Outrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces.
Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
If you live in a city with multiple colleges/universities check out the cars in the staff parking lot. Many will have parking passes/stickers for multiple colleges on there. These are adjuncts that have to drive all over town to cobble together a full time job as an instructor.
My experience with adjunct professors is they're much better at teaching than old tenured professors who just want to do their research and couldn't care less about the students.
> Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
Check out the "Who Wants to be a Teacher?" episodes of the Educate Podcast. I remember listening to these and shaking my head. Worse, if you go back further in the same groups older podcast, you'll hear the tragedy of students being taught to read using provenly bad methodology and teachers defending it saying they don't care that studies show that it's the wrong path. It made me genuinely very angry on behalf of kids. They're being robbed of their future.
Allegedly most of them, since they have non-profit mandates and are often tax-exempt.
The University of Staffordshire is a public university and is funded by the government to provide education to British people. Its mandate isn't "about cashflow".
In reality, that particular school created a private commercial subsidiary called "Staffordshire University Services". All new employees are hired by that subsidiary, which does have a mandate to generate cashflow.
> But after a term of AI-generated slides being read, at times, by an AI voiceover, James said he had lost faith in the programme and the people running it, worrying he had “used up two years” of his life on a course that had been done “in the cheapest way possible”.
This is the future guys, get used to it.
The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.
The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.
Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
I promise you that students from wealthy families will continue to get human tutors for the foreseeable future. And it will have nothing to do with whether an AI can beat a human on a test or not.
This pattern has recurred in every era where "technology will disrupt X" -- the affluent pay to "opt out" of the ersatz tech-supported version of X, while people of fewer means have no choice but to put up with it.
I've had human tutors and a well-equipped AI, e.g. Deep Research-like, can often be better.
But an AI tutor at that level can be more expensive than humans. An hour of deep research with a SOTA model that has hundreds of thousands of context tokens is going to be much more than $80.
> The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.
> Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
The better-off children whose parents are "spend[ing] $1000s/month" will get real teachers who are people, not fancier AIs.
I mean look at food: The lower classes are eating industrially-processed McDonald's food, the upper classes are not eating more expensive but still industrially-processed stuff from McDonald's, they're eating organic, locally grown stuff from the farmer's market (which used to be the standard for food for everyone).
Good food is refrigerated and bad food is frozen, because it's cheaper to freeze as that preserves food indefinitely. This is true even at a farmer's market.
This counts on there being more juice to squeeze out of learning than I think actually exists. The people currently spending $1000s/month on real tutors are probably learning at ~90% of their potential. An idealized AI might push that to 100%, but the people who can't afford tutors or college are going to see greater benefit from even the cheapest models. That scenario results in decreasing stratification.
This is the culmination of decades of cuts to education. I mean, what else was going to be the end point of having teachers buy supplies for their own kids, demonizing professors, demonizing higher education and the idea of education generally, not training enough teachers, and underpaying the teachers you already have.
In America we have to deal with school shootings, the latest religious group mandating the 10 commandments be put up or rainbows be taken down, irate parents mad that you failed their kid who didn't do work all semester and has severe behavioral problems no one is allowed to discipline. And now of course with AI, the students aren't doing their work, and if you call them out on it they call their parents, they sue, you get deposed and have to admit you can't 100% prove it's AI... so why bother? Who would ever want to grow up to be a teacher anymore?
So yeah, cut education, end up with AI students submitting AI papers to AI teachers. We have arrived.
The only question now is... what are we going to do about it?
Spending on education has increased over the last couple decades, not decreased. Outcomes, however, have gotten worse. You're entire premise is flawed.
It certainly has increased. The question isn't whether the increase is enough, but rather if the destination of the funds is the right location.
There's also an issue with home life that heavily impacts educational outcome.
My own school district spent a fortune making a palace for the district admin. Meanwhile, the public schools are falling apart with the kids packed in like sardines. They've literally started adding cheap prefab trailers to the school grounds to accommodate.
