> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.

Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.

The service being paid for is not homework grading. Homework grading is merely one part of how the service has historically been implemented, but if changing circumstances make grading homework less useful, then not grading homework is the service provider doing their job.

> These students paid (a lot of) money for this service

The schools are providing two services to students, not one. There's one directly and the other indirectly. And those two services are sometimes at odds.

The direct service is to teach them. Skills, knowledge, perspectives, critical thinking, etc.

The indirect service is to act as a proxy for people and organizations in the world to avoid having to do a thorough examination of a person's abilities. A degree is an attestation that a student has cleared all the hurdles and accomplished something of value. The better the reputation of the institution, the more value this service is to a student.

Just because students are paying for the direct service doesn't mean they aren't also paying for the indirect one too, it's just that the reputation has been established by all the students that came before and these students will be affecting the reputation for students coming afterwards.

Regardless, because a huge chunk of the service is that attestation, it's not as simple as the customer pays so the customer should get what they want. The universities need to figure out a way to maintain the value of their attestation in the face of students who try to subvert the evaluation process and a changing world. And if homework is providing little value in that regard, some rethinking might be warranted. They could assign it and optionally grade it on request for students who want their work evaluated but make it clear that it bears no connection to the grade that leads to the degree. They could come up with some other means of evaluating whether students have worked or learned the material. They could rework the material to account for the existence of AI. Just like calculators or the internet changed the work environment to obviate previously valuable skills, today's students will be living their lives in a world where AI exists and certain previously valuable skills will not be valuable going forward. A university's job is to produce the most capable person for the environment in which they will live their life. If the old curriculum isn't doing that, the curriculum needs to be rethought. And homework might take on a different role or be significantly less important in that rethought curriculum.

Is that what the students are really paying for? Even before LLMs, some of my college classes had optional and ungraded homework. Students could show up for discussion sessions to ask questions and get help from the instructor or teaching assistants if needed, but that didn't impact their grades. That seemed to be a reasonable approach, although it might vary by subject.