Carl, your essay is excellent, but I think it overlooks the current reality of why many young people — and many adults — are attending high school, university, or online degree programs in the first place.
In the 1990s, a humanities graduate, and even more so a STEM graduate, could still reasonably expect that a degree would open the door to a stable job, a salary, benefits, and some form of adult security. Today, that social contract has already collapsed for millions of people. Many students are not pursuing knowledge for its own sake, or even a meaningful intellectual formation. They are trying to survive. They are trying to obtain the piece of paper that might keep them from being permanently locked out of the labour market.
I’ll be turning 49 in a few days. For the past year I’ve been enrolled in an education program at a private online university. What I receive are videos, PDF study guides, and video-call classes where teachers lecture to students whose cameras and microphones are turned off. All our assessments are multiple-choice. There is no forum where students can meet each other, build networks, discuss ideas, or experience anything resembling an intellectual community.
This format forces us to study and go deeper on our own, while also working, looking for work, or trying to remain economically afloat.
It is very sad to study this way: alone, disconnected, unseen. But this is how millions of people around the world are now “studying.” Not in libraries, not in seminars, not in communities of inquiry, but in isolation, in front of screens, trying to earn a credential that may or may not help them get a job.
In that context, ChatGPT and Claude have become, for many of us, the only available interlocutors. Not because we are intellectually lazy, but because no one else is there. No classmate responds. No teacher offers serious feedback. No institution creates a space for discussion. No human being seems to care what we are thinking or trying to understand.
That matters.
When I began studying, I was genuinely excited. I took notes by hand. I wrote to the school principal asking whether they could create a forum where students could exchange ideas. I received no reply. A few days later, I found myself discussing behaviorism with ChatGPT. I wrote on Substack about what I was learning, hoping for feedback from teachers, students, or people interested in education. I got nothing. Just silence. So I kept writing down my thoughts and ideas, sometimes with the help of an AI assistant, sometimes on my own. At no point did I receive meaningful help, advice, or feedback from the institution around me. Over time, I found myself increasingly alone with my online studies while also looking for work to stay afloat.
This is why I think the AI question cannot be separated from the institutional and economic conditions in which students are now learning. Yes, AI can become cognitive surrender. Yes, it can allow students to bypass the difficult work that produces durable learning. But in many contemporary educational settings, the student has already been abandoned before the chatbot appears.
Whether they are private online schools or official in-person schools, whether they are for teenagers or adults., the school has already withdrawn the human encounter, or has done so superficially. The teacher has already become a video, or an authority figure who's so “burned out” that it's best not to bother him. The classroom has already become a PDF, or a situation where it’s best not to participate so as not to make others uncomfortable or disrupt the rhythm of the class. The cohort has already disappeared. The assessment has already been reduced to a multiple-choice form. The degree has already become transactional because the labour market made it transactional first.
So when students turn to AI, they are not always choosing a shortcut over a rich intellectual formation. Not by choice, but out of necessity. A diploma is just a formality. What matters is putting food on the table, and a diploma no longer guarantees anything. That's why more often than not, we are reaching for the only responsive presence in an otherwise empty educational environment. That does not solve the problem you describe. But it changes the moral picture.
You and your colleagues mentioned here are teachers with established careers from a time before this digital economy. You have stable incomes, homes, families, cars, and all the comforts that allow you to criticize today’s intellectual poverty. Are you going to sit here and debate with me how to organize book clubs in a poor Third World city where children are selling food on the street to help support their families? I highly doubt that you or any of your colleagues would want to sit down and talk with me, a 49-year-old college student studying education.
So, the question is not only: “Are students using AI to avoid thinking?” The question is also: “What kind of economy and educational system has made a robot feel more viable, attentive, more dialogic, and more intellectually available than the institution charging students for a degree?” If we want students to think first and use ChatGPT later, then someone has to care about their thinking before ChatGPT enters the room.
This: "So, the question is not only: “Are students using AI to avoid thinking?” The question is also: “What kind of economy and educational system has made a robot feel more viable, attentive, more dialogic, and more intellectually available than the institution charging students for a degree?” -- yes this is the excellent question. The system was weak before AI. AI has shone a light on the weakness.
Thank you so much for responding to my comment. I remain grateful and excited to be pursuing a degree at my age, financed by two friends since I can't find a job. I also love my studies. Distance education, from my perspective, is very poorly planned as an educational system because it's designed like a business. I understand and accept this. However, the inability to create a true community is very unfortunate and undoubtedly has direct consequences on how new teachers understand the field of education. Everyone is on their own. I long to build my own circle of academic contacts to whom I can share what I'm learning and understanding, but I'm still alone.
Yes, education should only be available to those that can afford to move to a university and attend in person while the riff-raff toils to scrape out a meager living.
but if our answer is the poorly constructed online experience, while the rich still have access to more human education, have we solved anything at all?
Your response to this article voices out the silence that bogged-down institutions, students, and teachers have experienced for the past years.
As an educator, a techie one at that, I’ve made the move to be more intentional in getting to know every student that sits on my class every sem. I make it a point to call them out each by name, even if we will only be in one room for a good 5 months. How they think, what they’re going through, where they are and what could they possibly gain from a sem with me. Every sem has been a surprise for me - not entirely because of the tragedy or scandal of the third world classroom - but because of how working with students individually has greatly improved their engagement and performance, and how they make sense of their world. It is such a privilege to be able to journey with these kids in their self-discovery, so they can make their own value-oriented decisions in life.
And yes, this is costly in time and energy, and goes beyond my paygrade. This also shifts my focus from the more rewarding ‘publishing productivity’. But whatever the cost, I do hope and pray that I will never tire of lending an ear and offering a hand to these students under my care.
Your argument (why students turn to AI) and Carl’s (why degrees have lost their economic signaling value) are orthogonal. What’s missing is why degrees turned into signals in the first place. My theory is this:
Evaluating job applicants is unreliable and expensive. Degrees provided a somewhat reliable alternative while also shifting the cost to the applicants themselves. Starting around 35-40 years ago, second- and third-tier schools, facing falling demand, realized credential seekers were a goldmine of potential revenue and shifted their focus from providing education to granting credentials. Some chancy bastards saw this too and launched for-profit schools. Then top-tier schools also joined the party. The US government, filled with policymakers high on the idea of college for all, fueled the fire with essentially unlimited student loan borrowing. School administrators ignored the education mandate to maximize revenue and throughput.
And now here we are. Both employers and job seekers realized a few years ago that a college degree’s signaling value had evaporated; AI is just the final nail in the coffin. Universities are in a death spiral they created.
Evaluating job applicants is still unreliable and expensive. Maybe something else will replace the degree and the cycle will begin anew.
First, thanks for responding to my comment. And yes, part of what you say is exactly as you put it, but I don’t think Carl’s article and I are talking about different things. The stage is set; there are billions of people moving within it. We have this reality, dragging along the “whys.” Education is certainly another business niche now.
The point is, in my job search I’ve come across this: “Seeking employee/accountant/administrator, ages 22 to 25, with 3 years of experience.” It’s ridiculous. These are street ads, not online ones. Then there are the jobs on websites. I’ve read ridiculous things: people looking for minor employees (serving tables) “who have a car” (yes, you read that right)—that’s just one example. I have 25 years of experience repairing electronics, I’ve run my own business in the past, and I can’t get anything because I’m 49. Over 4,000 applications in recent years and nothing… not even at Walmart or Costco. The New Enemy: Time—Ageism in the Labor Market.
All true but I don’t understand how that’s related to AI; what you’re describing predates AI by decades. I don’t think there’s an ageism conspiracy but age *is* a signal. Older people are generally not as digitally literate and harder to train. Individual older people may not fit that profile but if you’re inundated with 5,000 job applications age is a cheap and fast filter. You say you’ve applied to 4,000 jobs, as has everyone else desperate for a job, young and old, thus creating the need for cheap, fast filters.
Thank you for responding my answer. You’re forgetting that “older people” are now Gen Xers in our 50s, and that we’re pretty digital literate. We’re not talking about boomers who are heading to nursing homes. And let me correct you on this: No, it wasn’t always like this. I don’t remember this “ageism” in the ’90s, nor in the 2000s. What I do remember is that people in their 60s back then could quickly find a place anywhere—in small and large companies alike—even without a degree. Today, that’s over.
