Could AI Cheating Save Liberal Education?

 When I was in college (starting almost 30 years ago -- there's an odd thought) it seemed like colleges were already at a "things can't go on like this" point: Tuitions were sky high.  Many students were there to just a degree they thought would guarantee them a job and so didn't seem to care much how they got through so long as they got the degree.  The number of administrators was growing while the track to tenure was increasingly tenuous.  Some people were starting to write think pieces about how maybe college wasn't the right track for everyone.

It seemed like things couldn't go on, but of course they have gone on.  Every one of those trends has become far more extreme since the mid '90s.  Now even more people are saying, "This can't go on!" but is it any more true than before?

One argument for why it won't is that AI has now made cheating vastly cheaper than it was even in the days of the online term paper mills of the early internet.  Arguably, a lot of students could plug all their assignments into one of the big AI models and get a result out which is better than the average 20-year-old can produce unaided.

At the same time, many universities themselves seem to project the impression that learning doesn't matter much to them.

One of our elder daughters just finished up her degree at a large (and generally well regarded) state university, and she had a number of frustrating cases where classes had 300+ students and were taught by a constellation of TAs with tenuous English skills; where there was no textbook and the content provided to students was a set of second hand PowerPoints.

Those kind of classes did not seem much focused on actually teaching, and with many of the students only showing up half the time and ostentatiously playing games on their phones when they were there, there sounded like there was a "they pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn" ethic which surely just confirmed cheaters in the idea that using AI to do your assignments was the correct solution.  Otherwise, it was up to study groups to go find their own resources to learn the topics well enough on their own to somehow pass tests.

All of this seems pretty broken and not very focused on learning.  You can't help wondering if there's a point where with tuitions constantly increasing and the increasing assumption that many of the degrees are actually being earned by Claude and ChatGPT -- and, of course, employers increasingly using those same models for basic office work in preference to replacement-level new graduates -- employers will stop seeing university degrees as uniquely valuable and people who only want a degree in order to guarantee an income will stop paying the exorbitant prices.  (Note: I've been over-using em dashes since long before our robot overlords arrived, and I do not expect to stop now.  You'll just have to take my word for it that no word on this blog will ever be AI generated.)

This combined with the demographic shift which means that there are simply going to be fewer eighteen year olds in coming years than in past ones, seems like it's set up to hit a lot of colleges hard.  Not the prestigious ones, I would imagine.  It seems like a Harvard or Haverford degree will always say something.  But for colleges which have made "just get a degree" their business, it seems like the bottom might finally fall out of the market.

I do wonder, though, if there could be some hope buried in all this.  If the high-priced-diploma-mill business model may break, and those who only want a certification which promises an upper middle class job will have to either find some other path or learn to live with less security, perhaps that could leave some small colleges to embrace the model of truly providing an education.

Reduce the number of admins, increase the number of professors, and focus on small classes whose purpose is actually to teach and read and discuss and write and learn the way that humans have been doing for centuries. 

Perhaps if the model in which a college degree is the government and debt subsidized pipeline to middle class stability breaks, the model in which college is an opportunity for those who love learning to spend a few years focused full time on learning a field deeply can return.