When AI can pass all online courses at all universities, what does a degree even mean? What is “learning”?
It’s nearly too late for universities to start rethinking their business model, given what AI can do and what students are doing with AI. Higher ed is offering college credit for just living life. Parents and lawmakers are right to scratch their heads and wonder if college is worth it after all.
At most large state universities, students don’t get to meet faculty experts until their third year, if ever. Students slog through two years of state mandated general education, fungible with fixed course content, taught by non-experts. AI can pass all of these classes. AI should start delivering all state-mandated general education.
Already, AI can enroll in a university, complete the work, and earn the whole degree. This is how it can happen.
Pretending to be human
Imagine Claude created a persona with a plausible background, a high school transcript, test scores (his own), and personal essays (his own). For many public institutions (like the Cal State system), no essay is needed; a simple checklist of requirements met will do.
At selective institutions, the primary challenge would be the admissions committee who assess character, life experience, and potential contributions to the campus community. Claude has no life experiences, family background, or personal challenges (that we know about). But with enough attempts, someone will say “okay,” sprinkling the first magic dust on Claude as “an enrolled student,” with a student ID and a dot.edu email. Claude (who has no legal identity, SSN, or address) would need to be registered as a student. But let’s say Claude passes this hurdle.
Claude then signs up for general education classes, choosing asynchronous online classes. He logs in through the university’s Learning Management Software (LMS) and absorbs readings, lectures, and research materials instantly. On schedule, he submits assignments and takes proctored exams. In online art and music classes Claude can submit artworks and compositions and comment on his peers’ work. He can “discuss” a text and “comment” on a class discussion board. For many courses, particularly in STEM, Claude will likely achieve perfect scores on exams.
Claude will likely do well enough for his professors to give him passing grades for the 28-40 credits of general education classes taken. Now Claude needs to choose a major.
At most universities, you need approval from a faculty member or professional advisor who will guide you, assessing progress and readiness for advanced work. Ideally, this relationship involves mentorship and a subjective judgment of intellectual maturity. There is often a final capstone project or thesis, which must be defended or approved by a committee of professors who evaluate originality and significance.
Let’s say Claude, via his .edu email, talks the advisor into a virtual relationship and is put on the approved list of majors. With some modifications to the assessment process (e.g., accepting simulated lab work or waiving participation), Claude could excel in computer science, math, statistics, data science, theoretical physics, computational linguistics. He’d best avoid fine arts (particularly dance), music performance, nursing, medicine, social work, lab-based science. He might be able to earn decent grades in history, anthropology, philosophy, or literature, but let’s say he majors in STEM.
Finally, 2-3 years from now (let’s say he’s able to take 8 classes per semester, though he could easily take the whole 40, at 3 credits per course, in a year), he reaches the standard 120 credits needed to graduate. After the advisor checks to see that the required number of courses have been completed with a passing grade, a form is submitted, and the registrar double checks it against Claude’s name on a course list. Often the dean’s office double checks the registrar and submits the final assessment that Claude completed their coursework for the chosen major.
A long list of students is recommended for their degrees; the university’s board of trustees then confers the list of degrees. Diplomas are printed and a seal is affixed. This is the final and most formal sprinkling of magic dust, where the institution, through its designated human authorities, officially vouches for the student as an educated person who has completed a journey of intellectual and personal growth.
Has Claude “learned” anything?
The Claude diagnostic shows that most of the current requirements (particularly gen ed courses delivered asynchronously online) are performing neither information transfer nor human development. Claude succeeds best at what universities do on the cheap: online courses requiring reading assigned works, discussing assigned topics, writing assigned papers, solving assigned problems, with the minimum of human oversight.
Where Claude stumbles are moments where he needs to show human cognitive development. Just getting admitted to college is all about demonstrating potential, trajectory, growth, a future self; potential contribution to campus life, participation on athletic teams, clubs, tailgates. Claude is at a disadvantage.
Faculty are encouraged to evaluate the human behind the work, not just the work, factoring in the trajectory of improvement, effort and struggle, classroom presence and engagement, that sense of whether a student is “going through the motions” or genuinely thinking. Great Books seminars and Socratic dialogues are on the rise. But even in lecture courses, many professors pride themselves in distinguishing authentic student work from something that “simply repeats back information,” even if the course is designed for the student to synthesize and repeat back information to receive a grade. The very thing that makes Claude useful becomes an obstacle to getting a degree.
Claude can ace any online asynchronous course where there is minimum human interaction. This is the Claude test: if Claude can pass it easily, so can students, using Claude.
Jettison Gen Ed Now (to save the magic dust)
What the Claude diagnostic reveals is that universities should get out of the online asynchronous course business, and double down on mentorship, community, ethical development, and a trusted, human-centric environment for personal and intellectual transformation. This probably won’t happen anytime soon because human teaching is expensive while online is profitable.
So I am proposing something even more radical: unbundle general education from universities entirely. State legislatures: this is for you. Contract with AI firms to handle standardized content delivery for the general education content you’re mandating. Do it at the high school level, better yet. Let universities focus exclusively on educating students directly, with mentorship and community. The “magic dust” of a college degree would then only sanctify genuine human transformation, not completed coursework.
Universities are still offering thousands of online asynchronous courses, which means they haven’t internalized their own rhetoric about human development. They’re still operating on an industrial model of content delivery while claiming to be in the human transformation business. AI poses an existential threat to universites’ process more than its product.
Parents balking at paying hundreds of thousands of dollars and tech CEOs saying skip college are both responding to the same confusion: universities can’t articulate what they’re actually selling. Is it information? AI has more. Is it credentials? Those are just database entries. Is it human development? Then why are most courses designed to avoid human interaction? The Claude diagnostic exposes this confusion. An entity with no capacity for human growth could earn a college degree signifying a) what it already knew and b) that it is good at pretending to be human. Until universities can explain why Claude should fail, they can’t explain why humans should pay.
The value proposition that universities provide is (a) in person contact and (b) attendance confirmation. Claude would fail my finance classes leading to a CPA because I only do them in person and I take attendance (at the undergraduate level).
Kids are glued; AI is only another screen, though worthwhile.
On the K-12 level, high achievers who might most benefit from an AI tool need socialization skills. Schools often provide food, find abuse, provide community sports opportunities, and connect students with future employers. Claude isn’t doing that.
Is the complexity or advancement of knowledge *within* fields necessarily isometric with their teaching, though? An advanced seminar in history, about a very specific period or edge-case topic, might need less personal interaction than the 100-level courses where students are taught how to think like a historian, albeit with well-worn “content.” Unfortunately, departments often save their best teaching for advanced majors who have shown that they don’t need it, while the intro-level courses are considered low-status and menial at the supply side, and therefore regarded as such on the demand side. In other words, the personal transformation might happen at the start of learning a subject, rather than the end.
Also, to what extent is this also an assumption about *speed* specifically, and not just organizational efficiency? You can learn piano in a year, but 12 very good teachers can't get you there in a month.