Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.
Check out the "Who Wants to be a Teacher?" episodes of the Educate Podcast. I remember listening to these and shaking my head. Worse, if you go back further in the same groups older podcast, you'll hear the tragedy of students being taught to read using provenly bad methodology and teachers defending it saying they don't care that studies show that it's the wrong path. It made me genuinely very angry on behalf of kids. They're being robbed of their future.
The University of Staffordshire is a public university and is funded by the government to provide education to British people. Its mandate isn't "about cashflow".
In reality, that particular school created a private commercial subsidiary called "Staffordshire University Services". All new employees are hired by that subsidiary, which does have a mandate to generate cashflow.
Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!
This is the future guys, get used to it.
The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.
I'm now able to create a fucking shit nobody will ever care about in no time!
The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.
Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-conta...
This pattern has recurred in every era where "technology will disrupt X" -- the affluent pay to "opt out" of the ersatz tech-supported version of X, while people of fewer means have no choice but to put up with it.
But an AI tutor at that level can be more expensive than humans. An hour of deep research with a SOTA model that has hundreds of thousands of context tokens is going to be much more than $80.
> The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.
> Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
The better-off children whose parents are "spend[ing] $1000s/month" will get real teachers who are people, not fancier AIs.
I mean look at food: The lower classes are eating industrially-processed McDonald's food, the upper classes are not eating more expensive but still industrially-processed stuff from McDonald's, they're eating organic, locally grown stuff from the farmer's market (which used to be the standard for food for everyone).
Good food is refrigerated and bad food is frozen, because it's cheaper to freeze as that preserves food indefinitely. This is true even at a farmer's market.
In America we have to deal with school shootings, the latest religious group mandating the 10 commandments be put up or rainbows be taken down, irate parents mad that you failed their kid who didn't do work all semester and has severe behavioral problems no one is allowed to discipline. And now of course with AI, the students aren't doing their work, and if you call them out on it they call their parents, they sue, you get deposed and have to admit you can't 100% prove it's AI... so why bother? Who would ever want to grow up to be a teacher anymore?
So yeah, cut education, end up with AI students submitting AI papers to AI teachers. We have arrived.
The only question now is... what are we going to do about it?
There's also an issue with home life that heavily impacts educational outcome.
My own school district spent a fortune making a palace for the district admin. Meanwhile, the public schools are falling apart with the kids packed in like sardines. They've literally started adding cheap prefab trailers to the school grounds to accommodate.
I specifically mentioned: teachers paying for supplies out of their own pockets, underpaying teachers, not investing in safe teaching environments, increased litigation, demonizing the profession, increased political targeting, and lack of teacher agency in disciplining students.
Fact is when I look at my district, over the last decade we've had to do more with less, and I don't know a single teacher who can say the opposite. So it is true we are spending more overall, it's not true we aren't cutting education.
I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
The problem isn't that someone learns to prompt AI and is selling the output. The problem is that the customer thinks they're paying for human instruction and they're getting something else.
Perhaps the insights are good or bad and that's fine if you can correct later with a conversation with your doctor. But would you want a doctor trained by the same AI?
Importantly, you have no idea what part or what percentage of the conversation was accurate. How much of it was a hallucination from a chi manipulator? How much of it was based on dated research? How much of it came from a random blog post by a crazy person?
So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.
Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less?
> I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated
You guess it is a small percentage? How much do you guess this small percentage was the most important part about this disease?
Because it seems like you were taken in by the empathic answers by gpt and think it got things mostly right.
Well I am operating within a space where his doctors are setting the parameters in terms of the pathways targeted, the therapies offered, etc. And I'm asking, how does this therapy work? How is it related to X and Y? How strong is the evidence? Questions like that. I think I can throw the appropriate grain of salt on it, but yeah, some fake facts could creep in. It's stuff that will be validated, but super valuable to just synthesize the lay of the land and give me context for understanding what the docs are saying.
> Curious why do you think you not have gotten these insights that too even from textbooks no less?
Partly just how tailored and conversational ChatGPT is. It gets right at my needed level of explanation. It knows how much education I have. It remembers salient details about my son and his condition. It really explains things well. It knows so much. It's quite remarkable.