You don’t remember ageism in the 90s-00s? I do. I absolutely remember who got hit the hardest by the sweeping dotcom layoffs, and I remember seeing this after the manufacturing layoffs a decade prior, and I remember thinking I needed to be prepared to retire at 50. People getting laid off now seem surprised, and I’m honestly not sure what they told themselves about the old guys (too old, too set-in-their-ways, too tech illiterate, nothing that’ll happen to me because I’m too passionate about tech) getting let go first in any downturn. It’ll happen again in another 10-20 years and people’ll be shocked then too.
First, thanks for responding to my comment. AND YOU'RE SO RIGHT! Thanks for reminding me of this. I went too far, because with every “shift in the tide,” there are people who seem too slow to keep up. Maybe because I was young and also a tech enthusiast, I overlooked the fact that many people were being left behind. I have no excuse because, on top of that, I ran a computer repair shop for nearly a decade, and many of my customers didn’t know how to use their computers properly. What a slip-up and what an oversimplification on my part.
Thank you for responding to my question. What I appreciate most about you is that, assuming you're a math teacher, you speak “in mathematics”. I'm Mexican and an astrologer, and I speak broken Spanish, broken English, and a little better in symbols and archetypes. Because of your way of expressing yourself, I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to interact with me.
I appreciate your effort of getting at the connections between the different arguments that are going on. I think it's telling that your point begins with the job market, and from the perspective of the employer. Here is (one of) the main conundrums of the educational institution but also of the socio-economics of knowledge and expertise in general in the current day. If the value of an education, of any form, can only be calculated and made visible by employers, we are in trouble. It's about how that economic value of degrees is being measured, who has the authority to decree value, and how broader economic institutions measure value of anything in a socio-economic system.
These days, a degree is bait universities use to catch teenagers, drown them in lifelong debt, and use the proceeds to pay hefty administrative salaries and build stadiums.
We’ll be just fine if only 20% of high school graduates go on to college, as was the case fifty years ago, and the rest do something else. Colleges need to be culled.
I agree with you on the dilution of both the economic value and meaning of degrees. To me, that doesn't mean we should only think about the problems and future of universities through the lens of economics and jobs. And the devaluation of education has a lot to do with other developments, such as the decline of trust and power of institutions, broken social contracts, financialisation of everything, etc.
And yes, education was a status symbol (depending on which past and where we're talking about) - but that does not mean that a degree is what signified it.
Because there are other ways to understand and measure value and societal contribution than by tracking economic impact (especially if things like abstract quantitative data is the representative measure of economic impact)
Yes. This is why Charlie Kirk made a point of not going to college. Maybe that is attempting to set a more healthy trend than kids drowning themselves in debt to follow their hearts to learn something they are interested in but may provide them with no valuable skills in the labor market
I think that's a great account of how the education system has failed. To me personally education should never be discriminative in the first place; and we should not disregard how AI is now breaking barriers for people in developing countries to access knowledge. This is another great article I have read: https://substack.com/home/post/p-193233055
That post is complete fiction, from start to finish. The example he leads with, the Nigerian counterfeit pill testing company, RxAll, was started in 2016, long before AI as we know it today. It doesn’t and never used AI, and has since pivoted to selling software because pill testing is a dead end: it’s not in the pharmacist’s interest to test pills he’s already paid for and find out they’re fake. His supplier isn’t going to give him a refund. All his other examples are just as bad.
This is such a breath of fresh air after being lectured by folks with tenure about how AI is an unambiguous evil and that anyone who uses it just hates the humanities. Being ABD in a new city and having a (non-academic) job that makes connecting with academics in my area all but impossible, I simply don’t have anyone to discuss philosophy or theology with anywhere around me.
With Claude, I’m ably to ask questions, get responses that actually address them, and then follow up. It’s a lifeline for those of us who would otherwise just read and think without any kind of reactive input. It’s a simulation of a conversation with someone who knows the material, and I’ll take a simulation over nothing.
I live in Swaziland and I'm in a distance learning program as well. Here you spoke for me as well and far more eloquently than I could. Thank you Norma.
Thank you, Dirk, for responding to my comment with your kind words. It's a complex issue, but I think we all need to speak out about how we live and how we see what's happening.
I’m generally unimpressed with our educational system. It’s more of a day care than education system.
I was unimpressed back in the mid-1990s when my high school in a Denver suburb decided not to expel me for missing too many classes because I had scored almost 1500 on the SAT. I was unimpressed at the University of Colorado where I attended in person 25 years ago (online school was just getting started) earning two bachelors and a MBA. Working class students like myself didn’t get the network effects of the wealthy students whose parents paid their tuition and set them up with internships. I myself had the joy of joining the Army after my masters. Basic training is super fun in your mid 20s. Highly recommend it. But the Army did pay off my student loans.
I thrived, when I went back to CU to get my masters in accounting after COVID 100% online. Some degrees, don’t get extra value from campus life.
I’ll close with this. A few weeks ago, I spoke to my 5th grade daughter’s math teacher asking if she could do independent study since she was three grades ahead in math. The teacher flatly told me “no”. But thanked me since she didn’t have to spend any time instructing my child.
I thing is what it does. Most of our schools are day care centers. If they were focused on education there would be a test to go from grade to grade. But there isn’t. There is a reason for that.
Next year my daughter will be doing independent study, or else her, and her high test scores, will be at a charter school.
One last thing on AI. I taught my daughters how to use the scanner, turn “busy work” homework into PDFs. Then give the pdf to my AI agent and have it answer the questions. So now my kids supervise and double check the AIs work. Frankly the AI helps them more than their teachers.
Thank you for responding to my comment. As a 49-year-old student, I still had high hopes when I started, but they faded quickly. But you’re doing a great job with your daughters. I use AI in a similar way to study: I upload my study guides to discuss the topic, look for information outside the platform, and I’ve managed to pass all my exams on my own, achieving a 9.8/10 GPA. I’m proud of this because I’ve done it literally all by myself. What I like about AI is that it’s not as accommodating as it seems; the bot is very useful for debating topics and broadening our perspective a bit, but it forces us to examine what we ourselves are saying, thinking, and believing.
Hi Uriel, I shared a very similar view with you on the education system. As a parent I honestly don't have faith in any institutions, and I hope for the necessary disruption to come. This is an article I have just written about my experience: https://fromtheinsideco.substack.com/p/modern-education-has-failed-us-and
Norma, I agree with some of the points you made. I read Carl’s essay and I think your perspective is somewhat presumptuous regarding his circumstances and how they shape his perspective. While I agree that judgement comes from a place of privilege, there was nothing that signaled to me that he misjudged or left out information regarding this dissertation.
Regarding the value of a degree: if we are discussing economic impact, it is best to include the socioeconomic and racial aspects to accommodate your point. The cost of a college degree and the barriers to get one should almost always be accompanied by the acknowledgement of the value of degrees decreasing as the groups of people who obtain them them shift. It’s less about economics and more about intentional and quiet exclusion of education.
Carl, I believe your essay is insightful. As a college undergrad, this perspective is refreshing. I have also been contemplating the value of a degree, and your explanation resonates.
Thank you for responding to my comment. I apologize if any part of it could be misinterpreted. I have great respect for Carl’s work—I’ve saved several of his articles—but when it comes to criticizing students without distinguishing between a well-off student who isn’t making the most of what’s available to them and a poor student who is struggling to keep from being evicted or to put food on the table every day, we need to be careful.
As a 1990s humanities grad, its wasn’t my experience that a degree led easily to secure work. The good old days had different issues, but werent as great as some might assume
What you're describing is the credential stripped of everything that once justified it. Universities figured out they could sell the diploma without the campus, the community, or the formation, and millions of students accepted because the alternative was worse. AI tutors will enter this space competing against something already hollow. And if the degree is just a signal, and the signal keeps degrading, who exactly benefits from maintaining the fiction?
Thank you so much for responding to my comment. That's certainly true. Schooling was once steeped in ceremony, after-school activities were almost ritualistic, and the teacher possessed an almost mystical aura. I discussed this in an article about the era when the figure of the "mentor or teacher" was even promoted by film (Moyagi, Kenobi, etc.) and was imbued with great dignity, an almost mystical aura. Today, school is a mere formality, and the teacher is now just an "equal" to the street sweeper. We are living through a kind of new nihilism in which all meanings have been impoverished.
