College is Coming Apart

Artificial intelligence arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role. Worse, some of us are offloading the drudgery of writing recommendation letters, grant proposals, and even scientific papers to AI.

But at the same time that AI fouled up the student-teacher relationship, the technology benefited other corners of campus. Researchers quickly discovered that AI is enormously useful for knowledge production, especially in the natural and applied sciences: in protein-structure prediction, materials design, and drug discovery, for example. Pressured, in part, by donors, boards, employers, and parents, college administrators have announced AI initiatives, invested in AI infrastructure, and established AI degree programs.

These two forces—students using AI to their detriment and colleges using it to their benefit—might seem to be in conflict. Students are supposed to do everything longhand to preserve the sanctity of learning, but they are also urged to meet the new professional demands created by AI. Faculty and administrators are policing the classroom for AI, largely in vain, while also using AI liberally in their own work. Campuses are defending themselves against AI as an interloper while concurrently retooling themselves for the AI future. Colleges are racing toward and away from AI simultaneously. It feels like artificial intelligence is wresting higher education apart.

That’s what I thought at first too. But I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong. Higher education is a bundle of unrelated things held together by custom, history, and accident. The college bundle was always a tenuous one. It has little reason to remain together, even as the institutions inside it are too entrenched to separate.

College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.

Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.

Optimizing college for professional preparation also began to pull the two purposes apart, and eroded the unrepeatable social experience that college is supposed to provide. The economy demanded more of students outside the classroom—internships, networking, publications, volunteering. In a brutal job-search environment, where entry-level gigs seem to demand nepotism, luck, and 10 rounds of interviews, today’s undergraduates may feel that their older professors do not fully understand the gap between the delivery of the credential and the career it promises.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

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