I’ve come across this analogy that I think works well:
Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym.
If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you. The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.
If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas.
Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), because I actually want to learn.
There are many college students for whom none of these tests would pass. They would not attend if there was no diploma, they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class.
What made us think these students were ever interested in learning in the first place? Instead, it seems more likely that they just want a degree because they believe that a degree will give them an advantage in the job market. Many people will never use the information that they supposedly learn in college, and they're aware of this when they enroll.
Personally, the fact that they can now get a degree with even less wasted effort than before doesn't bother me one bit. People who want to learn still have every opportunity to.
Further, if a student can get a diploma without work, then the diploma does not have value anymore. If diplomas are no longer valuable, the signal they provide in the labor market will turn into noise.
If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire an employee?
I think this story will become true, and society will radically shift into one where critical thinking skills will actually be the only skills employers look for in employees, since the grunt work can be automated.
What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
In a medieval guild, to be admitted as a master, an apprentice had to create a chef d'oevre, or masterpiece, so called for this reason.
In the computer engineering industry, you increasingly have to demonstrate the same: either as a part of your prior work for hire, or a side project, or a contribution to something open-source.
A diploma is still a useful signal, but not sufficient, except maybe for very junior positions straight from college. These are exactly the positions most under pressure by the automation.
I think software developers might be somewhat of an outlier. Industry wants good programmers but universities teach computer science which really should be called "computation science". Much of what we learn in university will hardly ever be used while many practical skills are at best learned as a side effect. Dijkstra favorite said that computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes.
So degrees have been a weak signal for a long time. Several of the best developers I've worked with had no CS degree at all. As a result we have interview processes that are baffling to people from other industries. Imagine a surgeon having to do interview surgery, or an accountant having to solve accounting puzzles. AFAIK we are very unusual in this regard and I think it's because degrees are such a weak indicator and the same is true for certificates in our industry.
> while many practical skills are at best learned as a side effect.
I strongly disagree, that’s the intent not a side effect.
It’s IMO a common misconception that early algorithm classes are just designed around learning algorithms. Instead basic algorithms are the simplest thing to turn abstract requirements into complex code. The overwhelming majority of what students learn are the actual tools of programming, debugging, etc while using the training wheels of a problem already broken up into bite sized steps.
Ramping up the complexity is then more about learning tradeoffs and refining those skills than writing an ever more efficient sorting algorithm or whatnot.
That is true, in the sense that the 100/200 level classes are covering programming basics in addition to whatever algorithmic theory is being presented. But beyond that that, programs really seem to differ pretty strongly on applied projects and software engineering practices (basic stuff like source control) and more theoretical/mathematical concepts. One type of capstone style class commonly seen is compiler design. To a certain extent, a good school will teach you how to learn, and give you enough of a background, class projects, internships, electives with applied options, that you get a well rounded education and can quickly ramp up in a more typical software organization after graduation. But as someone who has hired many new grads over the years, it always surprises me what sort of gaps exist. It rarely is about programming basics, and almost always about "software engineering" as a discipline.
My experience is graduates of schools focused on the more practical aspects tend to make better Jr developers on day one but then stagnate. Meanwhile graduates of the more theoretical programs people pick up those same practical skills on the job leaving them better prepared for more demanding assignments.
This then feeds into the common preference for CS degrees even if they may not actually be the best fit for the specific role.
Interesting. I did my undergraduate in Germany and my graduate in the US, so my experience might be unusual here and different from what you get in the US. My undergraduate algorithms classes in Germany and my advanced algorithms classes in the US involved zero actual coding. It was all pseudocode as you'd find in the Knuth books or in Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest.
And they were supported because they were useful labor. Even an unskilled, brand-new apprentice could pump the bellows, sweep the forge, haul wood and water, deliver messages. If it frees up the master to produce more valuable output, that’s a win-win. Then they can grow into increasingly valuable tasks as they gain awareness and skill.
IMO one of the big problems is that we’ve gone too far with the assumption that learners can’t be valuable until after they’re done learning. Partly a cultural shift around the role of children and partly the reality that knowledge work doesn’t require much unskilled labor compared to physical industries.
I was somewhat aware that in medieval period most started out as an apprentice in mid teens. Essentially work slaves in the house of a master. Then after a decade or so of toiling and gaining the skill they would go on to become individual business owners.
But I wasn’t aware about the master peace. Thank you for sharing that!
By the time one is early/mid 20s they would be nearing master level in skill. Would have faced the real world for 7-8 years, know how the world works in terms of money, dealing with customers, and so on.
