If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation.

If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem even worse.

These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

The author mentions the notion of a "permanent underclass." What that looks like relative to your comment is this: more enterprising students (usually, but not always, from privileged upbringings) will learn how to develop the restraint to use AI as an assistant and a learning aid, while the vast majority use AI as an easy button.

Except it's actually worse than that because the big AI providers with billions on the line are actively encouraging their users to use their services as easy buttons. If they weren't, Googlebook wouldn't have a Magic Cursor/Clippy as a Service feature that suggests using Gemini when you jiggle your cursor over something, and Google Docs wouldn't insert a "Write for me?" CTA when you stop typing.

>If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost

It's been a lost battle for decades, then.

What made University of California Santa Cruz so attractive to undergraduates in the 70s was no grading of performance and engagement but instead written evaluations. I loved being able to concentrate on great subjects with the help of often excellent teachers and TAs. Swathmore is noted for this culture too.

The purpose of the university has always been certification.

“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

- Will Hunting

For US undergrad, with all the resources available online, going to university just for education doesn't justify the high tuition. Research is mostly limited to graduate school anyways.

Is learning something while you plagiarising someone’s work to submit as your own coursework should also be an excuse to allow plagiarism?

This particular battle for learning was lost a long time ago. If university stopped providing an earnings boost from attending, 90% of students would quit tomorrow.

It doesn’t help that a lot of desirable fields are comically out of date at the academic instructional level anyway.

Would you honestly tell an aspiring software engineer that your typical computer science degree will teach them much about wielding computers in a cutting edge way?

If I were to list the top 5 things I got from university, knowledge wouldn’t make the cut and were I to do it again, I would certainly attend less class.

More and more colleges are saying they will cancel your degrees if they retroactively detect AI cheating. This will be hysterical.

AI isn't the issue as much how AI is used. Passive use of any tech, including social media, and now AI is lazy and has poor outcomes.

Aligning AI use with the goals of all sides, and not just one side getting paid, or just one side graduating could look different.

Most people attend higher education to access opportunity to improve their lives, overwhelmingly for a career and earning.

The idea of higher education teaching "learning how to think" is perhaps a relic of the origin of some universities which didn't historically do STEM, and focused on things like liberal arts, which in turn often had the support of coming from a privileged background, or financial safety net.

STEM money and funding though, attached a lot of traditional post secondaries to do that as well.

It's perfectly acceptable to expect higher education of any kind to have you ready to grow and earn more in better suited opportunities. Not enough educational institutaions don't publish their % of students who graduate in the area that they started in, and also the % of graduates who find their next step, career wise, etc, in 6-12 months of education.

>These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

Hear, hear!

> These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

Spot on. I am teenager going to college soon and I feel like the same way about the education system (and in extension, the job market but I suppose that the job market might be more understanding probably over all of it), part of my comment was as follows.

I do feel a bit like coding/a lot of fun-ness out of life is also like this, quantified, measured, transactional (posting for social-media?) [as I wonder if I am writing this comment for hackernews karma or relevant discussion talking points..]

This feels to me the most irreversible consequence because it might be hard for the generation (myself included) to see value in non-measurable things as everything has to be measured and transactional-ized.

(...) I would like for humanity to be more nuanced and less measured but more varied (grey rather than black or white) but I feel like that there is enough noise on the internet that maybe even this ends up becoming noise and I am not sure if anyone who might benefit from reading this actually does end up reading it.

From one of my comments that I had written sometime ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559013

> These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

What other kind of culture is there? A culture of not measuring?