What is college?
I’m a university professor. I started teaching classes in the early 2000s. The college experience always had its problems and it was far from perfect. But, up until about 2015, we knew what college was. But now more than ever, the idea of college should be reassessed.
The major issues facing the university system are these:
-AI. If AI can write papers for students, but AI detection cannot detect its presence, what is college? If students can use apps to answer any multiple-choice question, what is college? If apps can solve any math problem by taking a photo, what is college? Is anyone learning any knowledge, skills, or abilities? (Except the skill of using AI to appear to write and answer questions?) Why not aim for the stars, land acceptance into an aspirational school, and use AI to cruise through the course work?
I taught public speaking for 20 years and a big part of the class was reasoning; that is, the logic behind what a student will present. But with the advent of fully functional AI, a public speaking course will become a delivery course with very little emphasis on reasoning.
-Debt. If students exit college with a $1,000-a-month student loan payment, what is college? Add in the prevalence of AI, and students are incentivized to get the absolute cheapest and easiest degree.
-Ideology of victimhood. If students are trained to be victims (which at most schools they are), how can any educator teach the content they should? If, while teaching a political communication course, I have a list of forbidden topics (or even the perception of topics that can’t be mentioned, which are verifiably true about presidents), how does class “happen”? (Professors can and should start recording every lecture, similar to police officers wearing body cams.)
Moving into the future, here are some of our options:
1. Pretend it’s the same. (It’s not)
2. Take a hard turn back toward in-person options. (I can’t imagine we will do this)
3. Shift the perception of college in our minds. (Virtually every city in America has devoted space and resources to a college in its town, so colleges probably won’t go away.)
4. Treat it as a hundred thousand-dollar networking tool. With this college-as-networking model in mind, you pay $100K to expand your connections for professional and social connections.
Overall, do we maintain a mystical devotion to it? Mystical because we send our kids into a system that we hope will make them into something new, with little evidence that it will. Now is the time we need to think and rethink college.
But seriously….What is college?