer science departments.
It will become relevant across business, law, healthcare, education, communications, engineering, public policy, and nearly every other profession.
Ament’s central recommendation for university leaders is straightforward: start by understanding the problem.
Before purchasing or deploying an AI system, an institution should ask:
What specific problem are we trying to solve?
Why is AI the appropriate tool?
Who benefits from this implementation?
What could go wrong?
What data does the system require?
Who remains accountable for the outcome?
How will students be informed?
How will the institution evaluate whether the tool is working?
Universities should not adopt AI simply because it appears innovative.
Each implementation should have a clear use case, a cost benefit analysis, formal oversight, and a process for measuring its effect on students.
The most important principle may also be the simplest.
Major decisions affecting students should always include human accountability.
That applies to admissions, financial aid, grading, academic discipline, mental health referrals, student support, and other consequential decisions.
Students should also be told when AI plays a role in the services or instruction they receive.
Clear disclosure can strengthen trust between students and institutions while allowing colleges to use technology responsibly.
AI may be able to recognize patterns in thousands of data points, but it cannot fully replace the judgment of a professor, advisor, counselor, or administrator who understands a student’s circumstances.
Higher education offers something AI cannot easily reproduce: community.
Students learn through conversations with professors, debates with classmates, meetings with mentors, collaboration on projects, and informal exchanges that happen across a campus.
These relationships often help educators identify when a student is struggling emotionally, overlooking their own abilities, or beginning to disengage.
Universities should use AI to strengthen these relationships, not remove them.
Technology can help institutions identify students who need support, reduce repetitive administrative work, and personalize educational resources.
The time saved should create more opportunities for people to work directly with students.
Ament remains optimistic about the ability of colleges and universities to navigate this transition.
Most administrators and faculty members enter higher education because they want to help students succeed.
What they need are better tools, stronger governance frameworks, and clear policies that allow them to adopt AI without compromising student rights.
Student Defense plans to continue developing guidance for admissions, recruitment, student success, basic needs, education delivery, and workforce preparation.
The future of AI in higher education will not be determined by the technology alone.
It will be determined by the policies, incentives, and human decisions surrounding it.
When colleges begin with student needs, protect access and privacy, preserve human accountability, and use AI to strengthen learning communities, the technology could become a powerful tool for educational opportunity.
When those protections are absent, AI risks automating the same inequities higher education should be working to overcome.
