The Higher ED AI Apocalypse is Real

Unless we all start thinking about higher ed differently

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

If you don’t believe that higher education on the whole is being brutally and self-destructively disrupted by AI, I highly recommend this article Current Affairs. My own experience teaching college at various institutions for around 20 years has taught me that some students are 100% committed to credentialing, college social life, and athletics, and see learning, wisdom, and character formation as entirely beside the point. In the past, these students still usually had to go through the discipline of learning and character formation anyway in order to get what they wanted. And they often discovered a love of learning along the way. But today, it’s quite possible for a student to cheat their way through almost every class using AI, unless professors take very intentional steps to incorporate things like oral or bluebook exams. It’s not only “possible,” I’ve heard of students who have chosen this path for themselves, who are paying to go to college to avoid learning. But this is really just the logic of higher education as a credentials, social experience, or athletic experience come home to roost. We’ve taught young people to think like this for years and now here are the results. Of course, college involves all of those things, but its end is much, much bigger and more important than any one of them. Rightly understood, higher education ought to entail the pursuit of wisdom, development of skills, and formation of character for God’s glory and the edification of your neighbor. When we reduce education to credentials (grades), social experiences, or athletics, inevitably, how you get those grades will not matter. All that matters is that you get those grades. And I fear that we have a generation of students who have been drilled to believe that grades matter, that credentials matter, that experiences matter, and that money matters, and that’s about it. And by those standards, there’s nothing ethically stopping students from using AI to gain those goals. If we want a generation that can think for itself, can imagine, can read entire books, can write, and can speak well (to do things like share the gospel!), can engage in the advanced thinking necessary to carry on a democracy, then we need to deeply instill in them, from an early age, a love of learning as learning. We have to change the entire way our culture thinks about the ends of education.