This is America, we have perfected the art of spending more to get less. That doesn't mean cuts to education aren't happening. See also: the entire healthcare system.
I specifically mentioned: teachers paying for supplies out of their own pockets, underpaying teachers, not investing in safe teaching environments, increased litigation, demonizing the profession, increased political targeting, and lack of teacher agency in disciplining students.
Fact is when I look at my district, over the last decade we've had to do more with less, and I don't know a single teacher who can say the opposite. So it is true we are spending more overall, it's not true we aren't cutting education.
I think you know the answer to your question: nothing until it becomes a major issue. This is like global warming, it's a slow moving catastrophe, you can see it coming from a mile away but it's expensive to fix so it's hard to convince people to do something about it and there is just enough ambiguity that the detractors can effectively block your efforts.
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc.
I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot, buying a $15 part, and replacing it. But it's one less skill for a homeowner to learn, so you delegate.
The problem isn't that someone learns to prompt AI and is selling the output. The problem is that the customer thinks they're paying for human instruction and they're getting something else.
But you aren't a student paying for a university education presumably taught by someone that has experience in the field.
Perhaps the insights are good or bad and that's fine if you can correct later with a conversation with your doctor. But would you want a doctor trained by the same AI?
Importantly, you have no idea what part or what percentage of the conversation was accurate. How much of it was a hallucination from a chi manipulator? How much of it was based on dated research? How much of it came from a random blog post by a crazy person?
I have the sense overall, from talking to it about aspects of his condition that I understand well, and also using it as a coding assistant in work, that by and large it's on point.
i quiz it often on aspects of my son's condition that I understand, and it gets things right most of the time, with the occasional glaring bit of misinformation.
Well I am operating within a space where his doctors are setting the parameters in terms of the pathways targeted, the therapies offered, etc. And I'm asking, how does this therapy work? How is it related to X and Y? How strong is the evidence? Questions like that. I think I can throw the appropriate grain of salt on it, but yeah, some fake facts could creep in. It's stuff that will be validated, but super valuable to just synthesize the lay of the land and give me context for understanding what the docs are saying.
> Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less?
Partly just how tailored and conversational ChatGPT is. It gets right at my needed level of explanation. It knows how much education I have. It remembers salient details about my son and his condition. It really explains things well. It knows so much. It's quite remarkable.
[note, i didn't read the article so am not opining on its content in any way. An AI college education sounds terrible in many ways]
As long as we're reciting unrelated anecdotes to attempt emotional appeal over anything of substance, "Chat" has also driven young children to suicide. No one in their lives would have paid as much detail into reaffirming every negative thought pattern they had until they ended their own lives as much as an emotionless token predictor LLM running 24/7. They got their nihilism and idealization pushed back at them in a clear, cold tone they would have never gotten from docs, reading papers, reading textbooks. I dont think their outcomes were as amazing. Their mental condition wasnt even as rare of a circumstance to properly handle and treat, yet it failed at a fatal level.
I dont know why asking to not have LLMs shoved in your face in every facet of society always has to be rebutted by a subjective miracle experience akin to openai PR statements. You can have these conversations with chatgp- oh, your friend "Chat" without it being proliferated to education platforms. These concepts aren't in conflict with eachother, yet by coming to defense of their use as a mandated platform you want to brush away critique for reasons that are unknown to anybody else. Go ahead and keep talking to "Chat", maybe let the people suffering at the hands of low quality slop have their voice and chance to speak?
i guess i'd rather have the understanding it's offering me, with a smudge of, sure, call it bullshit, than not know it at all.
If you think about it, there is no source out there that is unimpeachable, and there is a need to consult many sources to get closer to the truth. triple all that for a rare disease.
1) Two-Sector Economy: In Baumol and Bowen's observations, the economy is divided into two parts:
- A Progressive Sector: Productivity grows rapidly due to technology and automation (e.g., manufacturing, data processing).
- A Stagnant Sector: Productivity grows slowly, if at all, because the service is labor-intensive (e.g., a string quartet performance, a haircut, K-12 teaching).
