At the same time, both students and teachers face relentless marketing for AI applications, whose impact on education are untested.
The Biden administration made investments in research and policy to try to guide ethical use and development of AI. But the second Trump administration is undoing all that, deregulating AI and slashing funding for education and research.
At UC Davis, where I teach, cuts to federal funding have been devastating. We lost a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant for our interdisciplinary Center for AI and Experimental Futures. Elsewhere, National Science Foundation grants on AI literacy have been defunded, apparently for mentioning the word “misinformation.”
How has California responded? It is about to drop the ball. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget would eliminate the California Education Learning Lab, which provides crucial support to help public education in California to adapt to AI.
This fiscal year, with a mere $5.5 million budget (of the $45 billion the state spends on higher education), the Learning Lab provides an amazing return on investment. Through its AI Grand and AI Fast Challenge programs, the Learning Lab recently awarded $12 million to over 30 projects.
Started in January 2025, these projects stand to benefit nearly 200,000 students and at least 15,600 faculty in the California Community College, California State University and University of California systems, including research involving K-12, over the next few years. But this urgently needed work will stop if the Learning Lab is eliminated.
AI is designed to help experts work more efficiently. It is not designed for novices and students. But we need a workforce capable of collaborating intelligently with AI, instead of letting AI “think” for them. Abandoning the fantasy that AI can simply take over writing and programming tasks, most teachers and employers are realizing two things: First, it takes expert human judgment to work safely and efficiently with AI. Second, over-reliance on AI makes it very difficult to develop the next generation of experts in any field — which continues to be the goal of higher education.
The Learning Lab-funded project I co-lead is a collaboration with experienced writing faculty at four community colleges (American River, Glendale, LA Mission and Marin), three CSUs (Bakersfield, Maritime/Solano and Sacramento) and at UC Davis. It is based on one of the largest early studies in the U.S. on AI and college-level writing.
Our approach educates students about the risks and benefits of AI in writing. It also integrates rigorous peer review of draft writing assignments — a best practice in writing pedagogy, which models professional writing processes and strengthens the human relationships that motivate students. Students are required to critically assess AI feedback on their writing, for their own audience, purpose and voice, in order to build AI literacy.
Both students and faculty need this kind of research-based guidance on how to adapt to AI.
Our team has expertise in AI and human-computer interaction. We intimately understand the challenges that first-generation, low-income, multilingual and minoritized students face in the new economy. We will help nearly 13,000 students and 225 instructors in adapting to AI, and the open educational resources we’re developing will support even more students and faculty across the state — but not if our Learning Lab grant is canceled.
Without the California Education Learning Lab, we risk deepening the digital divide. We saw an appalling amount of learning loss during the COVID pandemic, but the looming AI divide could make that look like a drop in the bucket.
Marit J. MacArthur teaches professional writing at UC Davis, where she is also a faculty affiliate in performance studies.
©2025 the Merced Sun-Star (Merced, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
