Meet the first graduating class of CollegeGPT

Earlier this year, Advait Paliwal built an AI tool that he said could act as a student. Given an email and a password, Einstein could log in to Canvas, a portal where professors at colleges across the country upload presentations and list assignments. The bot could attend lectures, write essays, and do homework. Paliwal, 22, says he built it as a joke for a friend who said he was bogged down with coursework, and didn't plan to code the ultimate cheating tool. It ended up becoming the latest flashpoint in a debate over AI and cheating at colleges.

Einstein had a typical, fleeting online outrage cycle after Paliwal posted it to X. He says 100,000 people used Einstein at its peak. People got mad: "What's the point of being alive?" one Bluesky user wrote. Paliwal says cease and desist letters came, including one from Canvas's parent company (which did not respond to a request for comment). Under pressure, he shut the bot down. But the experience changed how Paliwal, who graduated two years ago with a computer science degree, views higher education. "That's when I started thinking about, 'OK, what is the value of education if you're literally able to do all the work autonomously?'"

Next month, the Class of 2026 will leave their college campuses and enter the working world. They are also the Class of ChatGPT: Since OpenAI's flagship chatbot debuted in the fall of their freshman year, this cohort has been the testing ground for a technology that upended higher education. Now, AI is now reshaping the workforce, posing the largest threat to the entry-level jobs that college graduates have generally undertaken.

These new aspiring workers could be the AI native employees companies are eager to hire. "The tide is turning in their favor," Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of Twill, a recruiting software company, says of new grads. Hiring managers are looking beyond GPA and résumés to pluck the right workers for a changing job landscape. With fresh graduates who have spent their undergraduate careers learning how to optimize AI, "there's assumptions that hiring managers make that you're gonna work differently, that you work with AI differently, that you have different traits that they're looking for."

On the other hand, college students who outsourced years of homework to AI may have deigned to sharpen their reasoning and creativity. "Anyone who is using AI in that way is making themselves both vulnerable to a very dynamic labor market today where AI is already very capable, its capabilities are rapidly improving," Zack Mabel, the director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. "What is going to give people the best prospects of being competitive in that type of labor market is to have skills that are going to be a complement to the technology," he says. "They're critical thinking skills."

For all the debate that college is dying, many white-collar employers still want to hire college graduates. But what's the value of a diploma that you cheated your way to?

Cheaters have been around for as long as there have been tests. A survey conducted in the early 1960s found that about half of all US college students were cheating — they were relying on others who had already taken the tests to give them answers or questions, copying off others, plagiarizing, and even sitting in for another student during exams. Cheating evolved with technology, as the widespread adoption of the internet on campuses in the 1990s and 2000s gave rise to an easier route to plagiarism.

"Most of us are willing to cheat in the right circumstances," says James Lang, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and expert in academic integrity. Many students cheat under intense pressure or when the task looks discordant with the real world knowledge they need. AI doubles down on the problem: the tech makes it easier to cheat in class, while also disrupting the tasks young white-collar workers would perform in the real world they're graduating into. "People are questioning: Is my hard work and effort worth it to create these skills which AI can reproduce or mimic?"

More than half of college students said their schools discourage or prohibit using AI, according to a Gallup poll conducted last fall. And yet, more than half said they use AI for coursework weekly, and about 20% said they use it daily. Among those who use it at least monthly, 65% said they found it very or extremely important for preparing for a career, and 70% said they felt that strongly about using AI to get better grades. According to academic integrity software Turnitin, 15% of papers that are run through its AI detection software are deemed likely to be 80% or more AI-generated. That's a fivefold increase from three years ago, when 3% of papers triggered that high of an alert.