Your comment raises a fundamental question: who benefits? I think it's pretty obvious that tech giants have invaded our lives and our minds. There are like ten people controlling what matters, toying with humanity, reducing it to ashes.
In season 5 of “The Boys” Stan Edgar, says “the machine must be fed” referring to the corporatism highlighted in the show. The irony isn’t lost on me. A show, featuring a giant corporation, mirrors real life with Amazon making the show.
The surest way to stop the current system with its concentration of power and capital, would be to stop the printing of currency. -but that’s a story far afield from an education post.
Anyway, the solution to stopping the concentration of power in the hands of a handful of corporations would be to stop printing money. But that’s would result in a recession, and no political party wants that. So the music keeps playing, and as old Stan said, “the machine must be fed”.
Sadly, our education system is so broken that students and teachers can’t define or recognize capitalism, fascism, Marxism, corporatism, cronyism, etc. it’s almost like it was done by design à la 1984.
I’m going to take a slightly different approach when it comes to what we need to stop doing. Technology is what our attention and use of it have made it. The only way to put an end to the concentration of power and control is to step back. To return to the “Stone Age.” Without people, these giants are nothing. The masses are the primary source of power and control.
Ray Dalio has some great videos and books on this subject - the concentration of power that occurs during the end of one of these economic cycles.
I have a presentation I do for local groups where I pull out a few hundred thousand dollars in prop money (it’s so good you wouldn’t know the difference) and explain the national debt to people, using their share as the base. Older people roll their eyes until I get to the scheduled cut to social security in 2033. But the younger people, especially under 18, they are filled with rage. You may yet get your return to something simpler.
Wow! Congratulations—you’ve had the vision and the smarts for this. I have some great ideas, but I don’t know anything about politics or economics, and in the city there aren’t really any “local groups,” except for the dance groups in the park. My thing is other stuff, which is basically way too oversaturated. I’d like to develop courses on topics that might be controversial and aimed at adults (society is deeply infantilized), but I’m still early in my career, and I haven’t gotten to instructional design yet. Hey! If you’re rich, make a generous donation in my last post so this future teacher doesn’t end up without a school and out on the street =) Happy monday!
Even sadder is the fact that there are thousands of highly qualified teachers who would love to offer more personalized attention and facilitate real group discussions in either in-person or online settings, but higher ed doesn't prioritize education, so the money goes to all kinds of other things, not to hiring more educators to teach better classes. Meanwhile, countless would-be teachers with Ph.D.s work in other fields instead.
Thank you for this, Norma—you are exactly right. As I say to my own students and to my colleagues, practically the only thing I have to offer students today is a human face. But educationally, there is real value in having a human face. I wrote about this before I had ever heard about ChatGPT, but it’s even more true now:
The flaw in that line of thinking is that people have been “self-educating” for at least several hundred years and solitude always helped. Nice try though
I appreciate the analysis that you're providing here. I'd like to offer what you might think of as an alternate reality, alternate in the sense that it's quite different from what you're describing here, and real in the sense that it's coming from my own current teaching experience.
I teach writing at a technical community college in the US. My classes are built around one main writing project that students work on over the course of the semester. Students have space to make meaningful choices about what they write about and how they write about it, and they also have quite a lot of support and guidance through the process. One day a week we do things together as a class, and one day a week students work on their projects in class while I check in with them (kind of like a shop or studio art class).
In one of my sections this past spring, you would have seen a student writing about the cult of Artemis in ancient Greece sitting next to a student writing about the cultural history of piercings sitting next to a student writing about growing up in Iraq during the war sitting next to a student writing about the psychology of memory sitting next to a student writing about the Chinese education system sitting next to a student writing about trans representation in film sitting next to a student writing about the business decisions involved in running a car wash (and I could keep going).
While some projects came together more successfully than others, all of these students were doing cool things that they cared about, all of them put in a significant amount of work over a sustained period of time, and all of them could converse thoughtfully about the work they were doing and the subjects they were writing about. Evidence of AI abuse was minimal. In many cases, students were doing a substantial amount of the writing in class (often choosing to write on paper for notes and early drafts).
While this happened to be a particularly strong section, it's pretty representative of my teaching experience. My students are interesting people who want to have meaningful learning experiences in college, and given opportunity and encouragement they will do (or at least attempt) really cool things. And they do this in spite of the fact that many of them are dealing with a ***lot*** in their lives and have not necessarily had the best experiences with education in the past.
Building a class that creates a better learning environment for my students is a constant and ongoing learning experience for me. There are a lot of things that I'm still trying to figure out, and there are a number of pieces to the puzzle that are at least somewhat specific to the context I'm teaching in. (Notably, I teach in a state that offers something approaching free community college and composition courses have minimal responsibility for content coverage. Also, my students are awesome.) Nevertheless, I'm starting to see things that consistently work, and the common theme for me is connection.
- Connecting with students
- Connecting students with each other
- Connecting the writing that we're doing with students' interests
- Connecting students' interests with academic inquiry
- Connecting academic inquiry with life in community
- Connecting writing with meaningful learning
Students really do want to have meaningful learning experiences. If we build them (or the space for them), they will come.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Good teaching solves the problem before it starts. What’s being short circuited with AI is lazy professors in a 150 student lecture hall supported by institutions that reward endless publication cycles over quality teaching. AI made cheating easier when no one’s watching. Why tf was no one watching?
It sounds like your students had a great course. But, how many students can work in a course like this? I would guess fewer than 20, maybe 15. A professor at a research university who devoted so much time to his students would certainly not get tenure. 40 years ago I did a Ph.D at UCLA, but once decided to take a public speaking course at Santa Monica community college. I remember the teaching as one of the best classes I ever had.
True. I feel the same way about journalism classes. They are so academically enriching. The problem is non-journalism students probably do not have the time to take them.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. To completely dodge learning by using these generative AI platforms, one and one’s formative work, would have to be unknown to the person - running the course or the accompanying tutor. If / where universities and colleges have reached a point where the student is completely anonymised it’s very hard to see a way foward.
Fantastic observation. I’m sure your students appreciate your attentiveness and appreciate being seen for the interesting humans they are. If we make education meaningful in the context of the life of a student, they build a relationship with learning, grow to know themselves better, and foster connections with the supportive people around them.
Excellent jwr! My English composition courses are fashioned the same way. Students rarely use AI unethically in my courses. Meaningful learning experiences speaks volumes. I am writing a book this summer on education, neuroscience, and social media algorithms. The form of learning we do keeps students attentive during class and away from TikTok (at least momentarily).
A group of us are writing a complete response, here's the abstract. Shooting fro 5k words by Tuesday:
Generative AI has weakened the evidentiary value of the unsupervised university essay. The problem is not merely cheating; it is credential readability. A finished paper no longer reliably distinguishes students who have developed disciplinary judgment from those who have outsourced cognitive work to an algorithmic system. Proctoring can restore control, but it narrows the meaning of the degree. In this essay, we argue for a layered post-AI credential built around three public demonstrations: a defended presentation, a discipline-authentic written product, and an applied artifact that teaches or operationalizes the written argument for another person. Together, these demonstrations certify oracy, literacy, and algorithmacy (the ability to use algorithmic systems without surrendering judgment to them). Drawing on historical transitions in university credentialing, we argue that durable credentials survive disruption not by policing old forms alone, but by adding new demonstrations of competence.
I have two sons, one of whom can't go to school. He has disabilities that means he can't reliably be in a room with 30 similar-age kids. He's also among the brightest, most mature and thoughtful people I know.
I'm now responsible for his education and what I tell him is that he is, indeed, one of the brightest, most mature and thoughtful people I know and that he will find a path through our socially-complex world that respects his talents and allows him to manage around his disabilities. But it won't be the 'lazy' path I went through, where I did well at school, went to university where I performed well but learned nothing, couldn't fit into a pre-organised corporate graduate scheme, and spent another decade trying to work out what to do with my life.
He'll have to work smart, nimble and innovative for everything he achieves - and, in most ways, that's better. It's certainly more efficient than turning your brain off and only working out who you are three decades in.
