How ChatGPT has emphasized our contradictory attitudes towards higher education
Frida Purdon, Staff Writer
Photo source: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
IN THE last few months, I’ve read countless articles about the deficiencies of higher education. Various articles berate students for using ChatGPT and for treating university as a process to be expedited rather than as a space for intellectual experimentation. Yet these criticisms seem uncritical and ungenerous to me, since they fail to challenge some of their pre-existing, and often paradoxical, assumptions. Students have been taught to treat education as a means to an end, and to value productivity and efficiency above all else. If using ChatGPT allows them to be more productive and more efficient—to realize those ideals which they’ve been taught to value and which society exalts—then why wouldn’t they?
Yet when castigating students for using ChatGPT and for treating education flippantly or instrumentally, critics often revert to an older conception of university, one which stipulates that higher education is about the production of knowledge, or the cultivation of students’ intellectual capacities, or even “personal growth.” According to this particular notion of higher education, using ChatGPT is a cardinal sin. Critics wring their hands and declare that students no longer value critical thinking, that they can’t read novels, and that they’ve offloaded the complex and rigorous mental processes inherent to essay-writing onto an algorithm in a kind of Orwellian nightmare. But since when was university primarily about critical thinking? We’ve been told all our lives that education is about getting a job and that we should hurry up and be done with it—intellectual growth is just a possible corollary to this. So it should be unsurprising when students, having internalized this utilitarian conception of education, use those resources available to them, such as ChatGPT, to do well—to be more productive and more efficient—and when they fail to supposedly think for themselves.
The advent of ChatGPT has, to my mind, demonstrated how the general public harbours two very different, often contradictory notions about what university is for. The more dominant conception, and one which all but the most privileged students have imbibed, is that university is about doing well and getting your degree so that you can then get a job; university is just a prerequisite, preparation for the job market. In which case, not using ChatGPT, a tool that helps you save time and excel academically, would seem illogical. Yet critics appear to want it both ways; they want students to be pragmatic and efficient, but they also don’t want students to use ChatGPT—to treat education as a means to an end. They want students to engage critically, to hone their minds. This should not be incompatible with a more instrumental conception of university, but it often is. As one humanities student told me, her marks suffer when she writes her own essays. This suggests that, although we often think our usage of generative AI signifies an inability or unwillingness to think, it also stems from systemic, educational failings.
It’s important to note that when students actually value the slow work of genuine thinking, they’re acting in opposition to the doctrine of our time, and of the institution itself, which values high performance on a timeline. To demand this sort of oppositionality from students seems like a tall order, given that doing the work oneself doesn’t necessarily pay off.
This dilemma regarding the purpose of education is only exacerbated by the fact that university is no longer considered as useful as it once was. A study conducted by the Pew Research Centre found that 40% of the students polled considered undergraduate degrees “not too or not at all” important, while 49% claimed that undergraduate degrees are less profitable than they were two decades ago (Higher Ed Dive, 2024). Whereas older generations took for granted the fact that university was materially beneficial, it’s no longer guaranteed that education will garner you anything. You’d think this would lead to a broader renunciation of higher education, but higher education’s supposed uselessness has done nothing to deter people from acquiring degrees. In fact, more and more people are getting Master’s degrees than ever before. And this is another paradox most students have to contend with: you can’t not go to university—despite the dearth of plumbers and electricians, trade school still seems to be beyond the pale for most—and yet, as people love to tell me, my degree is (materially) pointless.
Students are caught between two contradictory conceptions of education, and barring a societal sea change, the tension between these two conceptions will likely remain unresolved. In the meantime, we should reconsider our current criticisms of students, which often fail to appreciate how they are forced to conform to dominant value systems and are not necessarily lazy and intellectually incapable. Students, of course, have agency, and we can all probably agree that they should refrain from using AI for intellectual and moral reasons. But the rise of AI reveals systemic issues in modern conceptions of higher education and should be understood as such. Though defining the purpose of education in some generalized way is likely unhelpful, since education, like most things that matter, can assume various purposes and meanings, this moment is an opportunity to reconsider, if not reconceptualize, what it is we want from today’s academic institutions and university students.