Compare that with today, by early 20s one is only getting out of college undergrad. About to start the real world job training.
Yeah, they are different domains. I don't mind options for those who want to pursue an acedemic approach compared to a practical one. But for most fields we just don't have that choice anymore. Getting hand on experience? Gotta be recruited from acedemia first.
More reason to vye for labor protections. If they realize they can't just rotate out people every 6-20 months they may actually go back to fostering talent instead of treating acedemia like a cattle farm.
Honestly, a future where diplomas are just noise and employers stop caring about them and thus young people stop wasting years of their lives "learning" something they don't care about sounds like a huge improvement.
LLM cheaters might incidentally be doing society a service.
They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done" for whatever it means at that moment, and we could potentially see more erosion in technical abilities and work quality. You don't know what you don't know, and without learning things that you don't care about, you loose the chance to expand your knowledge outside of your comfort zone.
> They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done" for whatever it means at that moment
I graduated university around the turn of the century, long before the current AI boom started, and the majority of my classmates were like that. Learning the bare minimum to escape a class isn't new especially if you're only taking that class because you have to because every adult in your life drilled into you that you'll be a homeless failure if you don't go to college and get a degree. The LLMs make that easier, but the university, if the goal wasn't just to take your tuition dollars to enrich a vast administrator class instead of cover the costs of employing the professors teaching you, could offset that with more rigorous testing or oral exams at the end of the class.
The real lesson I learned during my time in university is that the two real edges that elite universities give you (as a student) are 1) social connections to the children of the rich and leaders in the field that you can mine for recommendations and 2) a "wow" factor on your resume. You can't really get the first at a state school or community college, and you definitely can't get the second at a state school or community college, despite learning similar if not the same material in a given field of study.
It hasn't been about (just) the learning for a long time.
I don't think diplomas have mattered for decades, at least in tech. Let's not pretend anything improved with the introduction of chatbots.
Annyway, any advantage is entirely offset by having to live in a world with LLMs. I'd prefer the tradition of having to educate retarded college graduates. At least they grow into retarded adults. What are we gonna do about chatbots? You can't even educate them, let alone pinocchio them.
What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
This is already true to some extend. Not apprenticeship taking place of college, but the last couple of places I worked hiring generally happened based on: I already know this person from open source projects/working with them in a company/etc.
In certain companies, degrees were already unimportant even before LLMs because they generally do not provide a very good signal.
I might be a good thing. Colleges have become complacent and too expensive. Costs of an education have been increasing while employment opportunities decreasing for some degree categories. People have been sounding alarms for a while and colleges have not been listening. The student loan market is booming.
Now if students can shortcut the education process, they can spend less time in it and this may force colleges to reinvent themselves and actually rethink what education looks like in the new era.
It's aroind 5 years out but schools are gonna have a rude awakening as the population decrease finally catches up to them. The standards won't raise because many will simply shut down over lack of students.
The Harvards will be fine, though. But I guess that will raise the standards naturally.
I was somewhat downvoted for saying something similar recently here [1].
Four year degree is a very expensive investment in the current environment. We should push younger people to face the real world as soon as possible. Apprenticeship is indeed a great way to achieve that IMO. As a great side effect the young people won’t have to start out their careers saddled with huge debt.
> If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.
Amen.
I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.
That is how many professionals are training in many European countries, and they still want a diploma to go with it.
In many countries, regardless of how learning it was achieved, you still need a paper to prove that you actually did it.
And in countries like Germany, better keep all those job evaluations close at heart because they get asked for as part of many job interview processes, additionally have them reviewed by lawyers, as they legally can't say anything negative, there is an hidden language on how to express negativity which to the reader sound positive on first read.
Techbically even those hidden phrases arent permitted by law, and you have the right to get those phrases removed/have it be turned into a basic evaluation (just from when to when + what job)
The employers that do use those hidden phrases just hope they arent challenged/the employee doesnt notice.
Thats also why most evaluations are entirely written in the superlative.
Unfortunely they are common enough to keep lawyers and book publishing businesses going with dictionaries "evaluation => real meaning", exactly for that little help to go though it and validate its correctness.
Many employeers profit from foreigners that aren't well versed in these nuances, and have to be educated this is a thing.
An example for others not used to German work market,
There's software for that even. The input is a ranking of the employee on a bunch axis (1-5 or something) and it spits out the appropriate text. Does the reverse too.
"Missing" information is a huge red flag as well, though. If an Arbeitszeugnis only lists the dates and what the person worked on, and nothing about results or behavior, we would never invite them for an interview.
