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

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.

As a crisis, this is even more consequential than the rampant wage theft, bloated vice chancellor salaries, antisemitism and sexual assault on campus, and the sorry and sordid saga of governance at ANU.

Rather than demonstrate the intellectual dynamism and out-of-the-box thinking needed to meet the challenge, universities are carrying on as though AI hasn’t upended everything they stand for. So long as they can keep cashing cheques – whether hefty taxpayer subsidies for domestic students or the rivers of gold coming from international fees – they will keep turning a blind eye.

This is fraud we would not accept in any other sector. And the degree-printing factories that many universities have become will have grave consequences not just for the individual students who have not earned their qualifications, but for all of society.

Ask anyone who teaches in the university sector, or in schools for that matter. AI is ubiquitous. Human nature is such that most of us will take the easy route when given the choice, even if we know that it’s bad for us in the long run. Most of us would choose the lift over the stairs or the Big Mac over the salad wrap, every time. But let’s grossly underestimate the numbers of students who have GPT degrees and put the figure at a measly 10 per cent (the reality is probably well over 90 per cent).

Should we accept that even 10 per cent of the future engineers of our roads and bridges didn’t earn their qualifications and don’t actually know how to build roads and bridges? What about nurses, meteorologists, barristers, financial advisers … Maybe the fraud doesn’t matter if these folks can continue outsourcing their cognitive functioning after they enter the workforce. AI hallucinations and biases notwithstanding, that sounds to me like an easy argument for the replacement of those workers with the same AI agents who sat their degrees for them. Integrating AI into the foundations of human education will not only lead to mass brain rot; it will likely hasten the AI jobs apocalypse.

Of course, some degrees, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, are easier to use AI to cheat through than others. Any subject which sets take-home exams or assignments, however, including many in courses like engineering and medicine, is vulnerable.

A return to exclusively in-person written or oral exams is likely unavoidable. Such assessments are comparatively expensive and require the unis to undo much of their COVID-era push to shift their operations online. These measures are often spun as offering flexibility but are usually a form of cost-cutting.

Despite concerns, the Queensland government recently announced that its own custom AI agents will be incorporated into the high school system. A number of American universities have launched corporate partnerships with OpenAI, which will supposedly “significantly enhance educational outcomes and career readiness”.

While AI can undoubtedly be useful in education, we should employ healthy scepticism about such grand and largely untested claims. It wasn’t that long ago that we fell for the bright, flashy promises of a tech sector which, after convincing schools to pay for the rollout of a laptop for every child and expensive subscription packages to online learning platforms, failed dismally to demonstrate any improvement in educational attainment.

In fact, the rise of edtech has seen reading and maths fall off a cliff. Heartbreakingly, Australia’s young people are far more likely to be functionally illiterate or innumerate today than they were when education revolved around blackboards, textbooks, pens and paper.

As a society we need to protect both the education system and the intellectual development of our own minds. We need to educate and shape the human brain first, before introducing AI as a tool. Otherwise, AI will become the brain and the student its tool.

Universities, of course, have an interest in downplaying the extent of the fraud. It postpones the very expensive root and branch restructuring required to both equip the sector for the challenges and opportunities of AI and restore its integrity as an indispensable place for educating humans.
The grim reality is that it’s not in the sector’s economic interest to put an end to the fraud. It is therefore critical that universities be dragged kicking and screaming back to the world of verifiable in-person assessments by those of us footing their bills: the government and taxpayers.

In a world in which AI can do much of the intellectual grunt work, universities need to reimagine not just the content of their degrees but their purpose too. Isn’t there value in developing the human mind to its full intellectual potential, irrespective of whether AI can do it better? Shouldn’t the pursuit of a challenging and intellectually rigorous education be a worthy end in and of itself? There’s nothing to be gained by living in a sophisticated society augmented by the advances of AI if we have lobotomised ourselves in getting there.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a research fellow in security studies at Macquarie University and a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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