There is a growing consensus that the education obtained by going to college could almost certainly be obtained more quickly and at less expense with tools available on the internet, but that the credentialing provided by legacy universities is what keeps the higher-education leviathan in place. Now we have AI coming along, with the capability of pretty much completing any assignment given to a student. Might AI finally cause the university cartel to lose its position of importance in this country? Perhaps.
John Carter wrote a fascinating piece at his Postcards From Barsoom substack titled ““AI Is Doing to the Universities What Gutenberg Did to Monasteries.”
First, he drew an analogy between the power, wealth, and prestige of monasteries in the middle ages with that of universities today. He wrote, “By the late middle ages monasteries were spectacularly wealthy. They were immune from taxation, and possessed vast land holdings thanks to generous donations made over the centuries by nobles looking to assure themselves a comfortable place in the afterlife.” Monasteries were also the “repositories, preservers, and disseminators” of all scholarly knowledge in the era before the printing press came along. All books were handwritten by monks until Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press in the 1450s.
Although the democratization of knowledge was thus unleashed when the Gutenberg Bible was published, the full impact kept unfolding over subsequent decades. A similar analogy might be the modern digital revolution, evolving from personal computers in the ‘80s and ‘90s to the internet growth in the ‘00s to whatever the introduction of AI will bring now.
But the monasteries retained their wealth and influence, much as modern universities have continued to retain their wealth and influence since the internet era started.
While the monasteries’ collapse was unthinkable, it was also inevitable. They had exerted enormous political power while no longer meaningfully contributing to society. It was King Henry VIII who finally decided to put an end to the monasteries’ reign of power and prestige in the 1530s. This paragraph from Mr. Carter’s piece sounds like it is written about our own Ivy League schools:
It struck many at the time as an unthinkable outrage, but in retrospect dissolving the monasteries was almost the most obvious move that Henry VIII could make. They had made themselves his political enemies, the domestic allies of his adversaries abroad: thus, by dissolving them, he crushed a hostile power centre.
Yes, dissolving a domestic hostile power center allied with foreign adversaries makes perfect sense.
They had, over the centuries, allowed their wealth and power to lead them towards luxury and corruption. The monasteries were hostile, rich, and unsympathetic, and therefore a vulnerable and attractive target for liquidation.
But most importantly, monasteries were no longer necessary, just like the entrenched four-year university structure is no longer necessary to provide a post-high school education.
Now that the world had the printing press, the monasteries’ primary reason for existence – the core justification for both their prestige and their accumulated wealth – no longer applied.They had outlived their usefulness, making them nothing more than an irritating thorn in the king’s side and a tempting concentration of loot. Henry VIII lost nothing whatsoever by dissolving them, and gained a great deal.
Our own university system is on the cusp of a similar collapse. This may seem outrageous, given the size, wealth, and massive cultural importance of universities, but at the dawn of the 16th century, the suggestion that monasteries would be dismantled across Europe within a generation would have struck everyone – even their opponents – as absurd.
Mr. Carter goes on to discuss how AI is being used so extensively now by college students that there is almost no way to determine to what extent, if any, students are learning or doing any actual studying or writing.
In 2022, ChatGPT became available. Almost overnight undergraduate students began using it to write their essays for them. Its abuse has now become essentially ubiquitous, and not only for essays: ChatGPT can write code or solve mathematical problems just as easily as it can generate reams of plausible-sounding text.
Aside from networking and “the college experience,” the main selling point of a traditional college degree has been that it serves a credentialing purpose. The degree provides prospective employers some level of attestation that the graduate was able to complete a rigorous four-year educational journey, and thus has the aptitude for professional work. (I wrote that last sentence knowing that there is an abundance of worthless degrees out there nowadays, but for STEM / accounting / architecture type fields of study, the degree has still retained its legitimacy.)
The class of 2026 will have spent their entire undergraduate career in an academic setting in which the use of AI is so ubiquitous that it is simply assumed that every student has outsourced every assignment they were given to the context window. Students assume this, professors assume this, and naturally, employers assume this.
Mr. Carter then makes the assumption that employers will soon be abandoning their reliance on universities as a credentialing service since AI will be doing all the work for students. We can hope that is the case. But what follows?
Aptitude tests in the subject being learned seem to be an obvious choice to me. In my perfect world, the whole university system collapses and we replace it with specialized academies (or conservatories) in which the students focus simply on their area of specialization for an abbreviated period, and not bothering with electives, history or whatever else fills up the current four-year degree plan. What I want in a new hire is someone who has solid math skills, understands T-accounting, can write a coherent sentence, and can pass a test proving that competence. While I would hope (s)he has an interest in science, history, and geography, those are irrelevant subjects to the career path. I also hate seeing these young graduates starting their careers while carrying a crushing debt burden from the four-year “college experience.”
The demise of the legacy university system’s role in our society is inevitable, just like the demise of the monasteries’ prominent role was inevitable. It will crumble rapidly once the collapse starts. Maybe the battle of titans between Donald Trump and Harvard University will be remembered as the beginning of the end of the university cartel.
[h/t to Mr. CBD, who sent me this article, and with whom I had a nice exchange of emails discussing the subject.]
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]