It could be that the employee left due to being on bad terms with the employer, for something at fault with the employer. I personally wouldnt take a basic one as that hard a strike.
PhDs are apprenticeships. Students perform original research under the supervision of a doctoral advisor, and submit their work to a "guild" of external reviewers (peer reviewed journals or conferences). Once the student has three peer-reviewed publications, they graduate.
"Once the student has three peer-reviewed publications, they graduate."
That's not a standard at all. You usually can't graduate without at least one peer-reviewed publication, but beyond that, as far as number of publications goes, it varies a lot from institution to institution. The biggest standard is that you complete a dissertation and defend it.
An apprentice, after five years of work, can be a master, just by practcising.
That's why the universities of Oxford and Cambridge give Master's degree to everyone that gets a Bachelor's degree after five years, without further examination or coursework (note that these are MAs only, not MRes, MPhil or MBA degrees, which typically require 1-2 years of studies, exams and theses).
Historically, the academic Master was seen as equivalent to a Master in a craft (e.g. philosophy <=> carpentry).
I hire people now and where they went to school means little to me. The first priority is “can they do the work?” which is a niche programming. After that is established, I barely take note of school.
I don’t personally count a CS degree as an indication the person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has good work ethic.
Problem is you most likely don’t have that big operation.
For company I work for we hire 1 dev per year and I believe last year we did not even hire a single person.
So I do have time to check up the candidate do 3 rounds each 1 hr so that candidates can see what company are we and what person is the candidate. We also are small company so we don’t get that many applicants anyway.
I cannot imagine how it goes when someone needs to hire 20 devs in one quarter. Especially for a company that is any way known and they can get 1000CVs for a single position. They need to filter somehow.
You could just as easily filter by having a github repo. It doesn't even need to be active or very full. Hell, that would also filter out a lot of people with college degrees! Might even save you time.
In my experience, only very large and bureaucratic institutions (governments, schools) really demand degrees and certifications.
HR seems a lot like real estate appraisal as~in appraisers know nothing about construction.
One could in theory establish the value of a thing or person by comparing it with similar things but if everyone does that the process becomes senseless.
If a working car is worth 5000, the same car from the same year with a defect that costs 1000 to fix should be worth 4000. If the repair costs 6000 there is no car.
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.
No, it has value because it gatekeeps class mobility. Degrees haven't signified learning or problem solving longer than I've been alive. The attitude is that if you pay for an education, you're entitled to a degree. The education aspect is optional.
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.
No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the starting point for your first salary and then for every salary negotiation moving forward.
As someone who did not go to university, but has the same knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of paper would have opened so many doors and made life so much easier. It took me 15 years to get a salary, that people get with the piece of paper after graduating. And not because it took me 15 years to reach that level of knowledge. I had that by the time the other graduated.
I had a friend who always cheated in school, and now he works for a big car company and earned a fuck ton of money.
Life is unfair and companies only care about the paper your diploma is printed on. If students would ask me for advice, I would tell them to cheat whenever possible.
You forgot one big reward with your approach. You are not 200k in debt which will take that kid with diploma to get that piece of paper. You are debt free.
I am not arguing on the merit of having a diploma is a bad thing - the colleges these days have turned their backs on the people as well.
Average $100k to get a piece of paper (LLMs are not the issue here the useless degrees that the colleges offer). Invest that $100k at an average 15% return - it becomes a lot of money 25 years from now.
Or get a piece of paper (if your major is useless) and pay the banks 100k + interest.
That’s a very American point of view though. In many European countries people don’t build up such big debts. I’m from NL and the upper bound among my friends was something like 50,000, but most people had much lower debts between 0 and 20,000. (Yay for lower enrollment fees + part of the money is given as a gift).
And even if you ramped up a 50k debt, it’s a government loan where the interest rates are low, your monthly pay off is based on your salary, and if you are not able to pay the debt within a certain period, it’s wiped away.
In reality, holding a piece of paper has nothing in common with relevant ability. Some graduates will exit university as competent people, some won't.
This isn't exactly news, or even a recent phenomenon. My peers who finished their CS degree circa 2004 ish were a broad mix of utter idiots who shouldn't get a job in that field, or damn sharp (if green) technically-minded people, or somewhere in between.
The industry will sort them out; the ones that can, do, the ones that can't, will do something else of use, or find another job.
There is a correlation, that is all you need for it to be valuable. Remove the correlation and value isn't there any more, see US masters in computer science for example that one doesn't correlate with skill so it isn't valued, but the bachelor is. In countries where a masters is correlated with skill they are values though.
