Hollis Robbins has published an interesting thought experiment: The Claude Test, Anecdotal Value, August 6, 2025.
She asks, "would happen if an AI tried to enroll in a university this fall, complete the work, and earn a degree?" and walks us through the exercise. I won't try to summarize. Instead, I want to jump directly to her conclusion:
The Claude diagnostic shows that most of the current requirements (particularly gen ed courses delivered asynchronously online) are performing neither information transfer nor human development. Claude succeeds best at what universities do on the cheap: online courses requiring reading assigned works, discussing assigned topics, writing assigned papers, solving assigned problems, with the minimum of human oversight.
Where Claude stumbles are moments where he needs to show human cognitive development. Just getting admitted to college is all about demonstrating potential, trajectory, growth, a future self; potential contribution to campus life, participation on athletic teams, clubs, tailgates. Claude is at a disadvantage. [...]
What the Claude diagnosis tells us is that universities should get out of the online asynchronous course business, and double down on mentorship, community, ethical development, and a trusted, human-centric environment for personal and intellectual transformation. This probably won’t happen anytime soon because human teaching is expensive while online is profitable.
So I am proposing something even more radical: unbundle general education from universities entirely. State legislatures: this is for you. Contract with AI firms to handle standardized content delivery for the general education content you’re mandating. Do it at the high school level, better yet. Let universities focus exclusively on educating students directly, with mentorship and community. The “magic dust” of a college degree would then only sanctify genuine human transformation, not completed coursework.
The ubiquity of online asynchronous courses demonstrates that universities haven’t actually internalized their own rhetoric about human development. They’re still operating on an industrial model of content delivery while claiming to be in the human transformation business. AI poses an existential threat to university’s process more than its product.
Here's my response:
Color me sympathetic, Hollis. I've always thought that the push for "everyone gets a college degree" was a mistake. In practice it seems to me the result of this expansion is a lot of gen ed, poorly delivered, along with vocational training, also poorly delivered. So I agree, shift the gen ed to the high school level (which is the level it's at anyhow). Education beyond that should be direct and personalized, whether it's hands-on skills with a large physical component, or more abstract intellectual skills.
That's one thing. And then there's writing. Since my degree is in English and my one faculty post was in an omnibus department in a tech school (Language, Literature, and Communications at RPI) I've had to teach composition, one of the most thankless educational jobs in the world. It's always seemed me that writing needs to be taught the way musical performance is taught, one-on-one. That's how I learned to play the trumpet, and a bit of piano, between the ages of 11 and 17 (plus a semester of trumpet at Peabody in my early 20s). But assigning every student their own writing tutor is just too expensive. But it would get the job done, and all students need it, the good writers as well as the deficient.
Finally, a thought that's sort of tangential to your essay here, but I've been thinking about it. I've been hearing that students are using AI on their term papers etc. and "they're not learning to think!" (Duh!), as though learning to think was important to what colleges and universities actually do. In a system that's organized to assign and receive grades, and the grades are inflated (my graduating 3.3 at JHU back in 69 was well above average; now it's what, a badge of shame?) letting the AI get the grades is the thing to do, lowest possible opportunity cost. But it's clear that that smarter and more knowledgeable you are, they more effective you can be in using even the best AI. It seems to me that in a genuinely competitive environment that should matter. And if somehow you manage to get students interested in something, they learn to think even while making extensive use of AI.
People don't like being turned into IBM punch-cards through industrial education, but if that's the system you put them into, they'l be punched and try to create some room for themselves elsewhere. Change the system, drastically.
Looking back on my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins, I worked it to get as much individual attention as I could. I took advantage of office hours, and did an independent study or two. I'm thinking particularly of a semester I spent with Mary Ainsworth learning about attachment behavior and primate ethology and all the hours I spend with Dick Macksey.
Also, as I recall (this is an idealization no doubt) when a course was going good, I'd find something that interested me about 2/3rds of the way through and concentrate on that. Oh, I didn't completely abandon the assigned course material (I still wanted a decent grade) but I devoted more time to my new-found interest.
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