2) Wage Linkage: Both sectors compete for labor from the same pool of workers. As productivity gains allow wages to rise in the progressive sector, the stagnant sector must also increase its wages to attract and retain employees.
3) Divergent Cost Impact:
- In the progressive sector, the higher wages are offset by the gains in productivity. The labor cost per unit of output can remain stable or even decrease.
- In the stagnant sector, there are no corresponding productivity gains to offset the higher wages. The labor cost per unit of service must therefore increase.
4) Resulting Price Trend: The prices for services in the stagnant sector (e.g., concert tickets, college tuition, healthcare) must therefore rise and faster than the prices for goods from the progressive sector (e.g., electronics, cars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Pric...
5) A lot of European countries fund these expensive services through general taxation rather than direct user fees. In the US that's not going to fly, so cost pressure incentivizes orgs to cut corners and reduce quality and automate as much as possible.
I'm lucky to teach in a school with relatively small classes (~25) and I can manually grade and review everything. (The autograde scripts I wrote in bash help.)
But yes, it's happening. If I had 300 students, I couldn't do this. I'd need a bunch of TAs or some AI. Or just pure autograding, which I always hated since the person who did nothing gets the same F as the person who left out a semicolon.
And students are definitely using AI, evidenced by their stratospheric code improvements in the last 18 months.
Readit News
Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
Check out the "Who Wants to be a Teacher?" episodes of the Educate Podcast. I remember listening to these and shaking my head. Worse, if you go back further in the same groups older podcast, you'll hear the tragedy of students being taught to read using provenly bad methodology and teachers defending it saying they don't care that studies show that it's the wrong path. It made me genuinely very angry on behalf of kids. They're being robbed of their future.
https://www.apmreports.org/collection/educate-podcast
The University of Staffordshire is a public university and is funded by the government to provide education to British people. Its mandate isn't "about cashflow".
In reality, that particular school created a private commercial subsidiary called "Staffordshire University Services". All new employees are hired by that subsidiary, which does have a mandate to generate cashflow.
Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!
This is the future guys, get used to it.
The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.
I'm now able to create a fucking shit nobody will ever care about in no time!
The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.
Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-conta...
This pattern has recurred in every era where "technology will disrupt X" -- the affluent pay to "opt out" of the ersatz tech-supported version of X, while people of fewer means have no choice but to put up with it.
But an AI tutor at that level can be more expensive than humans. An hour of deep research with a SOTA model that has hundreds of thousands of context tokens is going to be much more than $80.
> The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.
> Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
The better-off children whose parents are "spend[ing] $1000s/month" will get real teachers who are people, not fancier AIs.
I mean look at food: The lower classes are eating industrially-processed McDonald's food, the upper classes are not eating more expensive but still industrially-processed stuff from McDonald's, they're eating organic, locally grown stuff from the farmer's market (which used to be the standard for food for everyone).
Good food is refrigerated and bad food is frozen, because it's cheaper to freeze as that preserves food indefinitely. This is true even at a farmer's market.
In America we have to deal with school shootings, the latest religious group mandating the 10 commandments be put up or rainbows be taken down, irate parents mad that you failed their kid who didn't do work all semester and has severe behavioral problems no one is allowed to discipline. And now of course with AI, the students aren't doing their work, and if you call them out on it they call their parents, they sue, you get deposed and have to admit you can't 100% prove it's AI... so why bother? Who would ever want to grow up to be a teacher anymore?
So yeah, cut education, end up with AI students submitting AI papers to AI teachers. We have arrived.
The only question now is... what are we going to do about it?
There's also an issue with home life that heavily impacts educational outcome.
My own school district spent a fortune making a palace for the district admin. Meanwhile, the public schools are falling apart with the kids packed in like sardines. They've literally started adding cheap prefab trailers to the school grounds to accommodate.
I specifically mentioned: teachers paying for supplies out of their own pockets, underpaying teachers, not investing in safe teaching environments, increased litigation, demonizing the profession, increased political targeting, and lack of teacher agency in disciplining students.