I really think that they are used because it is easiest and cheapest fully legal filter. When you have significant number of candidates any filter that comes first to mind is selected. Degree is one such one that won't ever legally bite you.
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.
No. That's how it should be, but the reality looks different: it has value because it shows that someone spent 3+ years doing what they were told to do, enduring all the absurdities they were subjected to in the meantime. Whatever means they used to cheat don't matter, since they still worked on what someone told them to and produced results satisfying the expectations.
There are, perhaps, institutions where learning and problem-solving are seen as the most important while "following orders" and "staying in line" are deemphasized. For the students of all the others, putting up with an utterly absurd environment is often one of the biggest barriers to learning. Yet, it's a requirement without fulfilling which you can forget about graduating. Hence my conclusion: the diploma from most learning institutions certifies you as a good corporate drone - and that's enough of a signal in many situations, so why bother trying to fix it?
This is a very bold statement, you should consider substantiating it at least a little, maybe give just one example on what those absurdities collee students have to endure are, that prove they're good corporate drones?
From what I remember it was 4 years of learning stuff I signed up to learn, occasionally being quizzed on said stuff, and then they gave me a paper that claims I know the stuff.
You might live in another country where the situation is different, or maybe my experiences are outdated (20 years later, they might be). What I remember is unfairness and corruption, feudal-like relationships, tons of wasted time on things I didn't sign up for and things I already knew but couldn't say I know for fear of retaliation. I was still better than people going to private institutions: on top of all that, they were also extorted for money at every turn. ...thinking about it, yeah, I really hope my experience is outdated.
I'm not saying a college CAN'T provide an education, but it IS a little ridiculous you can't just test pass four years of regurgitating textbooks. Ideally for a fraction of the cost.
And that won't be their problem, they'll be long gone having achieved what they wanted when they were cheating. It is a societal problem or institutional and industry problem. If the market and these universities want these degrees to mean anything as signaling mechanism they must stop these students from cheating some way somehow...the students are never going to stop themselves.
Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.
I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.
The course I'm interested in gets kinda hard, and my "just pull up an LLM" muscle is very, very strong, (and besides, I'm not used to struggling! and why should I get used to it in the classes i like?! I can't afford a C in my major!) so ... I use LLMs on my "I'm interested in it" class too and... we're back to the original argument.
Most people don't go to college to learn for the sake of learning – that would be a very expensive luxury. They go for the opportunities that it opens up. The learning itself helps with that, but so does being able to prove that they've learned it. That what the diploma is meant to be for.
> Similarly, vocational programs or apprenticeships are not a formal education either.
They are in some countries, you get at the vocational programs or apprenticeships alongside the highschool, and in the end you might get the opportunity to apply to the university or just carry on with your job.
That is how I did mine in the 1990's Portuguese education system, and how I was already coding and understanding the big boys computer world at 16y.
But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is basically useless. Whether you want to play in an orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or not - they want to hear you perform.
I won't say there are exactly zero self-taught professionals in classical music because I don't know for sure. But I will say I've never heard of one. If they exist at all they're exceptionally rare.
The music industry is built on the back of people with music degrees. They don't get the name recognition of headliners. But song writers, arrangers, and session musicians are all very likely to have formal training in theory and maybe performance.
Producers and engineers less so. Those are more of a track record who-you've-worked-with occupation.
All industries are built on the backs of truly educated and passionate talent. Those people often don't reap the fruit they help sow to everyone else that makes billions, trillion off them.
Music is no different from software in thst regard.
Not only is that not true at all. There are many other jobs you can land other than performing with a formal music degree.
Of course with the right experience you might get away with not getting that formal education but you open so many doors by going through school and getting the "useless" piece of paper.
Case in point: Rachel “Raygun” Gunn. She had all the credentials in the world but single-handedly became the reason break dancing is no longer in the Olympics.
Slight overstatement… break dancing was one of the locally picked sports and the next Olympics had already selected different sports before she performed…
But she is a good example of degrees not equaling skill
It should also be noted that she doesn't have a degree in "performing," as far as I'm aware, she has a degree in "studying the culture" of break dancing. So, we (or at least any of us who haven't read her work) don't actually know if she's good at what her degree is in. We just know that she's not good at performing.
I don't think that's a good comparison. I went college to learn and was also relieved occasionally when professors canceled class and still had to force myself to study. I'm sure plenty of your piano teachers students don't enjoy practicing the same notes over and over but do so because they want to know how to play piano.
Absolutely. Also, the level of cheating in college, even pre-AI is often overlooked in these articles.
For the exact reasons you state, pre-AI homework was often copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.
AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students are only in it for the diploma.
If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a classmate or previous grad.
And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I still spend time learning about the subjects of my major and minor in my free time, but this would have described me pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.
In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.
There are jobs that turns you down if you don't have that diploma. No amount of real world experience will get you past that bar. If it's not there, they wont even look at the rest of your application.
I think several orthogonal concepts are touched in this.
1. Students given bad incentives to be thrown into a system with a completely different purpose than their main goal. Then those jobs turning face to suddenly say "schools teach you nothing" and even refuse to hire the newest generation.
2. Students in general not being stimulated by primary school and given direction and vision on what to do in life. Simply being pushed by parents to "be successful".
3. The crippling reality as of late that a job doesn't even guarantee keeling a roof over your head anymore. Leading to discouragement to even bother trying.
4. Connected to #2, the decline of various apprenticeships, internships (which are now a college recruiting pipeline), and other ways to invest in employees. Even if they complain about new grad output, they are still content outsourcing such training instead of investing in their employees for a career.
There's a lot of systems failing which can arguably cause an entire collapse in the country. Then no one will get an opportunity to properly learn.
Sure, if we can agree that there exist courses for which we can agree that using an LLM to pass is a reasonable thing to do, would we also not agree that the course should be nuked from orbit?
This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts. (/s)
Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.
You can get a BMus in Piano Performance, which is a standard music degree with a piano performance specialisation. It's not a special thing of its own kind, and it's normal for performers in music college to specialise in one instrument, usually with a second as an elective.
Being able to play moderately hard pieces from dots and sight-reading are the entry level requirement. It's taken for granted you can already do that.
The degree part means learning music history, theory, and performance styles, working on performance projects, solo and with other musicians.
The analogy with ChatGPT is that it's taking over the entry-level part of the process. You can't expect to get onto a music degree if you only know how to prompt ChatGPT to produce a MIDI file for your entrance exam.
And in CS, you can't produce good code if you barely know what a server is.
It's all very Dunning Kruger. If you use an LLM to produce course work to get your piece of paper at the end, you don't even know what prompts you should use to do an unfamiliar job, never mind having the skills to do it yourself.
Yes they did actually say that. They go into the process of accreditation that would result in a person or institute being able to give a degree "in piano"
The point of education isn't to actually learn though. It's to receive the credential.
This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the university degree is yet another part of the machine that they will become a cog in.
What should be alarming to everyone is that these students will graduate without having learned anything and then go into the workplace where they will continue to not use their atrophied critical thinking skills, to simply do yet more, as a cog in the machine.
This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted.
I would also say some of the attitude shift is also contradictory. The amount of people I interact with who have a lot of bad things to say about the education who tell me universities should focus on education in a general meanwhile also say that schools to should focus on student getting jobs. Probably one that has been heard before, something along the lines of, "why don't high schools teach plumbers courses." I mean they can. While also, "colleges are too focused on checking the boxes so students can get jobs."
It's not inherently contradictory to hold both positions, if your overarching position is that the schools are in a weird in-between state that serves neither well. My time in school was marked with both forms of frustration.
I wanted to learn a new language and I wanted to take some history courses that covered regions and eras not well covered in my high school courses. But despite my university having a significant "elective" component to my degree path, none of those courses were on the list of allowed electives for my degree. So in this case, the university was failing at a focus on education by hindering my ability to branch out away from my core studies and requiring that I take "electives" that were more closely associated with the imagined career path my degree would provide.
On the flip side, the "core" courses for my degree were bogged down in academic minutia and exercises that bore only the most surface level resemblance to the things I've done in my actual career. Often the taught material was out of date relative to the state of the industry. Other times the material was presented with philosophical reasons for learning the material, but with no practical application backing it to help make that philosophy complete. And very little material (if any) covered the usage of tools of the industry. In this case, we're failing the goal of setting people up for their careers by not teaching the practical applications of the knowledge. And to be clear this isn't just a "learning examples are by necessity simplified examples" problem. I later went back to school at a local community college for different material and from day one those courses were more relevant and more up to date. They provided material that was immediately useful in real world applications of the underlying knowledge. And I think some of that was because many of the courses for that community college were taught by industry veterans, either part time or as a "retirement" gig.
In short, my experience at a large university was indeed a series of boxes that were to be checked, ostensively to provide me a "well rounded" education, but practically all narrowly focused on getting me a job in the field. Yet the boxes also failed at being relevant enough to the state of the industry to actually give me a foundation to work from when starting my career.