Hearing an echo here to my own life and my son's too. Now 23, he'll not attend university as a learning disability sidetracked him some time ago. Still, he can adopt the virtues you've described to make his way in the world.
Carl Hendrick powerfully diagnoses the death of the university degree, yet AI is not the true culprit—industrial mass higher education is. Renaissance Florence, a city of roughly 75,000, produced Michelangelo and the Florentine school through intimate bottega apprenticeships. Masters recognised talent, guided reading, and forged judgment in daily dialogue.
Today the United States alone graduates over 100,000 art and design students annually, yet produces no comparable flowering of genius.
When one lecturer faces hundreds of students and thousands of anonymous essays, sustained mentorship collapses. Professors can no longer recognise intuitive ability or induct students into disciplinary logic through direct contact. Assessment becomes mere credentialing.
Real reform requires deliberate contraction: cohorts of no more than twenty and restored apprenticeship. In that intimate setting, AI would be a formidable asset—an infinitely patient, high-quality supervisor that amplifies the master’s guidance rather than replacing it. Only then will universities cultivate durable judgment instead of counterfeiting it.
I doubt he's considered "today," any longer. Williams completed undergrad, studying compostion and music, playing in ensembles during the entire time. He then went into the US Air Force, playing and arranging for their ensembles, as well as taking more college courses. Then he moved to NY to study under professors at Julliard and Eastman, and earned extra money working as a pianist in jazz clubs. He's now 94.
But, then, even if he's "yesteryear," few composers had an upbringing and education like him.
This is so awesome- not just the article but also the conversation it has triggered. As an unschooling mom of one AuDHD child and one neurotypical child- and someone who grew up in the hustle-porn capital of the world (Silicon Valley) under heavy Ivy League=success conditioning- this article sang to me.
Many of us parents raising ND kids (the square pegs) have spent years expected to force our kids inside educational round holes because we were told and sold this path: work hard, get the grades, earn the degree, secure the future. This article exposes the cracks our families have already been living inside for a long time.
I loved this piece so much I immediately wrote a companion piece from the ND parenting perspective for anyone interested:
Excellent piece. I believe that education needs to focus on 6C: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, Curiosity, Commitment. If these can be instilled from an early age in the curriculum young people will be better able, imv, to learn and thrive.
Professors can still strive for understanding outside of reliance upon the tools. I did a degree in Physics over 50 years ago and then a Ph.D. in Engineering. At the time we did not have either computer aided mathematical tools such as Mathematica or Maple or the newer LLM's. When I took a course in Graduate Nonlinear Structures the professor never asked us to solve the problems - "The solution of these equations is beyond you, your job is to determine what the relevant equations and boundary conditions are, if those are correctly specified, specialized mathematicians / numerical analysists can rind the relevant solutions." But we did have to thoroughly understand the problem so that we could determine what the relevant terms in the applicable mathematical description were important and relevant. And he would evaluate how well we could do it in pen and booklet tests. The homework was basically so that we could practice the processes and evaluation until our analysis approaches were well understood. Relying upon tools blindly would leave you helpless in the exam, when you would not have access to them.
A college friend of mind recently retired from his Physics professorship. They allowed students to rely upon Mathematica or Maple for mathematical support - but gave corresponding harder problems than if the student had to do it all manually - but you still needed the understanding of what was going on and what was relevant and what was not relevant. It is that understanding of what is relevant and what is not relevant that provides the basis for being able to do anything. If students rely upon the tools for that fundamental capability, they are self deluded and professionally useless.
The LLM's are definitely useful. I am starting to experiment with them, using them in combination with some books as I teach myself Geometric Algebra and try to understand how that approach allows you to have a different perspective on some interesting physical systems. I also use LLM-based tools at work for meeting transcripts, summaries, and the like.
LLM's are not inherently good or bad, it is how you use them. Similarly, social networks are not inherently good or bad -t is how you use them. Unfortunately, I think that the bulk of the population uses social networks badly and will use LLM's badly.
In terms of learning, LLM's are probably a godsend for autodidacts and near autodidacts and very destructive for intellectually lazy people - who make up the bulk of the population.
According to The Case Against Education, what the students learn from University doesn't matter, because most of them are useless in work. Diploma is just a signal shows that you're smart, conscientious and conforming to social norms.
A degree does not signal that you are “smart”. It signals that you know how to regurgitate information for a test. The vast majority of college graduates in 2026 have no clue how to think, and THAT used to be the point of education.
When you wrestle with a difficult text, for example a great philosopher who resists you, a dense legal judgment that refuses to resolve, or a proof that won't click, the friction is the encoding mechanism. The resistance of the material carves understanding through the negative dialectical imprint, through Arbeit. A frictionless summary delivered by AI produces something closer to recognition than knowledge: you can nod at the concept when you see it, but you cannot effectively use it, cannot feel where it strains under pressure, and cannot notice when someone is misapplying it.
Most of these “AI broke universities” essays seem to focus on the humanities.
Take home exams? They don’t exist with engineering degrees, at least back in the 2000’s.
Why would you make the exam take-home? The closest would be projects that are done over the semester, in which case you’re tasked with making something work—a software application, a vending machine built with a circuit board, a motor control application with an embedded board and real I/O.
Sure, you could cheat with ChatGPT (and especially agentic AI workflows for the software portion), but that’s actually how many (and soon most?) engineering tasks are done in the industry now.
There’s tremendous value in engineering students learning to use AI, not least of which is they’re learning the workflows used in industry.
Let’s preface all of these essays by narrowing it down to the humanities and similar fields. STEM education should welcome the use of AI.
And if we narrow it to the humanities, yes indeed, it’s a major problem. But then again, why did we even have take-home exams? That always seemed to me like a dubious way of measuring the students’ capabilities. You could always just find someone else to write it for you pre-ChatGPT.
Give them 3 hours in person to pour their thoughts on pen/paper or on a laptop with supervision. Problem solved.
If they cheated on their homework assignments throughout the semester, they’re sure to fail at the finals. Give them the freedom and responsibility to govern their lives like the adults they are.
a lot of it changed with covid. We were encouraged to give so much grace and be so flexible, and the HS kids coming up had that as well. The pendulum is definitely swimming back now though.
I line in South Africa. I think that we have all got to follow the Australian Nexus model of delivering masters level training to teachers in cognitive science and training teachers in high quality schools. That way there will be hundreds of thousands of human beings who understand what is a stake. I think people just don't get it.
I have one child out of college, one in, and another who may or may not go in about another year. I've had different conversations with all of them about the value of a degree - in terms of the value it may provide to them and the actual value (actual dollars as well as unpaid labor) the family contributes to make it happen.
I've told all three the same thing: you don't really learn anything in college, you learn how to think. You learn how to deal with people. You learn how to navigate a bureaucracy and how to advocate for yourself. The pandemic tested much of this - though in my defense, how could I have seen that coming?
My oldest is glad she went and working in the field she studied. I think my middle sometimes wonders why he's there, but he'll finish. My youngest is having trouble seeing the point. It's getting harder for me to make.
What (if anything) will replace my experience in college for my child who decides not to go? What will I tell my children who did go when they realize it wasn't all I cracked it up to be?
Your writing gives voice to the doubts that have been multiplying in my mind. Thank you for that as well as the humility to admit you don't have the answer either. I don't think we can trust anyone who says they have the answer.
Carl, your essay is excellent, but I think it overlooks the current reality of why many young people — and many adults — are attending high school, university, or online degree programs in the first place.
In the 1990s, a humanities graduate, and even more so a STEM graduate, could still reasonably expect that a degree would open the door to a stable job, a salary, benefits, and some form of adult security. Today, that social contract has already collapsed for millions of people. Many students are not pursuing knowledge for its own sake, or even a meaningful intellectual formation. They are trying to survive. They are trying to obtain the piece of paper that might keep them from being permanently locked out of the labour market.
I’ll be turning 49 in a few days. For the past year I’ve been enrolled in an education program at a private online university. What I receive are videos, PDF study guides, and video-call classes where teachers lecture to students whose cameras and microphones are turned off. All our assessments are multiple-choice. There is no forum where students can meet each other, build networks, discuss ideas, or experience anything resembling an intellectual community.
This format forces us to study and go deeper on our own, while also working, looking for work, or trying to remain economically afloat.
