Is University still worth it, in the age of AI?

[MamaLlama123]

Just a thought…

If AI eventually replaces humans in most jobs, and university graduates collectively face poor job prospects, would it still make sense to encourage our children to go to university — or even to fund it for them?

In the past, universities were the gatekeepers of knowledge. They offered access to ideas, lectures, and expertise that couldn’t be found elsewhere. But that’s changed. With AI, podcasts, and open-access courses, it’s now entirely possible to self-teach subjects like history or theology to a very high level — for free.

So if the same knowledge can be gained independently, what are we really paying for? The qualification? The experience? The social status it still carries?

If a degree no longer guarantees a job or economic security, would you still invest in it for your children — and if so, what would you hope they gained from it?

its impossible to say where AI will go but I guess my main thoughts would be-

• the learning AI can provide isn’t organised into a pedagogy or curriculum the way a university course is. So even if the information is available, how would you learn from it in the way you do at university? And when AI does organise itself into university like courses why wouldn’t the creators monitise it?!
• univerities shouldn’t just be about producing employees. This is where capitalism has got us, And certainly poor people have traditionally had to see university as a money making investment. But the wealthy enjoy learning for learnings sake- how can AI replace that?
• universities are responsible for enormous amounts of research. Al can support research but it can’t discover unknowns- so where would this work go?

AI doesn't do research.

AI is just a LLM (large language model) which scrapes human words and ideas.

So no, AI won't replace the training in thinking and critical analysis of a good university education - and MOST importantly, a university student prepared to do the hard work of learning to think - which involves doing a lot of difficult things - a lot of reading, thinking, and self-examination.

Too many of them don't like the bit about hard work & difficult things, unfortunately.

Without humans there is no AI. All AI does is trawl the internet and gather information that humans have put on there. AI is not all knowing and in all honestly shouldn't be trusted blindly.
A good example of this is on "No Kings day" in America lots of attendees to the marches wrote on various blogs and forums that Donald Trump had died in various amusing ways. If you searched For Donald Trump that day the AI search results would have told you that Donald Trump had died and how he had died!

I work in AI, we tell our staff they are AI users, it's a tool and they need to learn to use it well.

Currently it can replace a lot of low level jobs. In the future I can see it replacing a lot more.

I'd think carefully about which uni course and career plan. A lot of knowledge based work will be removed but for some it'll just remove the drudge work and let the person do more client facing or imaginative stuff.

A degree is also a filtering factor in job applications. A lot of our roles don't NEED a degree if it's the right person but if we don't ask for a degree we get hundreds of applications and just can't deal with that.

Humans will still be needed to ask questions and make judgements.

The immediate threat of AI to universities is assessed coursework. They had just about got to grips with plagiarism, but AI is another level. Although there are AI checking tools, they don’t seem to be in widespread use and anyway must unis allow use of AI for researching and planning but try to impose limits.

It has happened very rapidly - I have heard from the summer assessment period of whole cohorts submitting very similar ChatGPT written “work” which had to be graded 1st or 2.1 because the unis don’t dare fail them. The previous year it wasn’t detected as an issue at all.

In person exams are the only answer. But how well will students be prepared for these if they have relied on AI and haven’t done the thinking themselves in the weekly worksheets/essays. It’s a real problem.

The same is true in schools. Some teachers I know only now mark/assess work done in school. Homework is for practising, reading and memorising.

Exams with written coursework or essay EPQs will be similarly regarded as suspect unless a solution can be found.

(Oxbridge have encountered the problem creeping into online interviews too!)

The question will be what skills has the student developed at university if they have relied heavily on AI. Are those skills useful to employers or will more practical work experience be more valuable.

We cannot know what future employment will be like but we are currently going through a market disruption in graduate-entry type employment.

I agree with the general tone of the comments above.

AI is a tool. It can model but it cannot think independently. We will always need people who have been trained to think critically.

I think going back to sat exams for assessments would really sort the wheat from the chaff.

We welcomed Turn it in, seems like an age ago now. I love the idea of technology doing all the low level data sifting and sorting as it’s tedious. But it’s getting to a level where the loss of critical thinking and the process of finding out is just being obliterated.