Where I am at, you can learn a skill in high school either via elective or a career technical track like working on airplanes, HVAC, construction, etc. Back in the 90s, I took automotive electives because I liked to work on cars back then. It would prepare you to work at a small automotive shop or as a hobby. I realized that it didn't make that much money so switched to computers.
And by my school years in the 00's those programs were slashed across the nation thanks to Bush. They just kept putting down the blue collar work and encouraged everyone to go to college. Right as they make student loans unbankruptale.
There’s an argument that treating students as “customers” has led to all kinds of bad outcomes. One example is it creates an incentive to invest in all kinds of fancy infrastructure (fancy halls/dorms and even lazy rivers) because that is how they attract more “customers” but this ultimately becomes a huge driver of educational costs. The same can be said for watered down courses etc.
And there were fewer students going to university and so you had a higher proportion of people doing it for the love of learning. It was easier to get a job without a degree. It's not just a cultural shift, it's a change of supply and demand.
Notably, the late 70’s and early 80’s is when large scale social changes started to happen due to high inflation and major problems in the US economy. Also a lot of social unrest, and a pretty unhinged president (Tricky Dick).
The same issues are seen in other countries. It's not specific to US presidents or policy. The insistence on maximizing university attendance was a widespread idea coming out of the left, e.g. in Britain it was heavily pushed by Tony Blair. The Blair government also raised tuition fees considerably.
The stated rationale at the time was that degree holders earn more, so if everyone gets a degree, everyone will earn more. I am doubtful that was the true rationale but it's how the policy was sold to people.
Arguably the cause of the cultural shift is economic. Wages began stagnating in the early 1970s, which caused increased demand for diplomas as a way to increase wages. This is most striking in the number of students seeking law degrees, which shoots off at around the same time.
Yeah because in the 60s you could support a wife and 4 kids, buy a house and 2 cars, without a high school diploma, all before turning 25. There was no reason to go to college unless you were interested in learning.
These days you need a college degree just to afford a 1 bedroom apartment by the time you are 40.
We (America) made university educations super expensive. Causality is complicated, but it probably started as an effort to destroy the anti-war movement in the 70's.
"Most financial experts attribute he sudden increases that started in the 1970s with an influx of federal funding designed to make college more affordable."
Expensive things can be affordable. A house is expensive, but with stable employment and a bank loan you can afford it.
When we're talking about college costs, public schools are really the only institutions that matter. The Ivies (or even Ivy+) are a rounding error compared to the big midwestern land-grant universities and the UC and Cal State systems.
This coincides with federal funding programs, but student loans are famously not dischargeable, which makes them more instruments of social control than conventional financial vehicles.
> Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted.
Yeah, that's when the great "push for education" came, as well as neoliberalism which preached continuous hustling and individuality. And in the 90s, the ADA
and other anti discrimination laws hit, and requiring a college degree was and still is a very useful pre-screening filter for HR to continue discrimination.
It's also as I recall when tuition and student costs started to spike in the US which is probably more directly related than some "philosophical" change in the zeitgeist[0]. When students and parents start racking up debt like this, you become very interested in the fastest way to pay it back.
For me the impact of the university administrators as they chased higher endowments for more buildings with naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with direct hires that did not directly contribute to the faculty mission did more to alter the university experience than anything else.
Me and most of my peers in college had the choice between two courses. Course A was interesting, yet vastly more challenging and therefore time consuming, with the additional downside of lower grade expectation. Course B was boring, a gentle breeze in comparison, yet with an almost guaranteed perfect grade.
Imagine which course most students choose?
Even if a student wants to take on the more interesting course, incentives matter, and the incentive is: better grades qualify for better compensated positions and prestigious degrees. Only students who didn't care about this or were confident enough in their ability did choose Course A. In the end, barely a handful of students out of hundreds went with A.
Well, the credentials defintely help to GET the first job. As a cog in the machine though you are most often valued for skills more than for credentials, at least in the U.S.
> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.
A decent amount of my professors don't know the answers because they bought the course, test questions, and lectures from Cengage. During exam review, they just regurgitate the answer justification that Cengage provided. During the lectures, they struggle to explain certain concepts since they didn't make the slides.
Professors automate themselves out of the teaching process and are upset when students automate themselves out of the learning process.
I can tell when the faculty views teaching as a checkbox that they officially have to devote 40% of their time to. I can tell when we are given busywork to waste our time instead of something challenging.
To use your analogy, I'm being told to move 1000 plush reproductions of barbells from Point A to B by hand because accreditation wants to see students "working out" and the school doesn't want high failure rates.