It is very sad to study this way: alone, disconnected, unseen. But this is how millions of people around the world are now “studying.” Not in libraries, not in seminars, not in communities of inquiry, but in isolation, in front of screens, trying to earn a credential that may or may not help them get a job.
In that context, ChatGPT and Claude have become, for many of us, the only available interlocutors. Not because we are intellectually lazy, but because no one else is there. No classmate responds. No teacher offers serious feedback. No institution creates a space for discussion. No human being seems to care what we are thinking or trying to understand.
That matters.
When I began studying, I was genuinely excited. I took notes by hand. I wrote to the school principal asking whether they could create a forum where students could exchange ideas. I received no reply. A few days later, I found myself discussing behaviorism with ChatGPT. I wrote on Substack about what I was learning, hoping for feedback from teachers, students, or people interested in education. I got nothing. Just silence. So I kept writing down my thoughts and ideas, sometimes with the help of an AI assistant, sometimes on my own. At no point did I receive meaningful help, advice, or feedback from the institution around me. Over time, I found myself increasingly alone with my online studies while also looking for work to stay afloat.
This is why I think the AI question cannot be separated from the institutional and economic conditions in which students are now learning. Yes, AI can become cognitive surrender. Yes, it can allow students to bypass the difficult work that produces durable learning. But in many contemporary educational settings, the student has already been abandoned before the chatbot appears.
Whether they are private online schools or official in-person schools, whether they are for teenagers or adults., the school has already withdrawn the human encounter, or has done so superficially. The teacher has already become a video, or an authority figure who's so “burned out” that it's best not to bother him. The classroom has already become a PDF, or a situation where it’s best not to participate so as not to make others uncomfortable or disrupt the rhythm of the class. The cohort has already disappeared. The assessment has already been reduced to a multiple-choice form. The degree has already become transactional because the labour market made it transactional first.
So when students turn to AI, they are not always choosing a shortcut over a rich intellectual formation. Not by choice, but out of necessity. A diploma is just a formality. What matters is putting food on the table, and a diploma no longer guarantees anything. That's why more often than not, we are reaching for the only responsive presence in an otherwise empty educational environment. That does not solve the problem you describe. But it changes the moral picture.
You and your colleagues mentioned here are teachers with established careers from a time before this digital economy. You have stable incomes, homes, families, cars, and all the comforts that allow you to criticize today’s intellectual poverty. Are you going to sit here and debate with me how to organize book clubs in a poor Third World city where children are selling food on the street to help support their families? I highly doubt that you or any of your colleagues would want to sit down and talk with me, a 49-year-old college student studying education.
So, the question is not only: “Are students using AI to avoid thinking?” The question is also: “What kind of economy and educational system has made a robot feel more viable, attentive, more dialogic, and more intellectually available than the institution charging students for a degree?” If we want students to think first and use ChatGPT later, then someone has to care about their thinking before ChatGPT enters the room.
This: "So, the question is not only: “Are students using AI to avoid thinking?” The question is also: “What kind of economy and educational system has made a robot feel more viable, attentive, more dialogic, and more intellectually available than the institution charging students for a degree?” -- yes this is the excellent question. The system was weak before AI. AI has shone a light on the weakness.
There’s so much to unpack here but for one I’ll just say I think you make an eloquent case for the end of distance learning.
Thank you so much for responding to my comment. I remain grateful and excited to be pursuing a degree at my age, financed by two friends since I can't find a job. I also love my studies. Distance education, from my perspective, is very poorly planned as an educational system because it's designed like a business. I understand and accept this. However, the inability to create a true community is very unfortunate and undoubtedly has direct consequences on how new teachers understand the field of education. Everyone is on their own. I long to build my own circle of academic contacts to whom I can share what I'm learning and understanding, but I'm still alone.
I’m so very glad your eloquence is being heard widely.
Thank you very much Hollis. I still cannot believe it. I'm grateful for the interactions, this means a lot to me.
Yes, education should only be available to those that can afford to move to a university and attend in person while the riff-raff toils to scrape out a meager living.
As the leader of a lifelong learning unit at a university, I couldn’t disagree more.
That's right, only the elite should have access to education. Bring back the times before 1950.
but if our answer is the poorly constructed online experience, while the rich still have access to more human education, have we solved anything at all?
Your response to this article voices out the silence that bogged-down institutions, students, and teachers have experienced for the past years.
As an educator, a techie one at that, I’ve made the move to be more intentional in getting to know every student that sits on my class every sem. I make it a point to call them out each by name, even if we will only be in one room for a good 5 months. How they think, what they’re going through, where they are and what could they possibly gain from a sem with me. Every sem has been a surprise for me - not entirely because of the tragedy or scandal of the third world classroom - but because of how working with students individually has greatly improved their engagement and performance, and how they make sense of their world. It is such a privilege to be able to journey with these kids in their self-discovery, so they can make their own value-oriented decisions in life.
And yes, this is costly in time and energy, and goes beyond my paygrade. This also shifts my focus from the more rewarding ‘publishing productivity’. But whatever the cost, I do hope and pray that I will never tire of lending an ear and offering a hand to these students under my care.
Your argument (why students turn to AI) and Carl’s (why degrees have lost their economic signaling value) are orthogonal. What’s missing is why degrees turned into signals in the first place. My theory is this:
Evaluating job applicants is unreliable and expensive. Degrees provided a somewhat reliable alternative while also shifting the cost to the applicants themselves. Starting around 35-40 years ago, second- and third-tier schools, facing falling demand, realized credential seekers were a goldmine of potential revenue and shifted their focus from providing education to granting credentials. Some chancy bastards saw this too and launched for-profit schools. Then top-tier schools also joined the party. The US government, filled with policymakers high on the idea of college for all, fueled the fire with essentially unlimited student loan borrowing. School administrators ignored the education mandate to maximize revenue and throughput.
And now here we are. Both employers and job seekers realized a few years ago that a college degree’s signaling value had evaporated; AI is just the final nail in the coffin. Universities are in a death spiral they created.
Evaluating job applicants is still unreliable and expensive. Maybe something else will replace the degree and the cycle will begin anew.
First, thanks for responding to my comment. And yes, part of what you say is exactly as you put it, but I don’t think Carl’s article and I are talking about different things. The stage is set; there are billions of people moving within it. We have this reality, dragging along the “whys.” Education is certainly another business niche now.
The point is, in my job search I’ve come across this: “Seeking employee/accountant/administrator, ages 22 to 25, with 3 years of experience.” It’s ridiculous. These are street ads, not online ones. Then there are the jobs on websites. I’ve read ridiculous things: people looking for minor employees (serving tables) “who have a car” (yes, you read that right)—that’s just one example. I have 25 years of experience repairing electronics, I’ve run my own business in the past, and I can’t get anything because I’m 49. Over 4,000 applications in recent years and nothing… not even at Walmart or Costco. The New Enemy: Time—Ageism in the Labor Market.
All true but I don’t understand how that’s related to AI; what you’re describing predates AI by decades. I don’t think there’s an ageism conspiracy but age *is* a signal. Older people are generally not as digitally literate and harder to train. Individual older people may not fit that profile but if you’re inundated with 5,000 job applications age is a cheap and fast filter. You say you’ve applied to 4,000 jobs, as has everyone else desperate for a job, young and old, thus creating the need for cheap, fast filters.
Thank you for responding my answer. You’re forgetting that “older people” are now Gen Xers in our 50s, and that we’re pretty digital literate. We’re not talking about boomers who are heading to nursing homes. And let me correct you on this: No, it wasn’t always like this. I don’t remember this “ageism” in the ’90s, nor in the 2000s. What I do remember is that people in their 60s back then could quickly find a place anywhere—in small and large companies alike—even without a degree. Today, that’s over.
You don’t remember ageism in the 90s-00s? I do. I absolutely remember who got hit the hardest by the sweeping dotcom layoffs, and I remember seeing this after the manufacturing layoffs a decade prior, and I remember thinking I needed to be prepared to retire at 50. People getting laid off now seem surprised, and I’m honestly not sure what they told themselves about the old guys (too old, too set-in-their-ways, too tech illiterate, nothing that’ll happen to me because I’m too passionate about tech) getting let go first in any downturn. It’ll happen again in another 10-20 years and people’ll be shocked then too.