[note, i didn't read the article so am not opining on its content in any way. An AI college education sounds terrible in many ways]
I dont know why asking to not have LLMs shoved in your face in every facet of society always has to be rebutted by a subjective miracle experience akin to openai PR statements. You can have these conversations with chatgp- oh, your friend "Chat" without it being proliferated to education platforms. These concepts aren't in conflict with eachother, yet by coming to defense of their use as a mandated platform you want to brush away critique for reasons that are unknown to anybody else. Go ahead and keep talking to "Chat", maybe let the people suffering at the hands of low quality slop have their voice and chance to speak?
Which percentage?
And how important/misleading was that particular percentage?
(As an aside, personally, I precent the term 'bullshits' to 'hallucinating'; the latter is the daft Silicon Valley term.)
If you think about it, there is no source out there that is unimpeachable, and there is a need to consult many sources to get closer to the truth. triple all that for a rare disease.
1) Two-Sector Economy: In Baumol and Bowen's observations, the economy is divided into two parts:
- A Progressive Sector: Productivity grows rapidly due to technology and automation (e.g., manufacturing, data processing).
- A Stagnant Sector: Productivity grows slowly, if at all, because the service is labor-intensive (e.g., a string quartet performance, a haircut, K-12 teaching).
2) Wage Linkage: Both sectors compete for labor from the same pool of workers. As productivity gains allow wages to rise in the progressive sector, the stagnant sector must also increase its wages to attract and retain employees.
3) Divergent Cost Impact:
- In the progressive sector, the higher wages are offset by the gains in productivity. The labor cost per unit of output can remain stable or even decrease.
- In the stagnant sector, there are no corresponding productivity gains to offset the higher wages. The labor cost per unit of service must therefore increase.
4) Resulting Price Trend: The prices for services in the stagnant sector (e.g., concert tickets, college tuition, healthcare) must therefore rise and faster than the prices for goods from the progressive sector (e.g., electronics, cars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Pric...
5) A lot of European countries fund these expensive services through general taxation rather than direct user fees. In the US that's not going to fly, so cost pressure incentivizes orgs to cut corners and reduce quality and automate as much as possible.
But yes, it's happening. If I had 300 students, I couldn't do this. I'd need a bunch of TAs or some AI. Or just pure autograding, which I always hated since the person who did nothing gets the same F as the person who left out a semicolon.
And students are definitely using AI, evidenced by their stratospheric code improvements in the last 18 months.
If you can't do it better than an LLM, you have no more value than one to an employer.
In short, it's shameful to provide a paid primarily-LLM-based product. People can just make those themselves with minimal effort and zero cost.
I like to think that it has some impact, and yet I know they still use AI.
I know at the UCs, anything you do on campus is the UCs copyright. There's even little brass plaques they put in the ground when you walk on campus delineating that line.
But when these PIs are sending all the student's data up to OpenAI (presumably via the free version), then OpenAI has that data and it's copyrights.
Likely, yet another essay on the causes of the French Revolution is not ever going to be cared about. But there is a chance that something a student does in an upper division class may be worth something.
Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.
Bad lectures delivered by rushed or apathetic professors is such a death march. Learning theatre.
Distance learning was basically a dimly-lit grainy video, recorded 5 years prior, all acquired from the same provider and being shown to hundreds of classes all over the country. Instead of teachers, "tutors" (we couldn't call them teachers for legal reasons) making barely above minimum wage answering questions of dozens of classes and grading things on Moodle/Blackboard. A real teacher would be responsible for a class but they would barely see anything happening online, as they were just figureheads already busy with real classes.
I also remember some courses having almost half of the courses being long distance, so even people choosing traditional education were pushed into doing cost-saving computer shit.
The computers in the campus were obviously miserable to use, so I did everything in my power to at least make the software light enough so that people wouldn't suffer much, but in the end I hated myself for being in that industry.
This is too extreme of a generalization. There are obviously bad professors and universities that are not worth your money, but most professors at any halfway decent university are going to put a good deal of effort into teaching well. Getting a job as a professor is surprisingly competitive for the relatively low compensation because there are a lot of people who want to teach and teach well.
You can find some decent learning material on YouTube but it’s still mostly geared toward infotainment. I have a lot of bookmarks for excellent YouTube videos that I share with juniors on certain topics, but on average it’s really hard to find YouTube teaching resources that teach at the level of a university professor. When you do, it’s hard to get people to actually watch them as true teaching often involves slogging through some of the less exciting content as well. Most YouTube videos are designed to trigger “aha!” moments but only provide a surface level understanding. The type of learning where you think you understand a topic but couldn’t really explain it to someone else well or solve problems on a test because you haven’t gone through the full learning yet.
