The most volatile demographic and technological clashes on campus this fall will not be on the streets but in the classroom. Incoming young men, increasingly conservative and highly optimistic about generative AI, will be placed in classrooms with non-tenure-track, overwhelmingly female, politically progressive first-year writing faculty fiercely hostile to AI.
Why? Because accreditors and state legislatures demand first-year writing, which no study has ever found effective, and now seems nonsensical in the AI era. (The last respectable study was in Arum and Roksa’s 2011 Academically Adrift, which found that students showed almost no measurable improvement in writing in their first two years of college.) The argumentsfor ending it are mounting. Does anyone think setting up the incoming AI-savvy 2026 cohort for a first semester classroom battle is worth it?
The Common App’s March 2026 report shows 9.4 million applications, up five percent over last year, 2.1 million more than four years ago. I’ve been following enrollment patterns for two decades. I look at those numbers and see young men who might not have applied to college in past years feeling more confident than before, with an AI at their fingertips.
According to a February 2026 report from the Pew Research Center, roughly two-thirds of teenagers currently use LLMs, with male students significantly more likely to view these tools as fundamentally useful and beneficial for their own lives and society. An ACT survey found that male students were more optimistic about AI and more likely to see it as relevant to college and careers. A Berkeley-Stanford-Harvard analysis of 143,000 people across eighteen studies found that women were about twenty percent less likely to use generative AI overall than men, who view these models as legitimate productivity engines.
Even without taking gender differences into account, the reality for universities is that eighty-four percent of high school students used generative AI tools for schoolwork in 2025, according to the College Board, with sixty-nine percent using ChatGPT specifically. Pew found that teen use of ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled between 2023 and 2024. Boys and girls use it at the same rate. The difference is in attitude. Boys are more enthusiastic. The LLM has likely helped many of them write their papers and lab reports for the past three years. These young men applied to college confident they can pull together a solid essay on any subject.