College Is Coming Apart
Successive, overlapping crises reveal that American higher education makes no sense.
TL;DR
- AI has created a crisis in academia, enabling students to automate schoolwork and professors to offload tasks, fundamentally altering the student-teacher relationship.
- AI has also benefited scientific research on campus, leading to administrative initiatives and new degree programs.
- The article argues that AI, the pandemic, and Trump-era funding cuts have exposed that American college is inherently incompatible with itself, being a bundle of unrelated services.
- College traditionally makes two promises: credentialing for careers and a coming-of-age experience for identity formation, which have historically coexisted but are now unbundling.
- The pandemic demonstrated that credentialing is possible without traditional campus life, and AI further separates academic output from intellectual labor and social experience.
- Funding cuts from the Trump administration highlighted the structural incompatibility between education and research, as research is prioritized for grants and prestige, often at the expense of undergraduate teaching.
- Universities are purpose-built to resist change, and administrators often adopt a 'wait and see' approach, failing to address the fundamental incompatibilities that crises have brought to the surface.
- The author believes the structural inconsistencies will not resolve, and college will continue to exist as a credential or a ritual, even as its spirit as a community for education and formation unravels.