Hooked on AI: What's the point of college?

If AI does all the work, professors and students ask, what's the point of college? New AI models make it incredibly easy for students to offload all their assignments to a bot, writes Lila Shroff in The Atlantic. And professors may provide instant feedback, from a bot, creating a "fully automated loop."

The new tools will "listen" to lectures, "read" texts, "study" slides, take online quizzes and tests and complete assignments.

In less than an hour, "Einstein" had worked through all eight modules and seven quizzes in the online statistics course, earning a perfect score.

Still, some claim that AI can be used to help students learn -- if they're motivated. 

The tech industry is paying students to promote AI, writes Shroff. Anthropic's “Claude Builder Clubs hire students paid to host workshops and hackathons on their campuses, she writes. Members are given free access to Claude Code. OpenAI will offer college students $100 in credits for Codex, its agentic coding tool.

Shroff talked to Thor Warnken, an Anthropic ambassador and a biology major at the University of Florida, who said he takes a practice test, then feeds his work into Claude. The bot analyzes his errors and creates new practice problems based on them. “The first practice question will be super easy, and the next one will get a little harder and a little harder, until it gets super hard,” Warnken told Shroff.

Claude is a "fantastic" study partner, says William Liu, a Stanford sophomore who's also an Anthropic ambassador. "When he has questions during large lectures, he asks Claude, which has access to his course materials, and the bot explains concepts in real time," she writes. Still, Liu is happy he didn't have AI to do his homework in high school.

Most students worry that relying on AI will erode their critical-thinking skills, Shroff writes.

Natalie Lahr, a Barnard sophomore studying history and political science, tries to avoid AI. When asked a for help with an essay at the college’s writing center, the tutor "copy-pasted her essay prompt into the popular AI tool Perplexity and gave Lahr the AI-generated outline," Shroff writes. That was it, the student recalls. Afterwards, she thought, "Why am I even here?”