> Universities need to lean into the fact that for undergrads, they're only still good at one thing: proctured in person assessments. Also maybe community building.
You’re missing the biggest one of all: Accountability. We already saw with the MOOC trend that releasing high quality university lectures online from top universities is not enough to get many people to go through with learning the material. Getting them into a place where they know there will be a test and a grade and they have some skin in the game makes a huge difference.
Some people learned from MOOCs, but in general the attrition rate and falloff was insanely high from lecture 1 to the end.
Now, you can "grow up" and "matter" with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok etc. They are "people", you know ?
You always get the typical "because I was told to" or "I need it for my degree" answers, but ultimately students will bring up:
- they tried that already and they couldn't pay attention past a few lectures
- they didn't have anyone they could ask questions to. This is less true with the advent of AI but still, many students are very skeptical of AI (as they should be).
- they appreciate having a local community of peers to study with
- they are motivated when competing against other students for a top grade
- they are motivated by showing off their abilities to their peers
- they are looking for mentorship and guidance from someone in the field, whether that be in research directions or professional career advice.
- they are looking to build a network with peers and researchers which they can leverage in the future
My takeaway is that the students attend university for their education differ from those who would be fine just watching YouTube videos in that they view their education as a sort of team sport or collective activity; rather than an individualized goal they are achieving for themselves, they approach their education as a journey they are on with their friends.
The legacy institutions really are just a stamp / sorting hat for young people these days.
For the money people spend these days on education, you'd think there'd be grounds for refunds based on false advertising of the product.
1. Experts who compile/write the theoretical materials necessary (usually long form text, scripts).
2. The necessary pressure to actually read and understand these in order to pass the exams.
3. Social connections and the ability to work on interesting projects supervised by lecturers with experience and connections (clout if you will).
It's not that much deeper. The actual classroom is a nice "sugar" but that's not where the real learning and understanding happens in my experience. Videos are okay in order to learn but imo text is always much better. Sure you could compile this all yourself but the university provides a good path and everything around it for you to succeed.
College is 100x less forgiving of missing deadlines than the real world of jobs, for instance - but then, in college the only serious source of delays is yourself and your choices. It's actually quite a good litmus test for the ability to apply oneself towards externally imposed goals - which is most of what a job entails.
I wouldn't trust a Jordan Peterson type to have impartial position on a sudden EdTech psychosis when:
- he appears to have a relatively new online academy
- selling courses
- in a way that is relatively new to him
- don't seem welcome to teach in academic institutions
- uses psychology on their audience for the above
If MooCs weren't a thing, and courses on LaserDisc were, I think we'd know what we'd be hearing about a LaserDisc Academy by mail service.
I do not always get a "yes" but most of the time I do.
These are generally people who went to top universities and now have well paying and respected jobs. I suspect if I asked most students of lower tier universities the answer would be "I'd rather pay for neither".
Thankfully, things are generally shifting, there is a push for apprenticeships and one can even become a solicitor or barrister via the apprenticeship route now. University will go down as one of the largest economic wastes in human history.
Most students go to school to improve their access to opportunity to uplift their current and future descendants.
Yes, often economic uplifting is a part of that.
I get it that some professors don't like teaching and just want to do research, but teaching is what pays their bills, and if they can't be bothered to do their job well...
Meanwhile laying off "unneeded" teachers an getting hooked on the enterprise LLM subs. After these borderline bankrupt LLM corpos will raise prices several times universities will be paying even more while struggling with limited staff. This will translate into admin pressure on the teachers to automate more and more and more.
Understanding before application are two different steps.
The issues you're outlining can be solved by arranging technology to go through a process to satisfy the above.
Still, instruction, and instructors aren't really needing to be replaced, it's the silent elephant in the room that is rarely talked about that hopefully considers evolving.
... said no decent teacher, ever. The flows aren't symmetrical, but they are bidirectional.
Some human decision-maker is responsible.
I can't imagine having so little respect for my own reputation that as a professor I'd throw out unreviewed AI slop as my own intellectual work, but I bet nobody is getting fired for it so that's just a sign of my own stupidity. A professor with no pride, working for a university with no pride, giving students with no pride certifications that they can use to get ahead in an economy with no pride.
I'm bullish on AI in education, because of the possibility of creating an individual student model that the machine can use to constantly target weaknesses in understanding. But that hasn't been invented yet. What you would get now is a teacher that hallucinates, simply lies to bridge gaps, forgets what it was supposed to be talking about, and constantly fabricates references.