ChatGPT's essay takeover was just the beginning. Next came the text humanizers and word spinners meant to obfuscate the traces of AI in the text. Columbia University dropout Roy Chungin Lee, who went viral in 2025 after creating a tool to help software engineers "cheat" on technical interviews, raised $15 million in a fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz last summer for Cluely, a desktop app that listens in on meetings and provides real-time assistance and responses. The company says it has more than 500,000 professional users. "We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again," the app's website says. "While others guess — you're already right. And yes, the world will call it cheating. But so was the calculator. So was spellcheck. So was Google." Last summer, Grammarly unveiled eight agents that can evaluate essay drafts against an assignment rubric and suggest improvements.

On Reddit, students debate the point of writing an essay. Some say they've become too reliant on ChatGPT and seek advice to wean themselves off. Some describe feeling overwhelmed and unable to do their work without AI. There are tips about generating essays with AI, then typing them painstakingly into a Google doc, so that professors can track their activity to beat the cheating allegation. Some of it sounds more tedious than writing the actual paper. In a comment clearly typed by an actual human, one user opines that it doesn't really matter how you get there: "A degree is a degree tho that's the whole issue."

Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer at Turnitin, sees higher education and liberal arts degrees as maintaining their value. But, she tells me, graduating seniors who scraped by with sloppy and thoughtless AI use could face the consequences of offloading their work to AI when they show up at the office. "I think they'll be surprised at AI not being acceptable in terms of their everyday communications and writing and problem solving at their jobs," she says. "They're going to be asked hard questions. But I do think it might help for your first job in a good way," particularly when it comes to fielding those "dumb" questions young workers have as they arrive at their first jobs — like how to fill out a W2 or format an email.

Some students have built firewalls around what they use AI for, attempting to guard their learning process. Matthew Xu, a senior at Duke University studying history, tells me, "There's definitely a line where, if AI is doing the entire assignment and doing everything, obviously that's cheating." Xu is also working on the product side of Turbo AI, an app that turns class notes into podcasts, notecards, quizzes, and other study formats, and plans to continue doing so when he graduates. As a student, Xu will use it to break down concepts in one of his history classes, or make flashcards for his Chinese class, which makes studying much easier and is far from generating answers to an assignment. "It's very different when AI is helping you think."

Sharif Abrar Labib, a senior studying information technology at the University of Texas at Dallas, says he started using AI freshman year to check his grammar. Then he used it to make concise notes for open book exams. He's come up with other uses, like creating a chatbot to break down a course syllabus. But Labib is precious about his own writing, in part because he's always enjoyed it. He tells me he's seen classmates generate and copy and paste an essay for class. "It's not that very effective what they're doing because at the end of the day, they're not learning anything."

Colleges hold the societal weight of preserving original thought while also preparing students for the workforce, a responsibility that's disrupted by a mounting pressure from employers expecting work-ready college grads who know how to use AI. College coursework often takes time to catch up to the latest innovation, and without established AI best practices, teaching with the tech has been uneven. There's also the question of balancing exposure to AI with friction that works the muscles for critical thinking. Research released last year by MIT suggested that using ChatGPT to write essays could make them lazier and more dependent on AI. In a controlled study, participants instructed to use ChatGPT "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" compared those who wrote essays with the help of Google, or those who had no assistance.

AI is as much a crutch as it is a lifeline. It has democratized individualized tutoring of a sort, says Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. "If you can get instant explanations, instant feedback, and help with complex tasks, that can accelerate learning, and it makes students feel more comfortable experimenting and adapting, which are valuable skills in a rapidly changing workforce," she says.

The employment rate for recent college graduates hovered just below 6% as of December — its highest point since 2021. AI has refigured junior roles — with much of the tedious white collar labor offloaded to AI, companies want workers who come in ready to deliver, rather than be trained. And that changes the classroom, too. Because students have had access to AI since their freshman year, "that's shaping how they approach learning," Pasquerella says. "They rely less on memorization, and more on knowing how to ask the right questions and use the tools effectively." But there's a "real risk that students are offloading too much of the thinking process."

Lang agrees, noting the precious rarity about a college campus and the access to academics and peers that doesn't often replicate itself throughout other times in our lives. "We have to claim the value of higher education, to learn in community with teachers and students," he says.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.