Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Higher Education, newest first.
The Justice Department announced the first indictments from Operation Ghostbusters, a scheme that used stolen identities, often of people who never went to college, to file federal student aid applications for "ghost students" and route leftover refunds to accounts tied to a Kenyan network. At a press conference, officials said the fraudsters used AI to fill in applications, complete coursework and make the fake students appear present in online classes. Five people are charged, more than 750,000 dollars in cryptocurrency was seized, and investigators tied 32 million dollars in losses to these defendants alone. The Education Department has flagged more than 830,000 potentially fraudulent aid accounts, and victims often learn of the fraud only when loan bills arrive.
Elgin Community College, outside Chicago, asked Flock to take down its AI license-plate cameras in October 2025 after reports that federal immigration authorities had searched Flock data at other Illinois colleges, WBEZ reported. Flock said the college had no grounds to end the contract, and ignored a second request even after the school offered to pay the remaining fees. Staff covered the cameras with trash bags, and workers in unmarked vehicles kept removing them until the contract expired in April. Flock now says federal agencies cannot see local data unless police grant access.
A working paper from economists Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu, published by the Munich research network CESifo, finds "no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring of recent college graduates." Using Census survey data, it puts the summer 2026 unemployment rate for graduates aged 22 to 25 at 7.3 percent, inside the range of every summer since 2022. Graduates in the jobs most exposed to AI fared no worse than the comparison groups. That cuts against a Stanford study built on payroll data, which found entry-level hiring lagging in AI-affected fields, and the two measure different things. The authors warn that the classes of 2027 and later could feel more of an effect as workplace AI use deepens.
OpenAI said on Monday that a model it began training on August 28, the one behind its Navier-Stokes claim earlier this month, has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics. The company did not list them. Alongside the claim it announced an independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose nine unpaid members include Timothy Gowers, Martin Hairer and Edward Witten. The group says its first task is advising OpenAI on how to release a large batch of results responsibly, and that it will publish its recommendations and offer them to any AI company. It has no say over how fast OpenAI moves: the company wrote that the group "will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress." Only one member, Camillo De Lellis, signed this month's open letter from Fields medalists objecting to labs racing to claim famous problems.
After a December campus shooting, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano offered a take-home midterm for the first time in nearly two decades — and 40 of 86 students scored a perfect 100, lifting the class average to 96, versus a historical range of 65 to 80, on an exam that was harder than usual. Suspecting ChatGPT, Serrano moved the final in person; the average crashed to 48. The episode turns a fuzzy worry about AI cheating into a hard number, and Serrano says Brown's response has been "meek."
An IEEE Spectrum feature surveys how fast AI is closing in on professional mathematics — gold-medal performances at the International Mathematical Olympiad, a DeepMind system producing publishable research in arithmetic geometry, and a tool that formalized a Fields Medalist's proofs in days. The progress is forcing uncomfortable questions: if machines handle the technical work, what is mathematics for, how do students build intuition, and do humans risk becoming, in one researcher's phrase, "priests to oracles"?
A Stanford-led study ran nearly 3,000 blind comparisons of AI-generated and professor-written answers to contract-law tutoring questions, and the AI responses won 75 percent of the head-to-head matchups across 16 law professors. Crucially for classroom use, reviewers flagged AI answers as potentially harmful just 3.5 percent of the time, versus 12 percent for human-written peer answers. The authors frame the results as evidence that well-built systems can widen access to high-quality legal-education tutoring.
California State University has renewed its OpenAI partnership at $13 million a year for three years, extending ChatGPT EDU access to roughly 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty across 23 campuses — still the largest deployment of ChatGPT inside any single organization. A 2025 systemwide survey found 95 percent of students using an AI tool and 84 percent using ChatGPT specifically, but 82 percent also said they worry AI will hurt their future job security. A faculty petition opposing the contract continues, with some campuses adopting AI tools without consistent guidance or training.
ArXiv's computer science section announced authors will face a one-year submission ban — followed by a permanent requirement that subsequent papers first clear a reputable peer-reviewed venue — when a paper carries "incontrovertible evidence" that authors did not check LLM output. Section chair Thomas Dietterich flagged hallucinated references and stray meta-comments from chatbots (such as "would you like me to make any changes?") as triggering evidence. The rule isn't a blanket LLM ban; it formalizes a full-responsibility standard regardless of how content was generated.
Princeton faculty voted — with a single dissenting vote — to mandate proctoring for all in-person exams starting July 1, 2026, ending a 133-year tradition of unproctored testing under the student honor code. The proposal cites "AI and personal electronic devices as major catalysts," noting that AI tools on small devices make cheating harder for peers to observe, which has hollowed out the peer-reporting model the honor system relied on. The Daily Princetonian's 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 graduating seniors found 29.9% admitted cheating on an assignment or exam, 44.6% said they knew of violations they did not report, and only 0.4% said they had reported a peer. Instructors will now serve as exam witnesses but will not actively monitor.
Mathematician Tim Gowers, a Fields medalist, asked ChatGPT 5.5 Pro to attack open problems on sumset diameter from a Mel Nathanson paper in additive number theory. In under two hours the model improved a known exponential bound to a polynomial one — work the original researcher Isaac Rajagopal called "original and clever" and Gowers judged at "the level of a perfectly reasonable chapter in a combinatorics PhD." Gowers concludes that PhD-style "gentle problems" have been crossed off the LLM frontier and researchers must now aim above what these models can prove.
The Walton Family Foundation's sixth Gen Z AI poll, fielded with Gallup across 1,572 respondents aged 14 to 29, finds weekly AI use stuck at 51% — growing only four points year-over-year — while anger toward AI jumped to 31% from 22%. Eighty percent now say relying on AI to finish tasks faster will make learning harder, and fewer than 20% would choose AI for tutoring, financial advice, or customer service. Schools tightened in parallel: 74% of Gen Z students report a school AI policy, up 23 points from the prior year.