Many South Carolina students cite gas prices, Iran war, AI as midterm worries

USC partners with OpenAI as students raise AI job concerns

The Wall Street Journal’s chief political correspondent Josh Dawsey returned to his Columbia, S.C., alma mater — the University of South Carolina — for a series of campus interviews published this week, finding many students — including many Republicans — disillusioned with the country’s political leadership and almost all of them deeply anxious about artificial intelligence.

For Dawsey, who began his career at the Journal and re-joined the newspaper in 2025 after eight years at The Washington Post, the trip doubled as a homecoming. He first moved to Columbia about 15 years ago as a college freshman from a farm on a dirt road in a small town roughly two hours away. He has returned often since — for quadrennial presidential primaries, annual college football games, college weddings and reunions. He was there when the Confederate flag finally came down off the state capitol, “a seminal moment in the arc of a changing state,” he wrote.

This time, he came back, Dawsey wrote, to find out how the next generation feels about its political leaders and its own shot at the American dream “in a time of political polarization, artificial intelligence and sky-high interest rates and gas prices.”

He walked past a campus plaque commemorating Pope John Paul II’s 1987 visit, which quotes the pope telling students: “It is wonderful to be young. It is wonderful to be young and to be a student. It is wonderful to be young and to be a student of the University of South Carolina.”

The 15 years since have redrawn the state. South Carolina’s population has grown by about one million people in that period, the university received almost 70,000 applications last year — almost 80% from out of state — and “construction cranes are literally everywhere,” Dawsey wrote.

Inside the historic campus, with its 1800-era buildings that survived the Civil War and curving brick-paved paths, Dawsey found the sun bright, the mood ebullient and the campus lively ahead of a football game weekend. Many students voiced dissatisfaction with national leadership, he wrote.

“A lot of students — including many Republicans — said they were disillusioned with rising gas prices, the war in Iran and President Trump’s second term,” Dawsey wrote. “Many of them weren’t too thrilled about Democrats either.”

The economy, the Iran conflict and Trump’s second term came up repeatedly in Dawsey’s conversations. “Almost all were also deeply concerned about artificial intelligence and how it will affect their lives and job prospects,” Dawsey wrote. Some students said their friends “had stopped reading books altogether” as the technology reshaped how they researched and wrote.

That concern coexisted with an institutional push to expand the technology on campus. Amiridis told Dawsey the school had signed a partnership with OpenAI to make the technology available to students. Many of those students told Dawsey they were already using AI in their academic work, even as they raised alarms about its broader effects.

Some of the students still had a contagious optimism. Grace Cosby, a junior who leans Republican, had grown tired of inflammatory campus speakers and helped create a regular forum for civil debate with bipartisan speakers, Dawsey wrote. Cosby was one of many students who said she did not believe the current political class served her needs, but added that the next generation could help make it better.

Dawsey also interviewed Henry McMaster, South Carolina’s longest-serving governor. The piece is part of the Journal’s “Rooted In” series, in which reporters revisit their home states to capture the political mood ahead of the 2026 midterms.