U.V.M. is an extreme case, but during the past two decades flagship state schools across the country have aggressively brought in out-of-state students who usually pay higher tuition bills. More than half of the undergraduates at the University of Alabama, for instance, are not from Alabama. One of the most interesting trends in higher education is the explosion of out-of-state students who attend big flagship football universities in the South, in large part because they see college as a time to live it up, tailgate, and pledge a fraternity or sorority. But this version of the college experience really only makes sense for kids who were definitely going to attend a four-year school—namely, middle- and upper-middle-class kids with educated parents—and the trend suggests that many schools are struggling to sell students, or their parents, on educational reasons for paying them so much money.
Importing higher-paying—and oftentimes higher-achieving—students benefits a school during boom times, when universities have seemingly infinite choice among applicants. But what happens when the number of applicants drops nationwide? Schools that are slightly more selective or appealing than a school like U.V.M. will start letting in students they might have rejected in prior years, which means that those students don’t end up at U.V.M., and U.V.M. gets stuck doing a difficult dance between maintaining its standards and trying to meet its tuition goals. “You can admit richer students with bad grades to keep your revenue up,” Kevin Carey, the vice-president of education and work at New America, told me. “But if your academic reputation falls, people are less willing to pay the expensive tuition.” Sure, Andover and Exeter graduates will continue to go to Harvard, Alabama football will roll on, and the electrical-engineering classrooms at U.C. Berkeley will almost certainly remain full. But unless a college is selling something that students and their families actually want, it might be facing an irreversible decline. “We are looking at a winner‑takes‑all situation,” Carey said. “Institutions that have market power will probably take advantage of the situation, because they might have fewer competitors. And institutions that don’t have the same market power are in for a lot of tough times.”
Large language models, it’s often said, are mirrors that mostly reveal their users to themselves. This is certainly true for higher education, although, in that case, L.L.M.s have provided a particularly harsh reflection, one that draws the eye to academia’s myriad flaws. L.L.M.s may have allowed students to cheat in novel ways, for example, but that cheating has happened in the context of the customer-is-always-right relationship that now dictates most interactions between students and faculty—a dynamic that has also contributed to grade inflation, which effectively kills a student’s incentive to value his own work. The takeaway, then, isn’t that students are duplicitous and depraved or that technology has eroded their moral core. Rather, it’s that many of them do not see a good reason to complete their coursework. Why is that? Does it stem from a decline in the quality of instruction? In the growing realization that a four-year-degree alone won’t save them from downward mobility? Or is it that they now see the purpose of college simply as early-job credentialling, and, therefore, don’t really care if they’ve actually read Melville or whatever?
Similarly, the fear that college administrators will use A.I. to replace a lot of lower-level faculty and graduate students might be well founded, and it certainly could put a lot of talented and hard-working people out of a job. But, once again, our anxiety about A.I. mostly tells a story about existing problems that are unrelated to the arrival of artificial intelligence—this time, about the fungibility of adjuncts and the overproduction of graduate students by institutions that have been exploiting cheap labor for years. And while the questions that have been asked lately about the viability of the humanities as a discipline in a future when all writing will be outsourced to Claude don’t actually say much about the value of learning to read and to think, they do suggest that young people increasingly see college as an expensive, time-consuming, and debt-mounting career-entry portal and don’t want to risk their investment on a degree that will lead to no obvious job upon graduation.
