People are saying that AI is the end of university, but I see it quite differently. What you have to do is break down the university experience into its individual parts so that you can see the situation more clearly.
For example, there is exposure to textbooks and base knowledge that is supposed to be the state of the art, which is what textbooks are for. That was already bad and broken long before AI got here, so good riddance to that. AI is much better, especially when a proper AI is used to get the latest research and apply rigor to the results.
Then there is the in-person lecture from a professor. This has a very wide range:
For the vast majority of colleges and professors, having an AI build you or the class a custom YouTube video could be quite a bit better. Even more advanced than that would be an interactive AI that can do dynamic visualizations based on questions asked by anyone in the class. That is likely the case for lower, middle, and even upper-middle tiers.
If somebody is a true expert or a true genius professor, you get a Feynman-type experience where it is curiosity-based interaction. I don’t know that AI can substitute for that anytime soon, nor that I would want it to. Ideally, every college would have access to those types of teachers or at least recorded videos from them, similar to how I watch Sapolsky and Feynman lectures still to this day.
Then there is the social aspect:
Leaving home, living somewhere else, meeting new people, and being exposed to all sorts of personalities and viewpoints.
Learning how to resolve conflicts with people who think differently than you.
Meeting people who look and sound different, have different cultures, and eat different foods.
Getting exposed to different politics and philosophy, and generally being improved by all this dynamic exposure to otherness.
Then there are the other dimensions of campus life:
Competitions in the form of grades: perhaps more so in the past than now, but it is still another life skill being taught.
Extracurriculars: sports, chess, debate clubs, and all sorts of elective activities and exposure to random, interesting things.
Personal and social life: partying, meeting romantic interests, and potentially finding a future spouse.
Lifelong connections: making friends you might go into business with or know for two, three, or six decades, who may become your best friends in the world.
The credential itself: it is fairly obvious that this is plummeting in value, unless it comes from an extremely reputable, high-end school that is basically filtering based on the fact that you got in in the first place.
All of these components could be broken down even further, but it should be clear that college is not one thing. You cannot look at any one of these or even a couple of them and ask, “Is college worth it?” Some of these things are more important than ever; others have become next to worthless.
The questions we need to be asking ourselves as a society, as parents, and as students are:
- Which ones are which?
- Which ones do we still want to experience?
- Which ones are in danger from AI, if they haven’t been replaced already?
- Which ones can we get by going directly into the workforce, doing an internship, or starting a company?
- Which ones still require something like a college experience, refactored to account for its weaknesses?
This is the type of conversation we should be having about education in general, not just college. We should start by decomposing what we are actually talking about, seeing which parts we want to continue and which parts to leave in the past.
