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
10 comments:
Outside the US, most university programs don't have the broad-but-shallow smorgasbord of courses outside one's major subject. It's just straight into the meat after whatever maths and science prerequisites might be needed for comprehension. And often a 3-year commitment instead of 4, or you get a masters level degree if it's longer than 3.
I frequently mention to people with kids that:
• many in the US have a living grandparent who qualifies or "citizenship by patrimony" in one or another EU country,
• that completing that chain down to the kid entitles the kid to free or cheap tuition in ALL the EU countries that have that, and
• that most business, science and technical degrees in Scandinavia and the Baltics are taught 100% in English.
But for many children, the US university _experience_ is a desired rite-of-passage, and the parties, protests, and sporting events are really what they're looking for, with the credential being the excuse to make parents support it.
Father worked in the oil fields and on heavy equipment on construction. He referred to the college trained as educated idiots, and maintained they were the most likely to be injured on the job. They required constant supervision to avoid injuries. He received multiple safety awards from different companies. That was 20 years ago; in just the limited contact recently, it's gotten worse
Agreed this does not have a lot to do with AI; any cheating is more a symptom than anything else.
However anyone that studies "underwater basket weaving" type courses, or anything including “Ternary Positionality: Relationality, Decoloniality and Interpretations” probably is not really motivated to begin with. They have probably been steered (by previous teachers) towards an "easy" degree and are looking for the university experience and a ticket to an easy job in some meaningless administrative position.
Whether or not AI will devalue a degree depends on what that degree is in.
Frankly I doubt that even SHODAN and Skynet working together would be able to devalue a modern university degree any further than it already has been.
In fairness ....passing an underwater basket weaving course is probably a good start to a career in offshore pipeline repair.
You also have students who have been protected from failure by their parents (and schools, in some cases), and who cause major disruptions at colleges if they don't do perfectly in everything.
Doonesbury cartoon back in the early 1990s had a bit where a professor was grading and said to himself, "I'd flunk this kid in a heartbeat ... if I could afford the legal fees." That sort of thing pushes admins to lean on profs to pass everyone, especially "first generation college students and students from previously underserved communities." Oh, and the federal government is pushing the admins to push the profs.
I'm on the fringes of university life, not inside the Ivory Tower. AI is just part of the much bigger problem of mindsets. "What is the purpose of college?" The answer is where the problem starts.
TXRed
AI course materials only make sense, because most faculty members at most universities and colleges are actually dumber than the sum total of everything on the internet.
But if they're going to be fair, degree costs need to drop to around $40, all-in, for the entire four year degree conferred. Because at the end of the day, that's about all it's worth.
Commensurately $20 for a Master's, and another $10 for the Ph.D. should follow on in short order, until such time as they drop the recockulous requirements for students to self-indoctrinate, and return once more to teaching them how to think (including how to do valid research from legitimate sources, discern real statistical analysis from junk polling, etc.), instead of focusing on telling young skulls full of mush what to think (which is spring-loaded to "Failed Leftist Codswallop, 24/7/365/forever").
The question isn't whether AI should be allowed at the college level. It's why anyone thinks college education, such as it's become, is worth a wet fart in the first place. Given how craptastic the whole nauseating mess is, AI couldn't possibly make it any worse, and will at least filter out the more egregious examples of earnest communist faculty members and DEI administrators who add zero value to the entire experience, who need to be fired and set to work sweeping streets, digging ditches, or other vastly more useful - and less societally corrosive - actual work.
Universities devalue university degrees.
Its amazing how quickly AI is evolving. Grok3 (Musk) is supposed to be world winning but you know that it will be replaced by Grok4 within a few months. Add quantum computing and - your robot will be schooling you.
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