College Will Be More Important in the Age of AI, Not Less
This essay was also published on my LinkedIn and X.
College will be more important in the age of AI, not less.
I know. Counterintuitive. But hear me out.
The debate usually goes like this: why pay for college when you have GPT explaining anything in seconds? It's a reasonable question. But I think it fundamentally misunderstands what learning actually is.
The real debate isn't college vs. AI. It's active cognition vs. passive consumption.
When you skim an LLM output, you feel smarter. The explanation made sense, the logic tracked, and you close the tab feeling like you've got it. But you don't. Not really. There's a well-documented phenomenon called the illusion of explanatory depth. People dramatically overestimate how well they understand things. And I'd argue that frictionless, on-demand AI explanations are the most powerful illusion-of-depth machine ever built. The feeling of understanding is completely decoupled from actually understanding. As someone said, you're an idea tourist, not a student.
Real learning is painful. It's slow. It requires you to sit with confusion long enough for your brain to actually restructure itself around a new idea. That doesn't happen when someone (or something) just hands you the answer.
This is why college structure matters. Besides all the arguments about the brand, community, and the network, it's really about the structure. Deadlines, exams, problem sets, professors and TAs who won't just give you the answer. These aren't and will not be an outdated relics. They're the mechanism.
And here's what's changing: my CIS5200 machine learning class at Penn this semester started doing Oral Assessments for every homework. Completion gets you the base credit. The real grade comes from sitting with a TA for 20 minutes after submitting the HW, walking through a randomly selected problem end-to-end. You should be able to answer with a pseudocode, proofs, and follow-up conceptual questions. No notes. No AI.
It's uncomfortable. But It's also the most learning I've done from a homework assignment in years. Because it's not a secret that the majority of college students are using AI to complete their homework these days.
This is the direction college needs to go: not despite AI, but because of it. The one thing AI cannot replicate is accountability with another human in the room. A TA who can probe whether you actually understand something, or whether you just watched it go by.
And if anything, this will matter more over time, not less. We're raising a generation surrounded by infinite distraction (TikTok and GPT, to name a few) and frictionless answers. The ability to focus and truly internalize something is becoming rarer, and therefore more valuable. The institutions that force that struggle will become more important, not obsolete.
College isn't valuable because of what it signals. It's valuable because of what it demands.