First, thanks for responding to my comment. AND YOU'RE SO RIGHT! Thanks for reminding me of this. I went too far, because with every “shift in the tide,” there are people who seem too slow to keep up. Maybe because I was young and also a tech enthusiast, I overlooked the fact that many people were being left behind. I have no excuse because, on top of that, I ran a computer repair shop for nearly a decade, and many of my customers didn’t know how to use their computers properly. What a slip-up and what an oversimplification on my part.
I still don’t see how it’s related to Carl’s article or AI.
Thank you for responding to my question. What I appreciate most about you is that, assuming you're a math teacher, you speak “in mathematics”. I'm Mexican and an astrologer, and I speak broken Spanish, broken English, and a little better in symbols and archetypes. Because of your way of expressing yourself, I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to interact with me.
I appreciate your effort of getting at the connections between the different arguments that are going on. I think it's telling that your point begins with the job market, and from the perspective of the employer. Here is (one of) the main conundrums of the educational institution but also of the socio-economics of knowledge and expertise in general in the current day. If the value of an education, of any form, can only be calculated and made visible by employers, we are in trouble. It's about how that economic value of degrees is being measured, who has the authority to decree value, and how broader economic institutions measure value of anything in a socio-economic system.
The degree as some kind of platonic ideal of education is a very recent idea, it was a status signal first and foremost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts_(Oxford,_Cambridge_and_Dublin)
These days, a degree is bait universities use to catch teenagers, drown them in lifelong debt, and use the proceeds to pay hefty administrative salaries and build stadiums.
We’ll be just fine if only 20% of high school graduates go on to college, as was the case fifty years ago, and the rest do something else. Colleges need to be culled.
I agree with you on the dilution of both the economic value and meaning of degrees. To me, that doesn't mean we should only think about the problems and future of universities through the lens of economics and jobs. And the devaluation of education has a lot to do with other developments, such as the decline of trust and power of institutions, broken social contracts, financialisation of everything, etc.
And yes, education was a status symbol (depending on which past and where we're talking about) - but that does not mean that a degree is what signified it.
> that doesn’t mean we should only think about…universities through the lens of economics and jobs
Why not?
Because there are other ways to understand and measure value and societal contribution than by tracking economic impact (especially if things like abstract quantitative data is the representative measure of economic impact)
Yes. This is why Charlie Kirk made a point of not going to college. Maybe that is attempting to set a more healthy trend than kids drowning themselves in debt to follow their hearts to learn something they are interested in but may provide them with no valuable skills in the labor market
I think that's a great account of how the education system has failed. To me personally education should never be discriminative in the first place; and we should not disregard how AI is now breaking barriers for people in developing countries to access knowledge. This is another great article I have read: https://substack.com/home/post/p-193233055
That post is complete fiction, from start to finish. The example he leads with, the Nigerian counterfeit pill testing company, RxAll, was started in 2016, long before AI as we know it today. It doesn’t and never used AI, and has since pivoted to selling software because pill testing is a dead end: it’s not in the pharmacist’s interest to test pills he’s already paid for and find out they’re fake. His supplier isn’t going to give him a refund. All his other examples are just as bad.
Perhaps worth sharing your findings with the author?
I find arguing with idiots engaged in motivated reasoning is a waste of my time.
I see you, Norma.
This is such a breath of fresh air after being lectured by folks with tenure about how AI is an unambiguous evil and that anyone who uses it just hates the humanities. Being ABD in a new city and having a (non-academic) job that makes connecting with academics in my area all but impossible, I simply don’t have anyone to discuss philosophy or theology with anywhere around me.
With Claude, I’m ably to ask questions, get responses that actually address them, and then follow up. It’s a lifeline for those of us who would otherwise just read and think without any kind of reactive input. It’s a simulation of a conversation with someone who knows the material, and I’ll take a simulation over nothing.
What do you want to know about theology? That you must be born again?
I live in Swaziland and I'm in a distance learning program as well. Here you spoke for me as well and far more eloquently than I could. Thank you Norma.
Thank you so much for this honest and extraordinarily clear account. Very powerful!
Thank you, Dirk, for responding to my comment with your kind words. It's a complex issue, but I think we all need to speak out about how we live and how we see what's happening.
I’m generally unimpressed with our educational system. It’s more of a day care than education system.
I was unimpressed back in the mid-1990s when my high school in a Denver suburb decided not to expel me for missing too many classes because I had scored almost 1500 on the SAT. I was unimpressed at the University of Colorado where I attended in person 25 years ago (online school was just getting started) earning two bachelors and a MBA. Working class students like myself didn’t get the network effects of the wealthy students whose parents paid their tuition and set them up with internships. I myself had the joy of joining the Army after my masters. Basic training is super fun in your mid 20s. Highly recommend it. But the Army did pay off my student loans.
I thrived, when I went back to CU to get my masters in accounting after COVID 100% online. Some degrees, don’t get extra value from campus life.
I’ll close with this. A few weeks ago, I spoke to my 5th grade daughter’s math teacher asking if she could do independent study since she was three grades ahead in math. The teacher flatly told me “no”. But thanked me since she didn’t have to spend any time instructing my child.
I thing is what it does. Most of our schools are day care centers. If they were focused on education there would be a test to go from grade to grade. But there isn’t. There is a reason for that.
Next year my daughter will be doing independent study, or else her, and her high test scores, will be at a charter school.
One last thing on AI. I taught my daughters how to use the scanner, turn “busy work” homework into PDFs. Then give the pdf to my AI agent and have it answer the questions. So now my kids supervise and double check the AIs work. Frankly the AI helps them more than their teachers.
Thank you for responding to my comment. As a 49-year-old student, I still had high hopes when I started, but they faded quickly. But you’re doing a great job with your daughters. I use AI in a similar way to study: I upload my study guides to discuss the topic, look for information outside the platform, and I’ve managed to pass all my exams on my own, achieving a 9.8/10 GPA. I’m proud of this because I’ve done it literally all by myself. What I like about AI is that it’s not as accommodating as it seems; the bot is very useful for debating topics and broadening our perspective a bit, but it forces us to examine what we ourselves are saying, thinking, and believing.
Hi Uriel, I shared a very similar view with you on the education system. As a parent I honestly don't have faith in any institutions, and I hope for the necessary disruption to come. This is an article I have just written about my experience: https://fromtheinsideco.substack.com/p/modern-education-has-failed-us-and
Norma, I agree with some of the points you made. I read Carl’s essay and I think your perspective is somewhat presumptuous regarding his circumstances and how they shape his perspective. While I agree that judgement comes from a place of privilege, there was nothing that signaled to me that he misjudged or left out information regarding this dissertation.
Regarding the value of a degree: if we are discussing economic impact, it is best to include the socioeconomic and racial aspects to accommodate your point. The cost of a college degree and the barriers to get one should almost always be accompanied by the acknowledgement of the value of degrees decreasing as the groups of people who obtain them them shift. It’s less about economics and more about intentional and quiet exclusion of education.
Carl, I believe your essay is insightful. As a college undergrad, this perspective is refreshing. I have also been contemplating the value of a degree, and your explanation resonates.
Thank you for responding to my comment. I apologize if any part of it could be misinterpreted. I have great respect for Carl’s work—I’ve saved several of his articles—but when it comes to criticizing students without distinguishing between a well-off student who isn’t making the most of what’s available to them and a poor student who is struggling to keep from being evicted or to put food on the table every day, we need to be careful.
exactly!
As a 1990s humanities grad, its wasn’t my experience that a degree led easily to secure work. The good old days had different issues, but werent as great as some might assume
What you're describing is the credential stripped of everything that once justified it. Universities figured out they could sell the diploma without the campus, the community, or the formation, and millions of students accepted because the alternative was worse. AI tutors will enter this space competing against something already hollow. And if the degree is just a signal, and the signal keeps degrading, who exactly benefits from maintaining the fiction?
Thank you so much for responding to my comment. That's certainly true. Schooling was once steeped in ceremony, after-school activities were almost ritualistic, and the teacher possessed an almost mystical aura. I discussed this in an article about the era when the figure of the "mentor or teacher" was even promoted by film (Moyagi, Kenobi, etc.) and was imbued with great dignity, an almost mystical aura. Today, school is a mere formality, and the teacher is now just an "equal" to the street sweeper. We are living through a kind of new nihilism in which all meanings have been impoverished.
