From unclear artificial intelligence policies to spotty Wi-Fi to unreliable patchworks of apps and portals, students face a technological learning curve in addition to their academic work. While traditional-age college students are often seen as inherently tech-savvy because they have had phones, tablets and the Internet for most or all of their lives, students say there is a difference between familiarity and true skill.
“Being younger, growing up with all the technology, we know how to navigate it a little bit better, but knowing how to really apply it to what we're doing is where we have a gap,” Morgan Bowman, a third-year data science student at Indiana University (IU), said.
Bowman said university-provided guidance would be helpful in bridging that gap, but it is not always provided in the way students hope.
CONFUSION AROUND AI POLICIES
For example, students experience frustration with lack of guidance around a technology relatively new to everyone: artificial intelligence. Bowman, who is a member of IU’s Student Technology Advisory Committee (STAC), said expectations on AI use vary widely from class to class.
EDUCAUSE’s 2025 AI Landscape Study showed that in November 2024, fewer than 40 percent of higher education institutions had formal acceptable-use policies for AI. Even where policies exist, the process for creating them and how they are communicated with students is often unclear, according to the study.
Katie Thompson, a student outreach and engagement consultant for IU IT services, said students can find this difficult.
“If they have six different professors that semester, they could have six very different AI policies, and it’s incumbent on them to keep it straight,” she said.
At Chapman University in California, Zoe Zadah, vice president of the student government association, said a campuswide AI policy is in the works. The university is seeking input from faculty and students through committees, but rules are still set at the individual course level.
“Some professors are saying you can use it in this way, and others are saying you can't use it at all, and some are saying you have full freedom to use it, just cite it,” she said. “So there’s a lot of different opinions.”
Students have approached Zadah about creating more dialogue around how students interact with AI, as they feel instructors assume students rely on AI more than they really do. Thompson said the same is true at IU.
“Some of the narratives [students] see are just like, 'Oh, they’re just kind of uncritically adopting it,'” Thompson said. “In my experience, that’s really not true.”
TECHNOLOGY OVERLOAD
Even beyond AI, students say the sheer number of digital platforms required for everyday tasks can be overwhelming.
Most coursework at Chapman, for example, runs through the learning management system Canvas. Students also rely on a variety of communication and collaboration tools, including the Microsoft suite, networking platform Handshake and a student organization portal.
“Keeping up with all the different technological platforms can be a little overwhelming,” Zadah said.
According to a 2025 study by the ed-tech company Doodle, college students use between six and 15 digital tools on a daily basis. With so many platforms, students can feel like there is always something not functioning quite right.
For Bowman, IU’s transition from one scheduling system to a new one made it difficult to finalize class schedules. Simple issues like system errors when connecting to a university’s portal are bound to happen occasionally, she said, but when you're interacting with so many tools, those problems feel more common.
Nationwide, ed-tech company Pathify found that 57 percent of students said their institution’s digital experience causes them stress at least occasionally, and nearly half of respondents reported missing an important deadline because they were unaware of the date, which can occur as a result of navigating multiple disconnected portals.
Despite students having plenty of tools to achieve a given task, Thompson said students frequently default to the one they are most familiar with, even if it is less efficient. For example, students may have been exposed to Google tools in their K-12 education and will continue using them in college, even if IU has worked to embed Microsoft products across the board. Similarly, they might rely on a search function if they have not been taught helpful file-management practices.
Additionally, having access to the right tools is not helpful if students are not aware of them.
“Students just don't know what's out there,” she said. “Sometimes they’re sort of floundering around for the right tool, or knowing what tool they want to use, but thinking they have to pay for it when really, they don’t.”
CONNECTIVITY
Underlying all of these experiences is campus connectivity, a common complaint among on-campus students. According to the 2025 EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report, overall student satisfaction with campus technology is closely linked to the reliability of Internet connectivity. While a majority (56 percent) of students said they were satisfied with the quality of campus Internet, connectivity still ranked among the most frequent complaints.
Bowman, who attends classes online, said these concerns come up frequently in STAC meetings.
“I know it makes it a lot harder for them to get their work done, especially because, even being on campus, all your work is online,” she said.
LOOKING FOR BALANCE
Despite these frustrations, students still want their campus to be technologically forward-thinking. According to the EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report, students who feel their campus is on the cutting edge of technology adoption feel more confident in their career skills and the value of their education.
Students instead hope institutions will focus on making technology more streamlined and relevant to real-world skills.
“I think digital platforms are useful, and I think they should remain,” Zadah said. “But I think being selective about which ones remain. I think that also involves looking to see what people are using in their careers and in the real world and mimicking that.”
Students also seek guidance on balancing this real-world preparation, especially when it comes to AI, with ethics and self-improvement.
“On one hand, they want to be trained in it and know that, for any kind of employment opportunities, they need to be AI fluent,” Thompson said. “On the other hand, they do have ambivalence about it. A lot of them say, 'it's not completely accurate, and I don't know if I can trust what it tells me and I'm worried about it eroding my ability to critically think.'”
