The Paywall Divide: Premium AI Subscription as an Overlooked Equity Variable in Higher Education AI Research

Abstract

Purpose – University AI-adoption research has extensively studied whether students use AI, but rarely how they pay for it. This paper argues that premium AI subscription status is an overlooked equity variable in higher-education AI research andproposes a research design to test it directly. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual/proposal paper motivated by a descriptive statistic from an existing dataset: in a survey of n = 331 university students in Uzbekistan (Tukhtaeva & Mirza, 2026), 42.3% reported paying out-of-pocket for a premium AI subscription, a variable collected but never analysed as a predictor or grouping variable in the original study. The paper situates this statistic within the emerging digital-divide literature on generative AI and specifies hypotheses and an analytic plan for testing it.