I’m an academic, but I’ve told my stepdaughter to think twice about going to university

May 27, 2026 — 5:00am

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My stepdaughter is in her final year of high school and I am an academic, yet I’ve recently advised her to think twice before enrolling in university.

Why? Because right now kids are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have a terrible campus experience while being graded on who can write the best AI prompts.

In the three years since ChatGPT was released we have arrived at a point in which all of Australia’s universities are committing widespread, industrial-scale fraud. The students who began their studies back then are now graduating and entering the workforce, and we’ll soon begin to see the results of a real-time experiment in degree by GPT.

The value of a tertiary qualification was being undermined long before AI. We’ve seen plenty of grade inflation, decreasing admissions standards, dumbing down of courses, commercial essay-writing operations and other forms of cheating. But now every student can outsource almost every facet of the learning process to an AI assistant – from lecture notes to readings summaries to asking Gemini or Claude to curate their tutorial engagement. To achieve a high distinction one does not need to attend a single lecture or read a single text. So, why bother?

When the system actively rewards cheating, you can’t blame the students for engaging in it. The question is why, three years in, aren’t universities doing anything about it.

Students paying $56,000 to watch six-year-old taped lectures at Australia’s most prestigious university

As a crisis, this is even more consequential than the........

© Brisbane Times