Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?

Nonetheless, it seems a bit odd that, when it comes to predictions about our A.I. future, which typically range from friendly revolution to organ-harvesting apocalypse, declarations about higher education have been relatively mellow. Granted, many of the commentators offering these predictions are employed by traditional universities, and might tend to believe more strongly in the enduring relevance of the academy. There are exceptions: the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman has suggested that his own kid might not attend college; Howard Gardner, a psychology professor at Harvard, recently surmised that A.I. will significantly shorten the time children need to be in school. But the consensus is that college will still exist in ten or twenty or thirty years, a forecast that, for a parent of two staring down future tuition bills, is a bit disappointing.

Even some pundits who are open to A.I. as a major development agree that higher education isn’t going anywhere. Tyler Cowen, for instance, Caplan’s colleague in George Mason University’s economics department, has argued that more instruction time should be devoted to A.I. in American classrooms—and mused that A.I. might help students better understand the Odyssey—but maintains that the traditional subjects and pedagogy of higher education should largely remain intact. Sal Khan, the founder of the free online-learning service Khan Academy, has launched a partnership with TED and the Educational Testing Service called the Khan TED Institute, which aims to provide a “world-class higher education accessible throughout the world at a radically low cost.” (Around ten thousand dollars, he says; details are a bit thin. The institute’s website is filled with a lot of pablum about opening “new pathways into the AI economy where skill-based measurement becomes the critical link between learning and livelihood.”) But Khan doesn’t see his latest venture as a wholesale replacement for the brick-and-mortar university; he has described it as a reasonably priced alternative that can keep pace with a world that is changing “very, very fast.” (Khan also believes that tutoring, which is both effective and expensive, could ultimately be done by A.I. agents, making one-on-one instruction more accessible, though one of the parties would be a robot.) Scott Galloway, a professor, a popular podcaster, and perhaps the most influential public voice on the value of a university education, has declared that “this narrative that A.I. is going to destroy higher education is such ridiculous bullshit.” Higher education could drastically change soon, he says, if tech giants start partnering with prestigious universities to expand their enrollment through online degrees, thereby effectively shutting down hundreds of smaller, private colleges. But those changes would be driven by supply and demand, rather than a fundamental shift in opinion about whether it’s still good to go somewhere, in person, to learn things.

I don’t believe that these thinkers are necessarily wrong to dismiss the idea that enormous changes will come to higher education during the next two decades; as long as Americans want to distinguish their children from other children, the hierarchical college system will prevail. But these defenses of higher education feel almost performatively cynical, especially for an institution that has traditionally draped itself in high-flown sentiment about the pursuit of truth and the shaping of young minds, or whatever. (The motto splashed on all the brochures for my alma mater was “The Best Four Years of Your Life.” They were not, but I recall genuinely believing that they would be.) I also wonder if the skeptics might be overstating the power of inertia, especially at a time of extremely low public trust in all institutions, not just those of higher education. In the world of prestige media that includes The New Yorker, for example, it has long been much harder to break in without an Ivy League degree, and that remains the case; but the draw of working at a legacy-media institution has also never been weaker. Would a fifteen-year-old hellbent on a journalism career be best served by working himself to the bone both academically and extracurricularly to get into Harvard, or should he just start a Twitch stream and get to work?

Reasonable people can disagree about that. But I feel certain that most of the ambitious fifteen-year-olds who already know what they want to do these days would choose the self-made option—particularly if they come from families that can’t easily afford college tuition, let alone thousands of dollars in supplemental application prep. A.I. might not factor directly into such a decision for an aspiring reporter, but the already impressive abilities of large language models to hone research, approximate historical knowledge, and target potential sources would soften any disadvantages that this hypothetical student might suffer from skipping college. Perhaps this ambitious teen would be more susceptible to the algorithmic and predictive gutters of these machines—when the A.I. companies set the guidelines for what the L.L.M. says back, you will always be receiving their version of the truth—but professors and college curricula also have their gutters, some of which are far deeper than what you’ll find at the bottom of Claude.