College is extraordinarily expensive and becoming less useful, and those who insist otherwise are working from a model of the labor market that stopped describing reality sometime in the 1990s. Four-year courses at private institutions often cost more than $70,000 a year, and it should come as no surprise that student debt has tipped over $1 trillion .

This situation is ridiculous for a film student, but it is also ridiculous for a computer science graduate whose program could not keep pace with the industry it was preparing him for – and who learned more in four months on GitHub and dicking around on X and Repl.it than in four years of lectures.

It’s sad, but how many people were attending school for “the life of the mind” to begin with? The work is and has been purposeless for most of the people doing it for decades, and they know it, and the professors surely know it, and the institutions have responded by pretending otherwise. When an assignment has no purpose, copying the answer from a machine is not a moral failure, at least from my vantage point. It’s more efficient than googling it, or asking the kid next to you, or buying the answer.

This is the context in which AI entered universities. Techno-optimists like to believe that AI will democratize learning, that anyone with a laptop and a chatbot will have access to an Oxford lecture or Princeton seminar, and that the university will dissolve into a distributed global classroom. This is, of course, the naiveté people had about the internet in 1995. Nobody is going to watch those lectures........

© The Spectator