Artificial intelligence has taken over the university. Students have seized on AI to get through college, using it to write papers, take notes, and do homework—along with structuring their social lives and relationships.
The ability to coast through college like never before does not bode well for students’ cognitive abilities or executive function. But there is also a great opportunity here. By making higher education maximally pointless, accelerating its uselessness to the zero point, AI could do swiftly what education reformers have failed to do for decades: overhaul higher education’s dysfunctions and open up the chance for a different, better equilibrium.
Last year, a quarter of students said they use AI to complete assignments, and a fifth use it to write complete essays. In a survey from the ancient past of 2023—the figures can only have gone up—nearly half of college students said AI had either performed a complete assignment or done the majority of the work, with the students tweaking it as necessary. It’s debatable whether AI use constitutes cheating, but half of college students themselves say it does, and the majority of college leaders say cheating has increased in the age of AI.
