Recently, the writer advised his stepdaughter to think twice before enrolling in university. He says children are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt for what he calls a terrible campus experience, while students are now being graded on who can write the best AI prompts.
That is the argument at the center of an opinion piece published three years after ChatGPT was released. The writer says that students who began their studies then are now graduating and entering the workforce, even as universities carry on as though AI has not upended everything they stand for. In his view, the value of a tertiary qualification was already being undermined before AI arrived, through grade inflation, lower admissions standards, dumbing down of courses, commercial essay-writing operations and other forms of cheating.
He says the new factor is scale. Every student, he argues, can now outsource almost every facet of the learning process to an AI assistant, from lecture notes and reading summaries to tutorial engagement. On his telling, to achieve a high distinction a student does not need to attend a single lecture or read a single text. The result, he writes, is not a marginal abuse of the system but widespread, industrial-scale fraud across Australia’s universities.
The piece says the institutions are still cashing cheques from taxpayer subsidies for domestic students and from international fees, even as the assessment system has been transformed. The writer asks why universities are not doing anything about AI three years in. He says the fraud would not be accepted in any other sector, and he argues that the degree-printing factories many universities have become will have grave consequences for students and society. That warning is not limited to one campus. It lands in the middle of a broader debate about how higher education is changing, a debate that also runs through stories such as Bill Tierney returns with Princeton University as title memories resurface and Iowa State University-bound Brenna Van Cleave caps Ames girls' relay run.
The sharpest tension in the piece is the one it does not try to soften. The writer says most people would choose the easy route over the harder one, which is why the temptation to use AI will spread unless universities change their incentives and their assessments. He says even if only 10 per cent of future engineers were not earning their qualifications, that would be unacceptable. He extends the point to nurses, meteorologists, barristers and financial advisers, saying the same logic would allow them to keep outsourcing cognitive work after they enter the labour market, despite AI hallucinations and biases.
The close of his argument is bleak and direct: integrating AI into the foundations of human education will lead to mass brain rot. That is the force of the piece, and it is also its claim to urgency today. Three years after ChatGPT’s release, the question is no longer whether universities saw the disruption coming. It is whether they are willing to act before the degree itself loses the trust that gives it value. The issue is not confined to Australia, though the writer focuses there; similar pressures are visible in institutions as varied as Delhi University, where student access and campus rules can become political flashpoints. What he is really saying is that the system is already changing faster than the people paid to defend it.
