The dek gives the game away. The "future of the workforce" is all that matters. Why had we been doing all this gaining of knowledge in college all this time?
this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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The point of an undergraduate degree isn't knowledge; knowledge is only the first level in Bloom's Taxonomy, a set of six levels of how people understand different topics.
The problem with the use of AI in college is that students are supposed to get to the application point in undergrad and that college is supposed to provide that practice. Using AI in college is like using a machine to lift weights. Sure, the weights are moved, but it doesn't benefit the person who needed the exercise.
Ignoring that Bloom's Taxonomy is outdated and disproven (not that it was ever based on empirical data)...
students are supposed to get to the application point in undergrad and that college is supposed to provide that practice
This hasn't been true for a long time, ime; colleges have mostly been about laying foundations for years, ever since we moved to a gen-ed system that disfavored any kind of specialized learning at the cost of any usable skills (and since defunding and prison-ifying high schools made even gen-ed baselines not happen in practice). They've been having to make up for what kids aren't getting in high school, but that also means that by the time they leave with an undergrad they have almost no experience of applying their knowledge to real-world-repevant problems.
Even masters programs are like that.
Yeah, but part of it is because students complained, the current ranking of universities don't include quality of undergraduate education, and the public didn't really understand what college was for when providing funding with strings attached.
Why had we been doing all this gaining of knowledge in college all this time?
So someone with the wealth and power to act on that knowledge can use it to fuck over mankind for more wealth and power.
Hmm, depending on whose opinion you listen to, education systems have always been built around workforce productivity:
RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms
"... the current system was structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution
[...]
it was driven by an economic imperative of the time
[...]
we have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism, and in the image of it."
You can argue that primary and secondary school was about workforce productivity, but college was designed for leadership training.
Well... the first colleges were established to train clergy, because reading and writing were rare skills at the time, and there was a demand for trained clergy who worked as clerks, accountants and record keepers for nobles who could not themselves read or write, which I think just circles back to the workforce productivity thing.
This is also true for Confucian schools in China. The students were not clergy in the religious sense, but they learned reading, writing and tradition in order to become useful administrators for local rulers.
Colleges haven't been training people how to read for centuries; it has been assumed that people entering college could read and write with a pen for a long time and college shifted with it.
And the collegiate system wasn't based on Confucian teaching styles.