Generative AI in Higher Education: Students' Perspectives on Adoption, Ethical Concerns, and Academic Impact

This study explores the adoption patterns of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools among 226 university students from various departments in Turkish higher education institutions, revealing unexpected relationships between age, discipline, and ethical concerns.Through quantitative analysis of university students' survey responses, three distinct clusters of GenAI users' re indentified: high adopters with low ethical concerns, moderate adopters with high ethical awareness, and low adopters with moderate ethical considerations. Notably, the findings challenge the prevalent assumption about younger students' technology adoption, revealing a strong positive correlation between age and AI tool preferences (r=.858, p<.01). The study also revealed significant gender and disciplinary variations, with female and non-STEM students expressing stronger ethical concerns (p<.05 and p<.01, respectively). While students recognized GenAI's potential to enhance academic productivity, they expressed concerns about misinformation, plagiarism, and AI-enabled inequalities. These findings suggest the need for differentiated approaches to AI integration in higher education, considering age-based adoption patterns and discipline-specific variations. The results call for targeted institutional policies addressing ethical literacy, disciplinary needs, and equitable AI access. This research contributes to the growing discourse on GenAI in higher education by providing evidence-based insights for developing more nuanced and effective AI integration strategies.