Sep 17, 2026 · 31 min · 15 segments
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.anewanglepodcast.com This week is our September edition of Incentives & Instincts, a recurring series in which Justin speaks with…
So seems like a good time to revisit the idea of the future of higher education, don't you think? Yeah.
So I talked about this study with my students the first week of class, and the way I framed it to them was AI appears to be a pretty darn effective homework machine.
But if you basically outsource your college education to a machine, you're doing yourself a disservice.
At the same time, if you're experiencing as a student that everything the professors are serving you is doable by AI, you got to demand more from your tuition dollars, essentially.
There's also kind of short and long run things here as well, right? Like there's the, well, what are we doing now, right? With AI where it is now and where we're kind of, where things will be within a short time period.
But a college education is supposed to serve you for a 30 to 40 year career and 60 to 70 years of life after college.
What is it that we're supposed to be providing? What are we supposed to be doing here? If you think about what a university was created to be, It was created to be a place, you know, you're off in the world.
And there were these very, very scarce places where you could go and access the frontier of knowledge.
And that was true even when we started college, right? Like the university library offered me things that were not available to me in my town.
You know, there were libraries in my town, but they were nothing close to the University of Oregon library system.
I would have them send you a book or something if you were involved in some network.
So seems like a good time to revisit the idea of the future of higher education, don't you think? Yeah.
So I talked about this study with my students the first week of class, and the way I framed it to them was AI appears to be a pretty darn effective homework machine.
But if you basically outsource your college education to a machine, you're doing yourself a disservice.
At the same time, if you're experiencing as a student that everything the professors are serving you is doable by AI, you got to demand more from your tuition dollars, essentially.
There's also kind of short and long run things here as well, right? Like there's the, well, what are we doing now, right? With AI where it is now and where we're kind of, where things will be within a short time period.
But a college education is supposed to serve you for a 30 to 40 year career and 60 to 70 years of life after college.
What is it that we're supposed to be providing? What are we supposed to be doing here? If you think about what a university was created to be, It was created to be a place, you know, you're off in the world.
And there were these very, very scarce places where you could go and access the frontier of knowledge.
And that was true even when we started college, right? Like the university library offered me things that were not available to me in my town.
You know, there were libraries in my town, but they were nothing close to the University of Oregon library system.
I would have them send you a book or something if you were involved in some network.
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