I mourn the loss of wondering about things. This isn’t so much about AI but just how people can look without the discussion needed. DS went to a pub a few months ago where mobile phones were banned from being out at all. Unfortunatley it’s in York so not super local, I would go to that pub.

AI will be part of teaching at some point in the future, not very far IMO. Whether it is by way of personalised teaching, virtual reality, different type of assessment, it will likely redefine education altogether.

The need for qualifications and the job market are an altogether different matter, although related. It looks like fewer people will be needed to work in time, with all ensuing complications for society - universal income for non-working/ unemployable adults for example. I think the current state of obtaining a degree at a young age and following a more or less consistent career path will probably be replaced by the need to requalify regularly. A new education model involving AI led courses/degrees will possibly aid the process. Due to the personalised (and consequently accelerated) nature of these courses, the time frame will also likely be different. Instead of 3 years to obtain a degree, it may be a lot faster.

Interesting times ahead especially for young people....

Leaving aside AI specifically and the question of employability, I disagree with the idea that the availability of knowledge online replaces the university experience.

'Knowledge' isn't just about sucking in as many facts as possible. Open-access courses and the other things you mention are great for that and the better sources will develop critical thinking too, but they won't offer the feedback and mentoring that doing a for-credit university course will give you. It's brilliant that so much more knowledge is so easily available now, but watching videos and reading short articles on a MOOC isn't fundamentally different from getting a book out of the library. It is by drawing the conclusions of your study together and having that assessed and challenged by experts that you can really test your knowledge. That's what university education provides that libraries, mass open-access courses and the like can't.

Not that I'm knocking the latter. I love dipping into a MOOC or watching lectures on subjects I'm interested in on Youtube. But it isn't the same as having to formulate an argument and receiving critical feedback on it.

It's doing a disservice to universities to imagine that they are simply serving up facts in a manner similar to Wikipedia.

Libraries have always given people the opportunity to learn so there's always been good quality information out there. Academics teach and publish books (in the Arts for example) - humans will always be needed in the loop to help guide and challenge in the classroom.

When I teach, I give specific examples of things from my work life. These are not written down, the only way a student will get an A in their coursework is if they give me some of these examples. That is something AI won’t ever do.

We have had the same model of teaching kids for about a century now. Maybe we should recognise it isn’t fit for purpose.

We are at the very beginning of the AI journey, and just with every other technological development, people are claiming the sky is falling and the world as we know it will end. It will, for sure, as it has always done but the new world isn’t going to be an apocalypse, it will just be different. Imagine you were a 17th century crofter, farming your own land, and you were learning about the new fangled mechanical farming equipment that was coming in to use and you could see your job disappearing. Then you are transported to the 18th century and you saw how it had revolutionised farming, and how the world had changed to be something different because of it. That’s where we are with AI.

Machines will never replace humans entirely.

Errr, so the student copies your examples into ChatGPT which includes them in their broader answer and you give them an A?

With AI, podcasts, and open-access courses, it’s now entirely possible to self-teach subjects like history or theology to a very high level — for free.

I teach at university level and this is nonsense. The reason why students need university teachers is that it isn’t at all easy to self-teach subjects at this level — any more than school students can teach themselves their curriculum from the internet/AI.

A university level curriculum requires higher level skills in research, reading, understanding, arguing and writing to make sense of the material. These are the skills we teach. Students coming in fresh from A-level produce A-level standard work, not university level work: they aren’t yet at the level where they are able to read, analyse and understand the material to a higher level.

AI doesn’t do this either. We’re training them to think at a higher level than ChatGPT et al., so AI isn’t much use to them if they want to do well in a university course.

It’s total fantasy that AI is going to replace the universities. It’s a big predictive search engine, not a substitute for thought. Do you seriously think a completely deskilled society where people gape at screens that produce a mediocre half-simulation of real knowledge is a good thing? (The irony is that it’s in STEM subjects that AI is more likely to be actually useful, compared to the humanities, where AI simply can’t replace actual thinking.)

Real learning, real teaching and the real university experience can’t be replaced. But, we do need to think about the value of courses, the calibre of students and the real-life engagement of the experience. The real learning is in the shared experience, not in online learning.