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Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)
link-archive link
Article describing what was predictably coming to college campuses since GPT3 got released. The narration follows some particularly annoying Korean-American student trying to make quick bucks from LLM-cheating start-ups and a rather dumb girl who can't follow basic reasoning, which makes the read a bit aggravating and amusing but overall the arch is not surprising. Recommended for a quick read. Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.
Some interesting highlights for me:
A lot of departments want courses in the core curriculum because it guarantees jobs lecturing. They don't particularly care if the students learn anything or if it provides any value. Forcing students to write papers on indigenous studies is just the easiest path to getting paid to write their own papers on indigenous studies.
So basically everyone involved is a fraud, and it goes forward because we've let colleges control credentialing.
The students just want the credential. The lecturers just want their money.
There's so much money on the table for whomever can convince employers they have a better credential than Ivy League schools. And given the level of corruption and bloat, it probably wouldn't even take that hard a push.
Inertia is powerful, but it's not all powerful.
I have a vague recollection of a podcast. My Google fu isn't good enough. I think it was Conversations With Tyler. I think the guest was someone of means and a track record of disruption (Patrick Collison/Peter Thiel tier). The question came up about disrupting academia. In my continued jumble of vague recollections, the response was some form of, "We looked into it, but the academic cartel is too strong." They have piles upon piles of government subsidies. They have complete control of accreditation. I've seen, for example, a state uni system where the components also leverage control over the other components (one wanted to offer a new grad degree program, and the others cried to the state gov't to force an impossible requirement on them to "prove that there is a need", a la Certificate of Need requirements in the medical industry). If you were news-conscious around a decade ago, you saw the knives out for "for-profit universities". I'm sure there are all sorts of tactics-level games being played and tricks being employed.
They also suffer from a two-sided market. It's not enough to only convince employers; you have to convince prospective students, too. Thrown in here are difficult questions about the relative value of signaling in education. Various folks have various estimates (some quite high) for the amount of value in a degree simply being that the institution chose you and put their stamp on you, because they were able to choose from the best. If there is a significant amount of that, then the students might not actually care all that much whether you're really offering a better education; you just need to offer a better signal. If you're trying to recruit a top-crust student, you have to realize that all of the legacy institutions are already offering them a full ride (maybe even perks hidden as lifestyle amenities) and a time-proven signal. You have to compete with that... somehow. You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop (either top students realize that you haven't convinced employers already and will stop enrolling or top employers realize that you haven't convinced students already and will stop hiring).
@zeke5123a has a plausible idea of just paying students. But again, you're looking for top students; they're already effectively getting paid by the legacy unis. So, you're going to have to front significant cash. Since you can't subsidize this with the donations of wealthy aristocratic alumni, high tuition from a lesser tier student (since this will immediately devalue your budding brand), and piles of government assistance is likely not forthcoming, you will have to burn significant piles of cash for probably a significant number of years before you can start to turn the tide back to even breaking even.
If you're thinking that you could maybe you could stem the bleed by doing the typical thing of having your faculty also chase research grant money, you now have a three-sided market. How many academics out there can stomach the grant-chasing life, succeed at it, and also buy in to give the high levels of effort you're going to require to have super high educational standards? When you find one, they're going to be expensive, because they do just half that work for plenty of money and near infinite job security at a legacy.
Where along the way do you make sure you don't slip into the same mode of operation as the legacies, since you sure seem to be playing their same game now, just without the entrenched endowments? What's your mechanism to ensure that?
I wouldn't be surprised if whoever I vaguely recall on a podcast already went through this exercise. I wouldn't be surprised if they already tried to make an estimate of how much top students are already being effectively paid by legacies. I wouldn't be surprised if, with some reasonable assumptions on how long it would take to build the brand in both directions so that you could start to stop the bleeding, they just computed that it would just be an unreasonable pile of money.
The Thiel Fellowship seems to be an attempt that embraces a reasonably strong prior on the signaling theory, which allowed them to at least just give up on the educating part of the huge pile of money. $100k over two years, and starting with 20-30 students. That's with the Thiel Brand discount and no overt plan for how to turn it from a $2-3M/yr charity project into a revenue-neutral competitor to academia with any sort of scale.
This is not to say that they cannot be disrupted, but the challenge is pretty steep.
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I wonder if you could have a new university that initially paid students to come. There is an SAT cut off plus a requirement to have some AP. Three year intensive with only core classes needed (you should be able to do the requisite credit hours in 3 years if you have sufficient AP and a single summer night class). Internships required. After the first couple of classes succeed in getting hired at strong firms, you flip the switch and start charging 50k a year.
You've almost exactly described elite STEM PhD programs!
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They would have to pay the first students an amount equivalent to the increase in lifetime earnings from going to a regular university (minus the cost of a regular university). This would be cost prohibitive.
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