07/08/2025
When professors use AI to design the lectures and assignments and students use AI to complete them and then professors use AI to grade them, it's essentially AI speaking to AI. What value is there to the university? Professors now use AI to design courses and assignments, students use AI to complete them, and professors use AI again to grade them.
IT HAS ESSENTIALLY REDUCED THE UNIVERSITY TO AI SPEAKING TO AI.
From this week's The New Yorker. If you read The Chronicle of Higher Education, you read every week about the considerable hand-wringing and debate regarding the value of the university.
WARNING: IF YOU CHOOSE TO READ THE ATTACHED ARTICLE, THE "F" WORD IS PROMINENTLY FEATURED.
"When classes were over and students were moving into their summer housing, I e-mailed with Alex, who was settling in in the East Village. He’d just finished his finals, and estimated that he’d spent between thirty minutes and an hour composing two papers for his humanities classes. Without the assistance of Claude, it might have taken him around eight or nine hours. “I didn’t retain anything,” he wrote. “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” He received an A-minus and a B-plus". --NYU student (NYU is $100K/yr)
The article explores how generative AI is reshaping college writing, education, and student habits. It profiles students at [remember $100K/yr] NYU (where my creative writing student earned all A's on her absolute crap work and received NO feedback at all) and other universities who use AI tools extensively for nearly all kinds of writing, from essays to dating app messages. Students perceive it as simply efficient or even inevitable.
AI is prompting educators and universities to rethink what higher education is for. Traditionally, college has been about learning to tackle difficult tasks and developing critical thinking, even when coursework feels impractical. With AI, students can now bypass the struggle and still meet requirements without deeper learning or retention.
Institutions including the 460,000 student Cal State U campuses, Oxford U, Arizona State U, and the U Penn's Wharton School of Business, after initially trying to suppress AI use, are now rapidly partnering with AI companies like ChatGPT EDU to present AI as indispensable and integrate AI throughout college life, even offering personalized AI assistant accounts to students.
Professors, meanwhile, are experimenting with old-fashioned approaches like pen-and-paper exams, oral exams, and focusing on the process of writing, rather than just the product.
Students see AI as another tool for navigating college efficiently. Some express regret that they retain little of what they’ve “written,” while others appreciate the time saved for other pursuits. Another student summed up his view of using AI for assignments: “It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like, cheating.” He felt it was a victimless way to fulfill requirements.
AI challenges the traditional purpose of college: a place to learn through difficulty, even in seemingly impractical subjects. Now students can bypass both the process and the struggle.
Professors are responding by returning to pen and paper, with sales of blue books (exam booklets) rising, and some even considering oral exams, harkening back to Socrates.
College has always involved trade-offs in how students spend their time. In the 1960s, students spent ~24 hours per week on schoolwork. Today it’s about 15, and that includes course attendance, with AI often filling the gap. (Let's recall that back in 2011, Arum and Roksa found that college students showed virtually no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills, so this is just a further devolution.)
On the hopeful side, Estonia, one of Europe’s top performers in education, plans to bring AI into high schools soon, replacing rote essays with self-directed learning and oral exams.
The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.
