Employers once worried AI would shrink the value of a college degree. A new survey turns that story around. Nearly half, 48 percent, now say artificial intelligence will make a degree more important within five years. Only 26 percent expect the opposite1.
48% of Employers Say AI Raises a Degree's Value, Against 26% Who Say It Falls
Share of 2,500 U.S. hiring decision-makers who expect AI to change a college degree's value over five years
Each column is the share of surveyed employers who picked that direction; the rest expect the degree's value to hold steady.
Sources: Lumina Foundation [1]; Inside Higher Ed [2]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| More important | 48% |
| Less important | 26% |
Read that number alone and the story feels settled. Employers like degrees more because AI threatens every other skill. Students and colleges can relax.
Courtney Brown, Lumina Foundation's vice president of impact and planning, gives the sharper reason. "Employers are hiring for the things that AI can't do. They're putting a premium on judgment, critical thinking, communication and adaptability," she told Inside Higher Ed2. Those are skills a classroom is supposed to build, and test, through a student's own writing.
Brown's survey found 80 percent of employers choose the candidate with a degree, even when the job skips that requirement1. Sixty percent carry strong confidence in higher education, nearly double the 38 percent of the general public. Enrollment followed that confidence up 1.3 percent last spring, to 15.5 million students.
Timothy Paustian teaches bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He hid a trap inside one assignment. Any chatbot following it had to mention the color orange in the third paragraph. Sixty of 350 students got caught3.
Paustian still caught them. The fight wore him down anyway. "I have pretty much thrown in the towel on classic writing assignments for lower-level classes," he said3.
"LLMs are pushing us to be more creative in our assignments. However, we are losing something," Paustian added.
Yale and Cornell reached similar calls, dropping AI detectors as proof of cheating3. The American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University surveyed faculty this year. Ninety-five percent fear students lean on AI too heavily. Three respected schools gave up on the same tool within one stretch of months.
Harvard's dean, David Deming, reached a different verdict. He told students in September the university should change course4. "We would all benefit from getting out of the AI-detection business because it damages trust between faculty and students," he wrote.
Deming went further in a post minutes later. "Take-home exams and problem sets are no longer a sustainable way to assess mastery, and when coupled with unenforceable AI bans they create a difficult dilemma for students who don't want to cheat but also fear falling behind to their classmates," he wrote4.
Both men stopped checking whether the student wrote it. Brown's premium assumes somebody still does. The one proof only a classroom can supply, a student's own reasoning on the page, is the one proof colleges just stopped checking.
Forty-two percent of recent graduates, ages 22 to 27, work jobs any high school graduate can fill5. Their jobless rate hit 5.7 percent in June, 1.6 points above the 4.1 percent rate for every other worker. The premium Brown measured sits beside a labor market that still bruises new graduates.
42% of Recent Graduates Work Jobs a High School Diploma Would Cover
U.S. workers ages 22 to 27 with a bachelor's degree, underemployment and unemployment, June 2026
The tall bar is the share of recent graduates in jobs that skip their degree; the two short bars compare their jobless rate against every other worker's.
Underemployment and unemployment measure different things; both are read here as a share of the group named in each bar.
Source: Fortune [5]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Recent grads, underemployed | 42% |
| Recent grads, unemployed | 5.7% |
| All workers, unemployed | 4.1% |
Peter Turchin, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, has tracked a version of this pattern for decades5. "It's actually everywhere you look," he told Fortune. "Look at the overproduction of university degrees," he said.
Here is the question underneath the premium. Honest students carry the first cost. A false accusation can land on an unreliable detector, shown to skew against students who learned English later in life3. Colleges keep their premium whatever happens to that problem.
Employers get credit for valuing judgment they rarely test directly. The employer paying Brown's premium finds out only after the hire, the same way a college does. Both are betting on a signal only time will confirm.
The degree's price just went up. Its certification covers less about any one student than before. Readers can watch this fight happen industry by industry, as AI Lately covers it. The Signal, AI Lately's daily email, delivers exactly that: the people and decisions moving AI forward, each morning.
Sources
- Courtney Brown, "Employers still want the degree," Lumina Foundation, Oct. 20, 2026, https://www.luminafoundation.org/news-and-views/employers-still-want-the-degree/
- Kathryn Palmer, "Employers Say AI Will Make College Degrees More Important," Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 20, 2026, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/careers/2026/10/20/employers-say-ai-will-make-college-degrees-more-important
- Anuj Chopra, "Grappling with 'homework scams,' US universities shun AI detectors," TechXplore, Oct. 6, 2026, https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-grappling-homework-scams-universities-shun.html
- Sebastian B. Connolly and Summer E. Rose, "Deming Backs More AI Use, AI-Proof Assessments in Harvard Classrooms," The Harvard Crimson, Sept. 2, 2026, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/2/deming-ai-use-email/
- Nick Lichtenberg, "42% of America's recent college grads are working jobs that don't need a degree. From Kathmandu to Paris, young people are taking to the streets," Fortune, Oct. 26, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/gen-z-underemployment-riots-france-cockroach-india-rebellion/