The past week has seen more articles than usual about the effects of AI on higher education and the job market. The tone tends to be negative, but also contradictory, with some articles expressing optimism, but the general tone tends to be pessimistic.

For example, from Fortune, “Employers are increasingly turning to degree and GPA’ in hiring: Recruiters retreat from ‘talent is everywhere,’ double down on top colleges.” This is contrasted with The Economist, “Is AI putting graduates out of work already?”

The surge in AI has also called into doubt the value or purpose of higher education. Overall, AI is generally seen as a negative, facilitating cheating and defeating the purpose of higher education. For example, in response to AI cheating, Princeton faculty has mandated proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 years of precedent.

Learning has given way to job optimization, or alluding to The Economist, a future where such jobs may not even exist. Not holding back, Owen Yingling of The New Critic, in the article “The Great Zombification,” writes:

The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.

But hasn’t college always been about job preparedness? The vast majority of students attend college to be more competitive in the job market, not because of intellectual curiosity, and this long predates AI. This is why remunerative majors such as computer science, ‘business’ or psychology are so popular, compared to the less lucrative humanities.

All AI has really done is expose college for what it has long been: a job funnel masquerading as a place of learning. In the past, students at least had to go through the motions, pretending to care about learning. But AI now automates the tedious process of writing essays and boring reading assignments, all in a few clicks. And it does a far better job of writing than students are capable of doing on their own.

I see this as a welcome change. For decades, Republicans whined about “campus indoctrination” and affirmative action, but little changed, because they lacked the political capital or inclination to do anything about it. Such anger was just mostly lip service compared to more pressing matters such as endless wars or tax cuts. Now comes AI, which is a long awaited actual disruptive threat to the college hegemony. And many of these liberal-types are appalled that AI not just threatens their cultural or institutional locus of power, but may devalue those degrees they paid so much for.

There is the hypocrisy that companies are allowed to outsource and automate to be more efficient, but when students use AI to automate tedious or boring assignments, it’s somehow an affront to some higher moral principle. If the outcome is the same: correctly-answered assignments and the illusion of productive learning, fundamentally, what difference is there if an AI or human does it?

I have observed online, in comments, that there’s little sympathy for companies that get duped by candidates using AI to pass interviews. Whether it’s frustration with credentialism, algorithmic gatekeeping, or the endless hoops of modern hiring, many people seem to agree on one thing: AI is an equalizer. It lowers barriers, bypasses gatekeepers, and helps people navigate systems that long felt designed to filter them out rather than recognize talent.

However, AI disruption only goes so far. Many things will remain the same. My position is AI changes some things, but many preexisting trends will continue or even accelerate, such as wealth inequality, tech valuations, competition, status scarcity, and credentialism. This is in agreement with the above Fortune article.

Elite universities will still act as gatekeepers of prestige and status. There is no AI alternative to the top-20 schools. I remember all the hype from 10-15 years ago about how online learning and “MIT courseware” would upend the universities or threaten credentialism, and nothing even close to that happened. As it turned out, the online version of MIT is not a substitute for the actual thing. The value is not the curriculum, but the signaling value of being smart enough to get in.

Also, although AI may devalue credentialism to some degree, colleges and companies will adapt, as Princeton has done. This means more proctoring, or grading weighted towards in-class quizzes. Companies likewise have responded to interview software by using their own software to defect and counter such programs, such as detecting subtle eye movements or other telltale signs of AI usage, turning hiring into a technological cat-and-mouse game.

I agreement with the Fortune article again, an AI-led economic boom, combined with less regulation and higher stakes due to competition between trillion-dollar highly profitable firms, makes degrees more relevant and top talent more important. When huge companies are so profitable and rapidity growing, they can afford to pay top dollar for college grads , especially from top schools, to stay ahead of the competition. AI makes smart people more productive, and smart people use AI more effectively, so high-IQ college grads are being paired with AI, leading to a synergistic effect for employers.

Right now we’re in the biggest talent arms race ever. Ballooning salaries in many white-collar jobs reflect that. If AI boosts productivity and profits, there is no reason to expect that society will backtrack in this regard by becoming less competitive. But at the same time, there will be huge swaths of people unable to keep up and will be dependent on various welfare programs, homeless, living with friends or family, service sectors, or otherwise on the margins of society.

Economic growth and competition typically go together. Perhaps the pre-2000s was different, as there was less competition from China. Top universities and companies and other gatekeepers of prestige had not yet hit their saturation point as we see post-2008 or post-Covid.