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The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself

The Conversation 

and
February 19, 2026
Public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has largely orbited a familiar worry: cheating. Will students use chatbots to write essays? Can instructors tell? Should universities ban the tech? Embrace it?
These concerns are understandable. But focusing so much on cheating misses the larger transformation already underway, one that extends far beyond student misconduct and even the classroom.
Universities are adopting AI across many areas of institutional life. Some uses are largely invisible, like systems that help allocate resources, flag “at-risk” students, optimize course scheduling or automate routine administrative decisions. Other uses are more noticeable. Students use AI tools to summarize and study, instructors use them to build assignments and syllabuses and researchers use them to write code, scan literature and compress hours of tedious work into minutes.

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AI Could Save Construction $1 Trillion a Year—Here’s How

Inc.

Chris Boyd
February 20, 2026
More than $1 trillion—around 10 percent of annual construction spend—is wasted each year because of mistakes that require redoing the work.
Construction is the rare industry that, despite massive investments in data-management software, has actually become less efficient in recent decades. And because construction represents more than $13.5 trillion of the global economy—exceeding $2 trillion in the U.S. alone—those inefficiencies are especially costly. More than $1 trillion—around 10 percent of annual spend—is wasted each year because of mistakes that require redoing the work.
Part of that inefficiency is due to a labor shortage. Even though construction added 28,000 jobs in the most recent monthly U.S. labor report, there’s still an industry shortfall estimated at more than 400,000 people. The other big problem, though, is keeping track of the sheer volume of data—architectural drawings, Excel files of cost estimates, PDFs of product specifications, and countless other documents—all in different forms and formats, and totaling millions of pages of information that are involved in a big project.

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Higher Education Litigation Summary: February 2026

Thompson Coburn 

Tres Cleveland , Brandt Hill , Lorrie Hargrove , Evan Moltz , Anna S. Knouse , Alexander G. Spanos , Karolyn E. Eilertsen
February 18, 2026
Welcome to the February 2026 edition of Thompson Coburn’s Higher Education Litigation Summary, your resource for timely legal updates on key rulings and ongoing cases shaping the higher education sector. Bold text indicates updates to the rulings.
Highlights in this edition include:
The status of the 2022 Borrower Defense to Repayment Rule where the court reinstated the Fifth Circuit’s preliminary injunction and instructed the plaintiff to file a proposed First Amended Complaint;
Resolutions in Dear Colleague Letter litigation;
Recent activity in two cases challenging changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program; and
An overview of the implications that the Texas v. Becerra litigation may have for institutions of higher education.

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ED Releases Updated Data on Nonpayment Rates by Institution, Warns of High Cohort Default Rates

NASFAA

Maria Carrasco
February 19, 2026
The Department of Education (ED) on Wednesday released updated data on institutions’ nonpayment rates, warning that schools could be at risk of losing access to federal student assistance due to potentially high cohort default rates (CDR).
ED first released data on institutions’ nonpayment rates in July last year, as part of an effort to provide institutions with a resource to better understand the delinquency and default risks associated with their most recent borrowers. An institution’s nonpayment rate is the percentage of Direct Loan borrowers who entered repayment since January 2020 and whose federal student loans were more than 90 days delinquent at the time the data were collected, in May 2025.
On Wednesday, ED released updated data on institutions’ nonpayment rates, finding that over 1,800 institutions have nonpayment rates at or exceeding 25%.

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