The professor’s desperation in the age of AI

The introduction of AI and the demographic cliff have had a devastating impact on higher education. I think large research schools will weather the storm, but lower-tier universities like mine will shrink or disappear altogether. Already before COVIDthere was a big push for online education; Post-COVIDMany programs have moved online to survive. But with the introduction of AI, all these programs have become diploma mills. I taught online before and after AI. In the pre-AI era, online education was inferior in quality to the face-to-face experience, but that was no joke. Today, online courses are a simulacrum of education: students pretend to learn and I have to pretend to teach them.

Face-to-face teaching can still maintain a certain level of accuracy and cheating can be reduced to zero as long as all tasks are completed in the classroom. The problem is that this is not a solution to de-shitification of education – I can no longer assign work…