"why can't college kids do math?"

We don't talk enough about AI as a vehicle for what's essentially austerity.

Teaching isn't bi directional.

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.

Content often already exists and depending on the course not much effort is needed to adapt it to next year. Feedback and teaching is what hard and time consuming. Thus we will see the hard part being replaced first. Grading and exams are hard? Let's automate it. Lecturing is hard? Let's narrate text by a program. Etc.

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.

When I started undergrad, my father told me that university was not for learning; that was what the Internet was for, and since I was in tech; it wasn't quite for proving myself either: that was internships and portfolio. It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.

> It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos.

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.

I worked in the tech side of education until 15 years ago or so, and it was already clear how problematic it was getting.

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.

It really depends what field. In some branches of history, archaeology, and linguistics, for instance, many matters of emerging consensus often reach students only through lecturers’ handouts that are not put online. What a curious person will find on the internet and in general-reference books can be a decade or more behind, and viewed within the field as horribly out of date.

This is why the first day of every semester I ask my students "why are you here, in this room with all these other people, spending $$$, instead of sitting at home at YouTubeU watching this content better produced in 4K resolution with graphics and animations?"

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 story you’re recalling is “Just Deserts,” a short story by M. T. Anderson. It appears in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (2011), an anthology edited by Chris Van Allsburg where various authors wrote tales to match Van Allsburg’s mysterious illustrations. In “Just Deserts,” a lone child is raised in a simulated town after an apocalyptic event (implied nuclear war). He attends “school” and interacts with other children via screens, only to discover – in a scene involving a hollow pumpkin – that his parents and classmates are all artificial constructs created to keep him company. This twist reveals he is the last real child on Earth. The story was first published in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).

Which universities aren't commercial and about cashflow?

> 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.

https://www.apmreports.org/collection/educate-podcast

If you live in a city with multiple colleges/universities check out the cars in the staff parking lot. Many will have parking passes/stickers for multiple colleges on there. These are adjuncts that have to drive all over town to cobble together a full time job as an instructor.

I've had this experience as well, but I also noticed I am much less blown away when the information is put to the test.

So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.

There's no problem with that.

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?

I somewhat suspect you would not find it so amazing if you paid £9000/year for it, though.

This type of use while asking for annotations for all facts can be insightful to have the start of an informed conversation with a professional.

But you aren't a student paying for a university education presumably taught by someone that has experience in the field.

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?

Well, that's certainly one piece of anecdata. I guess that refutes the experience of all the college students.

Next try it on something rare you're an expert in, and be amazed at the low quality.

> Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc.

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.

> I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated,

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.)

As long as we're reciting unrelated anecdotes to attempt emotional appeal over anything of substance, "Chat" has also driven young children to suicide. No one in their lives would have paid as much detail into reaffirming every negative thought pattern they had until they ended their own lives as much as an emotionless token predictor LLM running 24/7. They got their nihilism and idealization pushed back at them in a clear, cold tone they would have never gotten from docs, reading papers, reading textbooks. I dont think their outcomes were as amazing. Their mental condition wasnt even as rare of a circumstance to properly handle and treat, yet it failed at a fatal level.

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?

MooCs are just glorified long videos of classrooms from 20 years ago.

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 think that's not true. What I gain from university are three things:

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.

The thought experiment I do when speaking with graduates is: assume you could just buy the certificate from the institution you went to for the same price as the tuition you paid, would you do that?

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.

I think you know the answer to your question: nothing until it becomes a major issue. This is like global warming, it's a slow moving catastrophe, you can see it coming from a mile away but it's expensive to fix so it's hard to convince people to do something about it and there is just enough ambiguity that the detractors can effectively block your efforts.

Spending on education has increased over the last couple decades, not decreased. Outcomes, however, have gotten worse. You're entire premise is flawed.

Generally, it's easy to be unpopular with a healthy income rolling in.

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.

Uh, now is this different from "normal" university education? I'd wager that 95%+ of people who go to college do it because they were told they have to for access to better job opportunities, not because they want to stay in the academia to publish books and do research for life.

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...

The real question.

Some human decision-maker is responsible.

But muh vibe coding :/

I'm now able to create a fucking shit nobody will ever care about in no time!

But the flip side is that the tuition will at least go down! ...right?

I kind of wonder whether we are past the point where waiting to be trained is feasible.

This counts on there being more juice to squeeze out of learning than I think actually exists. The people currently spending $1000s/month on real tutors are probably learning at ~90% of their potential. An idealized AI might push that to 100%, but the people who can't afford tutors or college are going to see greater benefit from even the cheapest models. That scenario results in decreasing stratification.

> AI will continue to stratify education.

> 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).

I promise you that students from wealthy families will continue to get human tutors for the foreseeable future. And it will have nothing to do with whether an AI can beat a human on a test or not.

Howso? I think it might be hard to prove.

Will make it a lot cheaper and more accessible.

In this specific case the university was in the UK.

I'm lucky to teach in a school with relatively small classes (~25) and I can manually grade and review everything. (The autograde scripts I wrote in bash help.)

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.

It is. It's called magicschool, and districts have already signed contracts

i have seen this joke beaten to death so many times in so many forms

It is crazy to me the amount of people who are auto-completing through their education. "I don't need to learn how to code, the ai will do it for me" etc. If the only value you provide is pressing [ok] on content you don't understand, why do you think someone won't replace you with a bot? To me it's like going to pilot's school and saying you'll just have your copilot fly the plane for you.