Your comment raises a fundamental question: who benefits? I think it's pretty obvious that tech giants have invaded our lives and our minds. There are like ten people controlling what matters, toying with humanity, reducing it to ashes.
The issue is teachers are now social change agents. Educational institutions won't even make a stand about what is a woman.
Earning a degree used to be a culmination of seeking truth and knowledge.
In season 5 of “The Boys” Stan Edgar, says “the machine must be fed” referring to the corporatism highlighted in the show. The irony isn’t lost on me. A show, featuring a giant corporation, mirrors real life with Amazon making the show.
The surest way to stop the current system with its concentration of power and capital, would be to stop the printing of currency. -but that’s a story far afield from an education post.
Anyway, the solution to stopping the concentration of power in the hands of a handful of corporations would be to stop printing money. But that’s would result in a recession, and no political party wants that. So the music keeps playing, and as old Stan said, “the machine must be fed”.
Sadly, our education system is so broken that students and teachers can’t define or recognize capitalism, fascism, Marxism, corporatism, cronyism, etc. it’s almost like it was done by design à la 1984.
I’m going to take a slightly different approach when it comes to what we need to stop doing. Technology is what our attention and use of it have made it. The only way to put an end to the concentration of power and control is to step back. To return to the “Stone Age.” Without people, these giants are nothing. The masses are the primary source of power and control.
Ray Dalio has some great videos and books on this subject - the concentration of power that occurs during the end of one of these economic cycles.
I have a presentation I do for local groups where I pull out a few hundred thousand dollars in prop money (it’s so good you wouldn’t know the difference) and explain the national debt to people, using their share as the base. Older people roll their eyes until I get to the scheduled cut to social security in 2033. But the younger people, especially under 18, they are filled with rage. You may yet get your return to something simpler.
Wow! Congratulations—you’ve had the vision and the smarts for this. I have some great ideas, but I don’t know anything about politics or economics, and in the city there aren’t really any “local groups,” except for the dance groups in the park. My thing is other stuff, which is basically way too oversaturated. I’d like to develop courses on topics that might be controversial and aimed at adults (society is deeply infantilized), but I’m still early in my career, and I haven’t gotten to instructional design yet. Hey! If you’re rich, make a generous donation in my last post so this future teacher doesn’t end up without a school and out on the street =) Happy monday!
Even sadder is the fact that there are thousands of highly qualified teachers who would love to offer more personalized attention and facilitate real group discussions in either in-person or online settings, but higher ed doesn't prioritize education, so the money goes to all kinds of other things, not to hiring more educators to teach better classes. Meanwhile, countless would-be teachers with Ph.D.s work in other fields instead.
Thank you for this, Norma—you are exactly right. As I say to my own students and to my colleagues, practically the only thing I have to offer students today is a human face. But educationally, there is real value in having a human face. I wrote about this before I had ever heard about ChatGPT, but it’s even more true now:
https://thesubwaytest.com/2021/08/15/the-school-down-the-hill-from-the-ivory-tower/
I'm sorry you're having that experience. That isn't what college is supposed to be like.
The flaw in that line of thinking is that people have been “self-educating” for at least several hundred years and solitude always helped. Nice try though
I appreciate the analysis that you're providing here. I'd like to offer what you might think of as an alternate reality, alternate in the sense that it's quite different from what you're describing here, and real in the sense that it's coming from my own current teaching experience.
I teach writing at a technical community college in the US. My classes are built around one main writing project that students work on over the course of the semester. Students have space to make meaningful choices about what they write about and how they write about it, and they also have quite a lot of support and guidance through the process. One day a week we do things together as a class, and one day a week students work on their projects in class while I check in with them (kind of like a shop or studio art class).
In one of my sections this past spring, you would have seen a student writing about the cult of Artemis in ancient Greece sitting next to a student writing about the cultural history of piercings sitting next to a student writing about growing up in Iraq during the war sitting next to a student writing about the psychology of memory sitting next to a student writing about the Chinese education system sitting next to a student writing about trans representation in film sitting next to a student writing about the business decisions involved in running a car wash (and I could keep going).
While some projects came together more successfully than others, all of these students were doing cool things that they cared about, all of them put in a significant amount of work over a sustained period of time, and all of them could converse thoughtfully about the work they were doing and the subjects they were writing about. Evidence of AI abuse was minimal. In many cases, students were doing a substantial amount of the writing in class (often choosing to write on paper for notes and early drafts).
While this happened to be a particularly strong section, it's pretty representative of my teaching experience. My students are interesting people who want to have meaningful learning experiences in college, and given opportunity and encouragement they will do (or at least attempt) really cool things. And they do this in spite of the fact that many of them are dealing with a ***lot*** in their lives and have not necessarily had the best experiences with education in the past.
Building a class that creates a better learning environment for my students is a constant and ongoing learning experience for me. There are a lot of things that I'm still trying to figure out, and there are a number of pieces to the puzzle that are at least somewhat specific to the context I'm teaching in. (Notably, I teach in a state that offers something approaching free community college and composition courses have minimal responsibility for content coverage. Also, my students are awesome.) Nevertheless, I'm starting to see things that consistently work, and the common theme for me is connection.
- Connecting with students
- Connecting students with each other
- Connecting the writing that we're doing with students' interests
- Connecting students' interests with academic inquiry
- Connecting academic inquiry with life in community
- Connecting writing with meaningful learning
Students really do want to have meaningful learning experiences. If we build them (or the space for them), they will come.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Good teaching solves the problem before it starts. What’s being short circuited with AI is lazy professors in a 150 student lecture hall supported by institutions that reward endless publication cycles over quality teaching. AI made cheating easier when no one’s watching. Why tf was no one watching?
What an uplifting comment
Thanks, George, I appreciate that.
It sounds like your students had a great course. But, how many students can work in a course like this? I would guess fewer than 20, maybe 15. A professor at a research university who devoted so much time to his students would certainly not get tenure. 40 years ago I did a Ph.D at UCLA, but once decided to take a public speaking course at Santa Monica community college. I remember the teaching as one of the best classes I ever had.
True. I feel the same way about journalism classes. They are so academically enriching. The problem is non-journalism students probably do not have the time to take them.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. To completely dodge learning by using these generative AI platforms, one and one’s formative work, would have to be unknown to the person - running the course or the accompanying tutor. If / where universities and colleges have reached a point where the student is completely anonymised it’s very hard to see a way foward.
Fantastic observation. I’m sure your students appreciate your attentiveness and appreciate being seen for the interesting humans they are. If we make education meaningful in the context of the life of a student, they build a relationship with learning, grow to know themselves better, and foster connections with the supportive people around them.
Excellent jwr! My English composition courses are fashioned the same way. Students rarely use AI unethically in my courses. Meaningful learning experiences speaks volumes. I am writing a book this summer on education, neuroscience, and social media algorithms. The form of learning we do keeps students attentive during class and away from TikTok (at least momentarily).
A group of us are writing a complete response, here's the abstract. Shooting fro 5k words by Tuesday:
Generative AI has weakened the evidentiary value of the unsupervised university essay. The problem is not merely cheating; it is credential readability. A finished paper no longer reliably distinguishes students who have developed disciplinary judgment from those who have outsourced cognitive work to an algorithmic system. Proctoring can restore control, but it narrows the meaning of the degree. In this essay, we argue for a layered post-AI credential built around three public demonstrations: a defended presentation, a discipline-authentic written product, and an applied artifact that teaches or operationalizes the written argument for another person. Together, these demonstrations certify oracy, literacy, and algorithmacy (the ability to use algorithmic systems without surrendering judgment to them). Drawing on historical transitions in university credentialing, we argue that durable credentials survive disruption not by policing old forms alone, but by adding new demonstrations of competence.
"I do not yet know what to tell them."
I have two sons, one of whom can't go to school. He has disabilities that means he can't reliably be in a room with 30 similar-age kids. He's also among the brightest, most mature and thoughtful people I know.
