Trust in universities has gotten so low that even colleges can no longer ignore it. A Yale University report released on Wednesday places much of the blame in the same place that the public does: the colleges themselves.
The problems cited in the report will be familiar to readers of The Free Press, as they include nontransparent admissions standards, grade inflation, a culture that forces self-censorship, and outrageous tuition pricing. This year, George Washington University—hardly in the top tier of selective schools—started charging a sticker price approaching $100,000 a year for the privilege of studying there.
Those problems have been hanging over academia, and getting worse, for years. But a second strand of issues, though not stressed in the Yale report, concerns the rapid progress of artificial intelligence. To put it bluntly, the AIs know more than many professors, they do not tire of answering questions, they explain things clearly, and they keep unlimited office hours. They are also far cheaper and can organize a class syllabus and grade tests. So what exactly is higher education supposed to be providing us with?