We are all pulling out the forklift. Some of us are happy because we don't have to work as hard. Others are using the forklift so we can get in a real workout at home, as school is not a good use of our time. Either way, none of us see value moving paperweights all day.
edit:
My favourite course during my Computer Engineering degree was Science Fiction because that professor graded us on substance instead of form. It was considered a hard class because one would get good marks on the essays by focusing on building substantive points instead of strict adherence to the form of a five-paragraph hamburger essay.
The call to action is to make courses harder and stop giving students plush barbells.
For example, University of Toronto Engineering Science (hardest program in Canada) gives first-year students a "vibe coding" lab in which students learn how to solve a problem that AI cannot.
There are many issues here. The lack of incentives is probably the most important one. For new professors (in research universities), good teaching is usually just a good thing to have, but it is not a deciding factor for their tenure. When they get their tenure, they probably have enough students, and they need to work hard to apply for funding and keep the students paid. Administrators care most about ranking, and teaching isn't really evaluated in the ranking. They just push the professors to do more research and apply for more funding.
It is also hard to evaluate university teaching because there are no benchmarks for that (compared with high school, for example), and it is hard to judge if teaching is good from student feedback. You can only know if someone fucked up or did really well, which are outliers.
There are other issues as well. Professor IMO is a ridiculous job, you are supposed to be an expert in the field, be a researcher, be a manager, be a teacher, be a salesman, all at the same time. There are people who can excel in all these, but these are probably just outliers. It doesn't help when PhD training doesn't train you to be a proper manager and teacher. While there are some teaching training, I think we are not really held to a high enough standard. E.g. One can pass the teaching course if they just show up and spend some time, even though their teaching is horrible.
These projections about bad professor experience is exactly why colleges became so hyperconpetitive. The difference between a competitive (and not even exclusive level like Ivies) and a "semi-competitive" is night and day in terms of rigor, staff talent, and overall environment.
But sure, you're always going to find a few meh or bad professors. And they will stick out as much ad thr great professors
The fatal flaw here is that an AI is more like asking a politician. Except maybe it won't gaslight you. It often has no idea what it's talking about, and pushing back may even have it change it's tune.
>And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)
Society makes people do a lot of things they don't want. I wonder if we're going to hit a breaking point this generation.
Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to a gym where you're told the goal is to be healthy and strong, but they can't really stop you from using a forklift, and jobs and compensation are given out according to how much you lifted irrespective of forklift use.
> If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you.
Does the use of a quantifiable metric like a GPA not exacerbate this? In a world where people take a GPA seriously, you'd have to be irrational to not consider cheating a viable option.
You could say the same about credit score and dating apps. These institutions assist the most predatory and harm the most vulnerable.
Why do some countries cheat in the Olympics? Because it is no longer a contest of human achievement, it's just about the medals as a symbol of national glory. Of course: once all countries are doping, the medals will become meaningless. College degrees will suffer the same fate if everyone cheats to get them.
Testing doesn’t work for everything, especially for dissertations, publications, research etc. That being said I’m wholeheartedly in favor of using extensive in class testing when applicable.
It works for enough that 99% of cheaters are weeded out. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough".
Also, always keep in mind the most underrated kind of cheater: the clearly smart kid who cheats to go from an A- to an A. That level of student can't be "caught" with tests because by all accounts they already know and have even mastered the material. The pressure at that level of competitiveness simply requires zero room for doubt. Not really what the article is about, but some food for thought.
Diversity in evaluation methodology is a reliable way for many subject. Even short, minimal handwritten exams would help to assess student understanding at a few key checkpoints and should should be reintroduced.
> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.
I remember illustrating a point to a class by posing a question and then calling on a student I figured wasn't smart enough to answer correctly so that everyone could see her make the mistake.
The tragedy is not that some students are going to college to get a diploma while learning as little as possible. It is that the boards of many private universities see their students' cash as more important than their education, and force the professors to pass everybody who went to higher education to buy a diploma.
This has a negative feedback loop where universities have to lower standards to bring dumber and lazier students to compete with other diploma mills.
I use chatgpt in a socratic way from time to time because I don't want answers I want the joy of thinking and learning. I heard there were efforts to make educational LLMs (whatever that means). Maybe it will help multiply teachers leverage so that more kids get inspired without having the teacher spend 1-on-1 time with them.. I don't know.
I love this analogy because it's also not a waste of time to learn how to use a forklift!
But the gym isn't the best place to engage in forklift training. And you engage in forklift training at the gym, expect to learn how to use a forklift to lift gym weights. Don't expect to also get the benefits that the gym is designed to impart.
