Will AI devalue university degrees?

 

One observer argues that artificial intelligence, if permitted and used in university education, will indeed devalue the product of that education.

Why would any firm or institution that produces a very valuable currency of its own then want to debase it?

I’m talking about education, where the currency is the academic credentials it produces. The sector has begun to clip its own coinage, by allowing artificial intelligence (AI) into classrooms.

Just last week, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) boasted how it would introduce AI-generated course material. In a press release, a professor of Comparative Literature called Zrinka Stahuljak said that: “Normally, I would spend lectures contextualising the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content, but now all of that is in the textbook we generated.”

That’s nice. Then again, with course modules called things like “Ternary Positionality: Relationality, Decoloniality and Interpretations”, one suspects she may have been getting a robot to generate her course material for some time. She may even be one herself. Who knows?

Using large language models (LLMs) to create or assess work comes with a couple of serious problems. The AI introduces factual errors, or “hallucinations”. Any accurate material that comes out of AI isn’t very good, either: it’s typically a bland and generic mash-up that has earned the name “slop”.

But that’s not the real problem, which is much more profound. Once students use ChatGPT to write their essays, they can disengage from their subject and bluff their way through.

It’s cheating, pure and simple. And if teachers become reliant on using AI to mark their students’ essays, as they are being urged to, they can disengage from their jobs too.

It reduces teachers and students to mindless zombies pushing buttons in their sleep. This scenario may seem far fetched, but it’s already happening. Speed marking and essay writing services abound.

Now think what happens when a student goes to cash in their expensively acquired credential with an employer. A survey for Currys last week found that the majority of students (63pc) believe that AI has improved their job prospects.

They may be in for a shock. If they’ve graduated from a college known to be using AI, the employer has no idea if the student is diligent, or a cynical and lazy cheat. So graduates will find out the hard way what credential clipping means.

. . .

Eventually many further education credentials will be worthless.

There's more at the link (which may be paywalled).

I'm not so sure that AI is primarily to blame for the devaluation in university qualifications.  Much of the blame, IMHO, lies in the teaching of worthless, academically useless courses that cannot possibly benefit students in any career field.  (Classic, if over-used example:  underwater basket-weaving.)  When students are forced to study subjects that they know have little (if any) relationship to the world in which they live, and in which they will be expected to work and produce results if they're to earn a living, they become demotivated.  Demotivated students (those with any sense, that is) won't work hard to produce good academic results in pseudo-academic fields.  Q.E.D.

When I was a manager, I tried to hire people with work experience and part-time education whenever possible, rather than those straight out of university.  A programmer with three or four years' practical experience plus a part-time business degree would be productive almost immediately.  One with a four-year degree and no business experience would take six months to a year to become productive, because they had so much to learn.  That was decades ago, of course . . . if I had to hire people today, I'd actively motivate against any candidate with only a degree, because I'd expect at least half of what they'd learned in university to be "woke" hogwash.  They'll take a year or two to get it out of their systems and become capable of learning, let alone deliver work of an acceptable and commercially viable standard.

I'm glad I don't have kids wanting to go to university these days.  I'd rather pay for them to take an apprenticeship in a hands-on skill, where they'd learn useful things and earn a worthwhile salary from day one of their employment.

Peter