It is easy to claim that something is worthless if you have the luxury of no longer needing it.
The regulations and funding of universities, compounded by a long-term under performance in internal communications has meant they are unreasonably derided and misrepresented almost as often by those who work within them as those who never have a reason to set foot on campus.
Worse, the priorities, needs, perceptions and capabilities of students is often glossed over in favour of simplistic blanket assertions relating to fees – as if there is somehow something unethical in asking students to contribute to the cost of education, or seek to expand the number with access to it. This is particularly virulent in those who yearn for the good old days, when the majority of people were excluded and students were evaluated based on their ability to memorise and regurgitate, rather than actually think, create or critique.
Which brings us to yesterday’s article in 9 Media papers about how ‘uni degrees have become worthless?’ Tell that to the tens of thousands of job hunters without a degree who are excluded from jobs because of their lack of qualifications. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of students currently enrolled in a degree who you declare are wasting their time. Tell that to the statisticians who continue to prove that you get a higher income on average with a degree. And try to convince well over 100,000 students who have just finished 13 years of schooling that the next stage of their life, planned for years, should be abandoned. It is unfair hyperbole dressed up in a veil of shoddy analysis.
Some of the first people I met as a young, naïve backpacker in the early 90s were joyless husks of humanity clinging on to a remembrance of their hippie heyday, saying the islands of Thailand and all of Nepal were no longer worth visiting because they had become popular with tourists. They were eking out a life living in dollar-a-day hostels sustained primarily by the opportunity to lament how much better things were in the old days. The old days when locals had no tourists, died of simple diseases and starvation, and clung to a few foreign coins like a drowning person to a lifebuoy.
I travelled on to those places, and it turned out they were wrong. As long as I didn’t arrive in a caftan expecting someone to fall at my feet with gratitude and shock at my arrival, I could appreciate those places for what they now offered.
That higher education needs extensive reform in terms of governance, funding, performance metrics and multiple other areas is beyond dispute. That the higher education sector has so far failed to convince the Australian public of the value that international students bring to enrich our communities, classrooms and workplaces is also beyond doubt.
But if you are going to run an opinion piece about degrees being ‘worthless’, best to start with facts.
Every education institution around the world is grappling with how to respond to the explosion in usage of generative AI apps such as ChatGPT. Assessment needs to change, but degrees are not just about assessment. There is this other thing, called learning that is also involved. And so education institutions need to teach people how to best use AI as part of their learning, rather than succumb to a singular focus on blocking it at exam time. What use is an education going to be in future if students emerge to the workforce of the future with a degree which is purely judged on their ability to handwrite a three-hour exam?
There are some dangerous tones in the current debate about the role of universities. Yesterday’s article wrote about ‘a student who can barely speak a word of English’ and then categorise them as not ‘normal’ in the following paragraph. The article declares that students with few oral English skills must have used ChatGPT. Is it also possible that the student actually used Google translate, because they were afraid of being called out for inadequate English skills?
The ego of a university staff member ‘amusing themselves’ by answering questions from students in a deliberately vacuous way is a concern. Yes I have worked with universities for 22 years, but I have also conducted market research with tens of thousands of students and prospective students in that time, and I can tell you a number of things:
- Issues with literacy and oral language capabilities are not confined to international students. Also capability and confidence in spoken English can be different to capabilities in written English. This is not a cop out – there have been issues and concerns with English language testing for as long as I have worked in higher ed, but what if you change the international student label to student with a disability. Stephen Hawking couldn’t conduct a conversation without speech aids in the latter years of his life, but it didn’t stop him making fundamental contributions to our knowledge.
- The largest study of AI use in Australian universities demonstrates that not all students are using AI to cheat, and provides a much more useful insight into AI usage than the article’s hyperbole.
- The article states that “‘cash is king’ ‘and once you’re selling degrees, you’ve lost any kind of quality control” This is populist hysteria. Anyone with a basic understanding of the higher education system knows that it is regulated by Federal Agencies, there are checks and balances at the professional, institutional and Faculty level and the fact that fees are charged for students to undertake degrees never guarantees that degree will be awarded. This sort of rubbish is a direct affront to the tens of thousands of students who fail subjects each year and the 14.7% who drop out and fail to complete their degree. Are there problems with pressure on assessment? Undoubtedly. Is it helped by absolutist statements dressed up as fact? Not in the slightest.
This sort of hyperbole is not just an insult to the hundreds of thousands of students devoting themselves to study this year, but also to more than 130,000 staff working in higher education who won’t be thrilled to be told that their vocation is pointless. We need to do better in our public discourse. This is not whistleblowing – it’s raising some valid issues and conflating them with extravagant hyperbole.
Many others will point out that AI is useful to varying degrees in different disciplines – and hopefully they will also point out that it is essential to future workers. But they need to refrain from branding all degrees ‘meaningless’. That is neither defensible nor correct.
We can agree on one thing though. Hopefully it is true that “The university as we know it is dead.” Now is not the time to cling to irrelevant models of the past. Right now is the time to be engaging society in what the university of the future looks like and there are plenty of examples of extraordinary advances improving teaching and learning through AI, as well as improved approaches to assessment that don’t rely on your ability to regurgitate a narrow grouping of facts.
University education will be much stronger when AI is fully embraced – and we should all hope the experience will be radically different from ‘the good old days.’
