The introduction of A.I., plus the demographic cliff, has had a devastating effect on higher ed. I think that big research schools will weather the storm, but lower-tier universities like mine will shrink or go away entirely. Already before COVID, there was a big push for online education; post-COVID, many programs switched to online to survive. However, with the introduction of A.I., all of those programs have become diploma mills. I taught online before and after A.I. In the pre-A.I. era, online education was qualitatively inferior to the in-person experience, but it was not a joke. Now, online classes are a simulacrum of education: the students pretend to learn, and I have to pretend that I am teaching them something.
In-person classes can still maintain some degree of rigor, and cheating can be reduced to zero as long as all assignments are done in the classroom. The problem is that this is not a solution to the enshittification of education—I can no longer assign papers because seventy to a hundred per cent of the students will use A.I. This term, I was able to do a comprehensive oral final with a single class because it was a small seminar with eleven students. Even then, I had to book a room for a six-hour slot in order to have a meaningful conversation with my students—scaling this when you have a hundred and fifty-plus students is impossible. Furthermore, because not all faculty are as concerned as I am about A.I. use, and because the students are using A.I. in online classes, the students are much less cognitively capable than they used to be.
Kevin Sun
Teaching assistant professor of computer science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I’m quite pessimistic about the impact of A.I. on both education broadly and my career personally, given the recent decline in C.S. enrollment.
The most obvious change in my teaching has been the elimination of difficult homework problems, which used to be a major component of my course. I’ve been trying to lean into social pressure as a source of motivation for students to learn, with group quizzes and in-class presentations, but there’s only so much an individual instructor can do given the systemic forces of A.I., grade inflation, the job market, student evaluations, etc. I’m worried that these forces allow many students to coast through school without learning as much as they used to. I acknowledge Bryan Caplan’s point that college is mostly about signalling, not learning, so it’ll survive as long as it’s a useful signalling device to employers. But, as college gets easier, the signal gets weaker, so who knows how things will change.
On a positive note, A.I. has helped me write course syllabi, lecture plans, exams, etc. It’s possible to use A.I. to grade and/or provide feedback to students—though I haven’t done so yet. I have also used A.I. to help me create in-class assignments in which students evaluate A.I.-generated code/content. In C.S., A.I. has shifted the emphasis from writing code to evaluating code. To train students in this, I present them with A.I.-generated code that is either correct or subtly incorrect, and I ask them to evaluate it.
I have a colleague who has completely embraced A.I. My understanding is that his course is much harder than it used to be, but students are allowed to use A.I. during exams. I see the motivation—A.I. is supposed to enhance our skills/productivity, so students should be expected to produce more—but I don’t want to create a situation where students are helplessly dependent on A.I. because they don’t have a solid grasp of the fundamentals.
Daniel Silver
Professor of sociology, University of Toronto, Scarborough
A.I. has fundamentally changed how I teach, and it demands basic reflection about what we are trying to accomplish. It has added a huge amount to my workload this year, since I spent a lot of that time trying to create new types of sociology assignments. The idea, basically, is to create multi-agent simulations where students create representations of the theories of writers like Adam Smith or Max Weber, and then they experiment with them. This was a huge commitment from me, the students, and the T.A.s, but it was worth it. The best final projects showed far more creativity and intellectual work than the typical second-year essay would have.
