By Ella Torres, September 8, 2026
The California State University system decided to renew its $39 million contract with OpenAI in May, providing unlimited access to ChatGPT Edu for staff and students across all 23 campuses for the next three years, according to EdSource.
ChatGPT Edu differs from the original ChatGPT by offering higher messaging limits, advanced reasoning through data analysis, coding assistance, higher mathematical comprehension and improved security for its users, according to OpenAI.
The CSU system first signed its contract with OpenAI in January 2025. Since the original signing, roughly 47% of staff and students have activated their ChatGPT Edu accounts, according to EdSource.
The $39 million contract has prompted pushback from the California Faculty Association and Cal State Student Association, according to The Sacramento Bee. The renewal also sparked debate among staff and students over inconsistent rules for AI use in the classroom.
The absence of a clear policy surrounding AI leads students, like Lucas Luminato, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student, to experience dramatically different expectations from one course to the next. While his thermal systems professor heavily encourages the use of AI, his ethical concepts professor threatens serious academic consequences to anyone caught using it.
Luminato said he has spent a significant amount of time navigating these ever-evolving rules.
“This term, a lot of professors encourage the general use of AI,” Luminato said. “Yet for specific assignments, if they notice it’s not your own work and you’re relying solely on AI, they’ll definitely give you a warning and report you to academic misconduct.”
Although Cal Poly Pomona leaves the rules regarding artificial intelligence up to each individual instructor, the university continues to provide internal grants and support external grants for professors willing to integrate artificial intelligence into their coursework and research.
Linchi Kwok, a hospitality professor at CPP, is one of the recipients of these AI grants and often integrates AI into his study abroad course curriculum.
“I believe, in many ways, we’re striving to prepare our students to get into an AI-mediated work environment,” Kwok said. “Students who know how to use AI as an agent to support their work can be more productive.”
Aaron DeRosa, an assistant professor for English and Modern Languages in the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences, also permits students to use generative AI but requires a high level of transparency and accountability. Students must disclose their use of AI, share their prompts and verify the accuracy of AI’s responses.
DeRosa said the appropriate use of AI in his classroom depends on the learning objective of the assignment. If students are evaluated on their ability to construct sentences, using ChatGPT to generate or revise those sentences could prevent them from learning that skill. If an assignment instead evaluates their ideas and critical thinking, he said AI could help them with other parts of the writing process.
“The tool (AI) can replace learning if you let it,” DeRosa said. “Once you’re in a professional world, you need to know how to use the tool to assist you with things you’ve already learned.”
Despite pushback, the CSU system continues to expand its investments into the artificial intelligence community, shifting the debate from whether students will use AI to how they should use it.