Many within higher education have been watching the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) models with amazement. And fear.
Some fears are existential: AI will kill us all. Some are academic: AI will facilitate student cheating. And some are financial: AI will displace well-paid and, until now, secure tenured jobs for faculty by rendering faculty and universities at large obsolete. Examples of writers grappling with this possibility include
- Hollis Robbins: “In 10 years, when students can get personalized content mastery for free or cheap and arrive at college having completed what we currently teach in years 1-2, what exactly are we selling? Research apprenticeship? Network access? Credentials? Time to mature? What’s the honest answer?”
- Rikki Schlott: “We’ve entered the age of AI — yet parents are still ponying up small fortunes for their kids to learn jobs that will soon be antiquated (if they’re not already).”
- Ted Underwood: “higher education risks losing its central place in the production and distribution of knowledge. It isn’t hard to envision a world where everyone knows that you get intellectual substance from an AI subscription, while formal degrees confer prestige mainly through association with beautiful campuses and victorious football teams.”
I can’t say much about whether AI will end civilization or solve the perennial problem of student cheating, but I do have an unorthodox view on the question everyone in academia is whispering about: will AI make faculty—and the university itself—obsolete?
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The short answer is yes. AI will make universities obsolete. But that’s hardly fatal. After all, higher education has outlived its own obsolescence before, and it will almost certainly muddle its way through this one, too.
The long answer is the following:
Universities and their faculty have been functionally obsolete for centuries. The traditional university lecture was created because books were prohibitively expensive in the past. A thousand years ago, books were written by hand and were therefore exorbitantly expensive. Economist Brad DeLong estimated that a book would typically cost about $50,000 in today’s dollars, which in turn meant that a college-level education would cost about $1.6 million just for books. The lecture was the solution to this problem. As DeLong wrote,
you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them–hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader–while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever…
But the invention of the printing press in 1440 changed all that.
While it took some time to develop fully, the printing press made books cheap. For example, today, I can buy Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy on Amazon for $9.91. In this case, the printing press reduced the price of this book by 99.98 percent. In other words, the lecture and the universities that sprouted up to provide them have been obsolete for centuries. And yet lectures and universities persist to this day.
[RELATED: AI’s Higher Ed Takeover Is Not Inevitable]
There is an interesting question of why universities have survived the emergence of the printing press.
DeLong offers some theories, as does Bryan Caplan. But for our purposes, what matters is that universities did survive. And for precisely that reason, they are likely to survive AI as well. Indeed, with only a few tweaks, the quotations at the beginning of this piece could just as easily be describing the arrival of cheap books rather than AI—a reminder that easier access to knowledge has never been a fatal blow to universities.
In fact, the university is in an even stronger position today than it was when the printing press was invented because demand for its services is artificially inflated by both credential inflation, which tends to require postsecondary education for jobs that don’t truly need it, and massive government subsidies that make higher education seem more affordable than its true cost.
The bottom line is that if universities survived when a college education could be had for the cost of a library card, they’ll survive when one can be had for the price of an AI subscription, too.
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