I'm now responsible for his education and what I tell him is that he is, indeed, one of the brightest, most mature and thoughtful people I know and that he will find a path through our socially-complex world that respects his talents and allows him to manage around his disabilities. But it won't be the 'lazy' path I went through, where I did well at school, went to university where I performed well but learned nothing, couldn't fit into a pre-organised corporate graduate scheme, and spent another decade trying to work out what to do with my life.
He'll have to work smart, nimble and innovative for everything he achieves - and, in most ways, that's better. It's certainly more efficient than turning your brain off and only working out who you are three decades in.
Hearing an echo here to my own life and my son's too. Now 23, he'll not attend university as a learning disability sidetracked him some time ago. Still, he can adopt the virtues you've described to make his way in the world.
Carl Hendrick powerfully diagnoses the death of the university degree, yet AI is not the true culprit—industrial mass higher education is. Renaissance Florence, a city of roughly 75,000, produced Michelangelo and the Florentine school through intimate bottega apprenticeships. Masters recognised talent, guided reading, and forged judgment in daily dialogue.
Today the United States alone graduates over 100,000 art and design students annually, yet produces no comparable flowering of genius.
When one lecturer faces hundreds of students and thousands of anonymous essays, sustained mentorship collapses. Professors can no longer recognise intuitive ability or induct students into disciplinary logic through direct contact. Assessment becomes mere credentialing.
Real reform requires deliberate contraction: cohorts of no more than twenty and restored apprenticeship. In that intimate setting, AI would be a formidable asset—an infinitely patient, high-quality supervisor that amplifies the master’s guidance rather than replacing it. Only then will universities cultivate durable judgment instead of counterfeiting it.
I do think there are people producing brilliant works today
For example composers like John Williams
I doubt he's considered "today," any longer. Williams completed undergrad, studying compostion and music, playing in ensembles during the entire time. He then went into the US Air Force, playing and arranging for their ensembles, as well as taking more college courses. Then he moved to NY to study under professors at Julliard and Eastman, and earned extra money working as a pianist in jazz clubs. He's now 94.
But, then, even if he's "yesteryear," few composers had an upbringing and education like him.
I agree. What you describe is to some degree what small liberal arts colleges and universities already offer.
A hundred percent and I have just written an exact article about this: https://fromtheinsideco.substack.com/p/modern-education-has-failed-us-and
This is so awesome- not just the article but also the conversation it has triggered. As an unschooling mom of one AuDHD child and one neurotypical child- and someone who grew up in the hustle-porn capital of the world (Silicon Valley) under heavy Ivy League=success conditioning- this article sang to me.
Many of us parents raising ND kids (the square pegs) have spent years expected to force our kids inside educational round holes because we were told and sold this path: work hard, get the grades, earn the degree, secure the future. This article exposes the cracks our families have already been living inside for a long time.
I loved this piece so much I immediately wrote a companion piece from the ND parenting perspective for anyone interested:
https://staceysx4.substack.com/p/what-the-collapse-of-the-college?r=zq3uf&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Excellent piece. I believe that education needs to focus on 6C: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, Curiosity, Commitment. If these can be instilled from an early age in the curriculum young people will be better able, imv, to learn and thrive.
Who is going to build our bridges and planes? Who is going to cut me open if I get sick? Let it not be someone under 30.
Professors can still strive for understanding outside of reliance upon the tools. I did a degree in Physics over 50 years ago and then a Ph.D. in Engineering. At the time we did not have either computer aided mathematical tools such as Mathematica or Maple or the newer LLM's. When I took a course in Graduate Nonlinear Structures the professor never asked us to solve the problems - "The solution of these equations is beyond you, your job is to determine what the relevant equations and boundary conditions are, if those are correctly specified, specialized mathematicians / numerical analysists can rind the relevant solutions." But we did have to thoroughly understand the problem so that we could determine what the relevant terms in the applicable mathematical description were important and relevant. And he would evaluate how well we could do it in pen and booklet tests. The homework was basically so that we could practice the processes and evaluation until our analysis approaches were well understood. Relying upon tools blindly would leave you helpless in the exam, when you would not have access to them.
A college friend of mind recently retired from his Physics professorship. They allowed students to rely upon Mathematica or Maple for mathematical support - but gave corresponding harder problems than if the student had to do it all manually - but you still needed the understanding of what was going on and what was relevant and what was not relevant. It is that understanding of what is relevant and what is not relevant that provides the basis for being able to do anything. If students rely upon the tools for that fundamental capability, they are self deluded and professionally useless.
The LLM's are definitely useful. I am starting to experiment with them, using them in combination with some books as I teach myself Geometric Algebra and try to understand how that approach allows you to have a different perspective on some interesting physical systems. I also use LLM-based tools at work for meeting transcripts, summaries, and the like.
LLM's are not inherently good or bad, it is how you use them. Similarly, social networks are not inherently good or bad -t is how you use them. Unfortunately, I think that the bulk of the population uses social networks badly and will use LLM's badly.
In terms of learning, LLM's are probably a godsend for autodidacts and near autodidacts and very destructive for intellectually lazy people - who make up the bulk of the population.
According to The Case Against Education, what the students learn from University doesn't matter, because most of them are useless in work. Diploma is just a signal shows that you're smart, conscientious and conforming to social norms.
A degree does not signal that you are “smart”. It signals that you know how to regurgitate information for a test. The vast majority of college graduates in 2026 have no clue how to think, and THAT used to be the point of education.
When you wrestle with a difficult text, for example a great philosopher who resists you, a dense legal judgment that refuses to resolve, or a proof that won't click, the friction is the encoding mechanism. The resistance of the material carves understanding through the negative dialectical imprint, through Arbeit. A frictionless summary delivered by AI produces something closer to recognition than knowledge: you can nod at the concept when you see it, but you cannot effectively use it, cannot feel where it strains under pressure, and cannot notice when someone is misapplying it.
Thank you; this was tremendously thought-provoking.
Thank you for a brilliant, brilliant essay.
Most of these “AI broke universities” essays seem to focus on the humanities.
Take home exams? They don’t exist with engineering degrees, at least back in the 2000’s.
Why would you make the exam take-home? The closest would be projects that are done over the semester, in which case you’re tasked with making something work—a software application, a vending machine built with a circuit board, a motor control application with an embedded board and real I/O.
Sure, you could cheat with ChatGPT (and especially agentic AI workflows for the software portion), but that’s actually how many (and soon most?) engineering tasks are done in the industry now.
There’s tremendous value in engineering students learning to use AI, not least of which is they’re learning the workflows used in industry.
Let’s preface all of these essays by narrowing it down to the humanities and similar fields. STEM education should welcome the use of AI.
And if we narrow it to the humanities, yes indeed, it’s a major problem. But then again, why did we even have take-home exams? That always seemed to me like a dubious way of measuring the students’ capabilities. You could always just find someone else to write it for you pre-ChatGPT.
Give them 3 hours in person to pour their thoughts on pen/paper or on a laptop with supervision. Problem solved.
If they cheated on their homework assignments throughout the semester, they’re sure to fail at the finals. Give them the freedom and responsibility to govern their lives like the adults they are.
a lot of it changed with covid. We were encouraged to give so much grace and be so flexible, and the HS kids coming up had that as well. The pendulum is definitely swimming back now though.
I line in South Africa. I think that we have all got to follow the Australian Nexus model of delivering masters level training to teachers in cognitive science and training teachers in high quality schools. That way there will be hundreds of thousands of human beings who understand what is a stake. I think people just don't get it.
I have one child out of college, one in, and another who may or may not go in about another year. I've had different conversations with all of them about the value of a degree - in terms of the value it may provide to them and the actual value (actual dollars as well as unpaid labor) the family contributes to make it happen.
I've told all three the same thing: you don't really learn anything in college, you learn how to think. You learn how to deal with people. You learn how to navigate a bureaucracy and how to advocate for yourself. The pandemic tested much of this - though in my defense, how could I have seen that coming?
My oldest is glad she went and working in the field she studied. I think my middle sometimes wonders why he's there, but he'll finish. My youngest is having trouble seeing the point. It's getting harder for me to make.
What (if anything) will replace my experience in college for my child who decides not to go? What will I tell my children who did go when they realize it wasn't all I cracked it up to be?
Your writing gives voice to the doubts that have been multiplying in my mind. Thank you for that as well as the humility to admit you don't have the answer either. I don't think we can trust anyone who says they have the answer.