Fact is when I look at my district, over the last decade we've had to do more with less, and I don't know a single teacher who can say the opposite. So it is true we are spending more overall, it's not true we aren't cutting education.
I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
The problem isn't that someone learns to prompt AI and is selling the output. The problem is that the customer thinks they're paying for human instruction and they're getting something else.
Perhaps the insights are good or bad and that's fine if you can correct later with a conversation with your doctor. But would you want a doctor trained by the same AI?
Importantly, you have no idea what part or what percentage of the conversation was accurate. How much of it was a hallucination from a chi manipulator? How much of it was based on dated research? How much of it came from a random blog post by a crazy person?
So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.
Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less?
> I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated
You guess it is a small percentage? How much do you guess this small percentage was the most important part about this disease?
Because it seems like you were taken in by the empathic answers by gpt and think it got things mostly right.
Well I am operating within a space where his doctors are setting the parameters in terms of the pathways targeted, the therapies offered, etc. And I'm asking, how does this therapy work? How is it related to X and Y? How strong is the evidence? Questions like that. I think I can throw the appropriate grain of salt on it, but yeah, some fake facts could creep in. It's stuff that will be validated, but super valuable to just synthesize the lay of the land and give me context for understanding what the docs are saying.
> Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less?
Partly just how tailored and conversational ChatGPT is. It gets right at my needed level of explanation. It knows how much education I have. It remembers salient details about my son and his condition. It really explains things well. It knows so much. It's quite remarkable.
[note, i didn't read the article so am not opining on its content in any way. An AI college education sounds terrible in many ways]
Deleted Comment
I dont know why asking to not have LLMs shoved in your face in every facet of society always has to be rebutted by a subjective miracle experience akin to openai PR statements. You can have these conversations with chatgp- oh, your friend "Chat" without it being proliferated to education platforms. These concepts aren't in conflict with eachother, yet by coming to defense of their use as a mandated platform you want to brush away critique for reasons that are unknown to anybody else. Go ahead and keep talking to "Chat", maybe let the people suffering at the hands of low quality slop have their voice and chance to speak?
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Which percentage?
And how important/misleading was that particular percentage?
(As an aside, personally, I precent the term 'bullshits' to 'hallucinating'; the latter is the daft Silicon Valley term.)
If you think about it, there is no source out there that is unimpeachable, and there is a need to consult many sources to get closer to the truth. triple all that for a rare disease.
1) Two-Sector Economy: In Baumol and Bowen's observations, the economy is divided into two parts:
- A Progressive Sector: Productivity grows rapidly due to technology and automation (e.g., manufacturing, data processing).
- A Stagnant Sector: Productivity grows slowly, if at all, because the service is labor-intensive (e.g., a string quartet performance, a haircut, K-12 teaching).
2) Wage Linkage: Both sectors compete for labor from the same pool of workers. As productivity gains allow wages to rise in the progressive sector, the stagnant sector must also increase its wages to attract and retain employees.
3) Divergent Cost Impact:
- In the progressive sector, the higher wages are offset by the gains in productivity. The labor cost per unit of output can remain stable or even decrease.
- In the stagnant sector, there are no corresponding productivity gains to offset the higher wages. The labor cost per unit of service must therefore increase.
4) Resulting Price Trend: The prices for services in the stagnant sector (e.g., concert tickets, college tuition, healthcare) must therefore rise and faster than the prices for goods from the progressive sector (e.g., electronics, cars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Pric...
5) A lot of European countries fund these expensive services through general taxation rather than direct user fees. In the US that's not going to fly, so cost pressure incentivizes orgs to cut corners and reduce quality and automate as much as possible.
But yes, it's happening. If I had 300 students, I couldn't do this. I'd need a bunch of TAs or some AI. Or just pure autograding, which I always hated since the person who did nothing gets the same F as the person who left out a semicolon.
And students are definitely using AI, evidenced by their stratospheric code improvements in the last 18 months.