I don’t know how many American colleges and universities will exist in ten years. Probably fewer than now, but then a little right-sizing has made sense for awhile, and would likely increase rather than decrease the health of the system. The ones that keep existing, which is to say most of them, will go on doing what they’ve always done, which is to supply the external scaffolding that the vast majority of human beings require in order to learn anything they don’t already want to learn: deadlines, grades, embarrassment in front of peers, the looming presence of a teacher who will notice…. That scaffolding is the product and always has been. The lectures are incidental, the textbooks are incidental, and the personalized AI tutor will turn out to be incidental too. What is not incidental is the social and institutional pressure that compels an ordinary late adolescent to sit in a room and slog through the Federalist Papers when every fiber of their being would rather be doing anything else. Maybe we can’t make young people feel that pressure in a meaningful way anymore. Maybe. But that just means that our whole society is doomed anyway, and ChatGPT is not going to be able to fix it.
A great post by Freddie, who is one of our best cultural critics: he writes excellent sentences and has a superbly well-tuned BS detector.