I think LLMs, if used correctly, can be useful for BOTH the credentialing and the human resource development (*cough*)
Essentially, since they are a summary of "the" state of knowledge, the teacher should be able to ask them to put a number on how novel a piece of text is.
Once LLMs are able to evaluate, independently, the soundness of an argument... (Hopefully, this will be achieved AFTER $5 H100s reach the average consumer)
I think we have to hold off a bit on the whole thing here.
Look, we have no idea what the feedback is like that this grad student gives, what the class sizes are like, what the cadence is, what the grade percentages are, etc. All we know is that Clayton Ramsey is a grad student at Rice in the robotics department and that he wrote a hot take here.
For me, the most important thing is if this grader is bothering to really grade at all. I think we've all had a harried grad student just dash off a few red lines on the week one HW about a week before the final exam. That's not a 2 way street, and if the feedback isn't as in-depth as he wants the work to be, well, he shouldn't be surprised. He can't be expecting students to put in the time unilaterally. But, we don't know any of that really.
Personally, I think that before the decade is out, we're not going to be talking about this at all. Because the students will be adept enough at using the LLMs to make it look like their own writing anyways. This is a problem that experience will solve for them.
And also, I think that the days of the massive lectures and essays are pretty much cooked. That 'cheap' model of education can't survive this LLM revolution. We obviously have to change what the heck higher education is trying to do.
My take is that we're going to go to smaller class sizes like those at St. John's or Oxbridge. Under 10 people, you have to have done the reading or look like a fool, all with a PhD in the subject as a guide/teacher. Large classes weren't cutting it for decades (ask any Frat about their test banks), and now the veil is just ripped off.
We will never reduce all class sizes to under 10 people. Large R1 schools are not going to reduce their number of students by a factor of 10 or increase their hiring by a factor of 10.
Dangers of Intelligence and Other Scientific Essays by Asimov predicted all this hullabaloo quite a while ago.
So, yeah, seems like evidence to support your position.
Welcome to the party. :)
> Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym.
I'm sure the time has come for college students to master using LLMs. It's just as important as grammar or basic math now. The software I build (and the entire tech industry) automates huge swaths of business processes with AI. Students need to be able to understand, work with, and manage swarms of AI agents doing work.
To stick to the analogy:
I need skilled forklift drivers, not big buff workers like I used to.
But the thing you are missing is that one needs a solid foundation of knowledge of the actual work to be able to manage it well.
Someone with years of coding experience is going to be able to laser guide an AI agent to the answer/result than someone who has muddled their way through comp sci 101 using an AI chatbot.
No one is saying they don't need a solid foundation of knowledge. The knowledge needed is different. What we're seeing now is lot like teaching people to care for a horse even though the automobile is now the dominant form of transportation
If you need forkloft drivers, don't recruit at the gym and be mad no one is forklift certified there.
This isn't even an opinion on LLMs, it's recruiting 101. You're free to convince the gym to train forklift drivers, but don't be surprised when you're laughed out the room.
It's the other way around... people will happily pay to be "forklift driver certified" and a piece of paper that gets them a bit higher in the hiring line. Especially when they'll pay way more for that than ethereal "thinking skills" that they can't even reason why they'd need that in the first place
If you took a forklift to the gym, you'd come out of the experience not only very good at "lifting weights", but having learned a whole lot more about the nature and physics of weightlifting from a very different angle.
Sure, you should lift them yourself too. But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. It's a very different but powerful educational experience.
> But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover.
If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should be worried about accuracy, up to date information, opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The tool you use doesn't change these factors.
No but it increases the speed and ease at which you can check any of those - making a lot of those steps practical when they were a slog before. If people aren't double-checking LLM claims against sources then they were never on guard for those without an LLM either.
Besides, those are incredibly short-term concerns. Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.
Does it? You google a query, get results, compare a few alternative results. You ask a prompt and what? Compare outputs to each other? Or just defer back to googling for alternative sources.
Firstly, these prompts tend to be shockingly close in behavior. Secondly, Google tends to rank reputable or self curated sites which have some accountability. It can be wrong but you know thr big news sites tend to at least defer to interviews to back up facts. Wikipedia has an overly strict process to prevent blatant, source less information.
There's room for error, but there's at least more accountability compared to what an LLM is going through.
> Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.
Lastly, prompts are still treated as black boxes, which is a whole other issue. For the above reasons I still would simply defer to human curated resources. That's what LLMs are doing anyway without transparency.
People want to give up transparency for speed? It seems completely counter to hacker culture.
Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym.
If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you. The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.