College is extraordinarily expensive and becoming less useful, and those who insist otherwise are working from a model of the labor market that stopped describing reality sometime in the 1990s. Four-year courses at private institutions often cost more than $70,000 a year, and it should come as no surprise that student debt has tipped over $1 trillion .
This situation is ridiculous for a film student, but it is also ridiculous for a computer science graduate whose program could not keep pace with the industry it was preparing him for – and who learned more in four months on GitHub and dicking around on X and Repl.it than in four years of lectures.
It’s sad, but how many people were attending school for “the life of the mind” to begin with? The work is and has been purposeless for most of the people doing it for decades, and they know it, and the professors surely know it, and the institutions have responded by pretending otherwise. When an assignment has no purpose, copying the answer from a machine is not a moral failure, at least from my vantage point. It’s more efficient than googling it, or asking the kid next to you, or buying the answer.
This is the context in which AI entered universities. Techno-optimists like to believe that AI will democratize learning, that anyone with a laptop and a chatbot will have access to an Oxford lecture or Princeton seminar, and that the university will dissolve into a distributed global classroom. This is, of course, the naiveté people had about the internet in 1995. Nobody is going to watch those lectures because nobody wants to and, more saliently, most people don’t need to.
The premise that everyone wants and is owed a Princeton seminar is itself a fiction. An educated, literate public is a fiction. Most of human history, including the history that produced most of the literature and music and political theory we still draw on, took place in societies where the deep reading of difficult texts was the practice of a small, privileged minority. The first novels were written for an audience that, by our standards, barely existed.
In a perfect world, the world I hope for for my children, the university will get smaller, weirder, more expensive and – if can you excuse my elitism – probably much better. It will look more like Oxford in 1890 than Stanford in 2025. In 1890, universities such as Oxford and Harvard had fewer than 3,000 enrolled students. In those days, undergraduates spent a few years studying Greek and Latin philology followed by Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Kant, Hegel, Hume, and Mill. They read an essay aloud once a week to their tutor and defended it in conversation. That model is what the university will rediscover, by necessity, over the next decade – that is, the life of the mind. The life of the mind that so few of us really need, or frankly want access to. (Embarrassingly, I include myself in this.)
The modern American university sells credentials: signaling to employers that you were smart and conscientious enough to get in and to finish. It sells networks: the friends you make and the alumni you can email. And it also sells, in some attenuated form, “education.”
The first of these is the one where the damage is already visible and has been for quite some time. The job market is in shambles – earning a college degree is not a key to employment at all, let alone gainful employment. And the monopoly elite universities held on ambitious people meeting ambitious people for most of the 20th century is fragmented. There are group chats, hackathons, residencies, fellowships and a half-dozen new institutions run by people who, in 1947, would have had to attend Harvard or Yale for the same opportunities.
Then there’s the education. People “feel” less educated today than they did 40 years ago, and the standard explanation – that we’ve slipped into some unprecedented cultural decline – is only partially right. First, we are delusional about how educated anyone has ever been. The average college graduate in 1986 had not, in fact, internalized the western canon. Second, most people don’t actually want a college education. They want the credentials and the network, at most.
I don’t think it’s wrong to want that life, to be perfectly clear. It’s just that it doesn’t make sense for most people.
My children will grow up using computers, including AI, the way I grew up using the internet
But what kind of school in the 2020s sets a child up to be the sort of person who wants that life, or at any rate has a mind capable of choosing it? I have come around, somewhat to my own surprise, to looking at screen-free models. Schools such as Waldorf (though I have my reservations), are built around producing children who can sit with one thing at length – who learn about life more holistically. Or a school that treats the child as a whole person, excuse the cliché, with handwriting and movement and music and nature built into the curriculum.
This is not to say I’ve jumped on the bandwagon of moral panic around screens. My children are going to grow up using computers, including AI, the way I grew up using the internet and my parents grew up alongside the first home computers. The question is not whether they will encounter the technology but what kind of minds they will bring to it when they do.
What I object to is not the use of technology in childhood, but the way technology is currently used in schools, which is, yes, dystopian. Gen Zers are not particularly tech-literate. They were raised on technology and learned almost nothing about it, because what they were given was YouTube in the classroom and a Chromebook with a locked-down browser, which is not edtech in any meaningful sense.
The kind of education I want for my children resembles the old high school auto-shop class, the one that taught kids how cars worked. Not how to drive them, but how the engines and transmissions and brakes fitted together, so that opening the hood revealed something other than a wall of plastic. I am in the lucky position of having a family that can teach my kids most of that at home. What I want from a school is something else. I want a place that will take care of the rest of them and builds the kind of disposition they’ll need to do anything worthwhile – including, eventually, doing anything worthwhile with technology.
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