Students fight back over course taught by AI
67 comments
·November 20, 2025zkmon
j45
Which universities aren't commercial and about cashflow?
jjmarr
Allegedly most of them, since they have non-profit mandates and are often tax-exempt.
The University of Staffordshire is a public university and is funded by the government to provide education to British people. Its mandate isn't "about cashflow".
In reality, that particular school created a private commercial subsidiary called "Staffordshire University Services". All new employees are hired by that subsidiary, which does have a mandate to generate cashflow.
CapitaineToinon
All universities outside of the US
HeinzStuckeIt
Your post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing campaigns in the Indian Subcontinent in order to get people to come and pay those sweet, sweet foreign-student fees.
zerkten
The original article is about a UK university. Cashflow and revenue generation is a very important topic for UK universities. They have copied the approaches of US universities, and in many cases have created overseas campuses when they have some name recognition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_branch_campus for examples.
gos9
The University mentioned in this article is in England.
danaris
Plenty of US colleges and universities are primarily about education and/or research, even today. Far from all, to be sure—and some are primarily about connections and the school name (primarily Ivies), rather than any of the above.
jjmarr
AI will continue to stratify education.
The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models.
Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
throwawaysleep
I kind of wonder whether we are past the point where waiting to be trained is feasible.
palmotea
> But after a term of AI-generated slides being read, at times, by an AI voiceover, James said he had lost faith in the programme and the people running it, worrying he had “used up two years” of his life on a course that had been done “in the cheapest way possible”.
This is the future guys, get used to it.
Herring
That's the Baumol effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
1) Two-Sector Economy: In Baumol and Bowen's observations, the economy is divided into two parts:
- A Progressive Sector: Productivity grows rapidly due to technology and automation (e.g., manufacturing, data processing).
- A Stagnant Sector: Productivity grows slowly, if at all, because the service is labor-intensive (e.g., a string quartet performance, a haircut, K-12 teaching).
2) Wage Linkage: Both sectors compete for labor from the same pool of workers. As productivity gains allow wages to rise in the progressive sector, the stagnant sector must also increase its wages to attract and retain employees.
3) Divergent Cost Impact:
- In the progressive sector, the higher wages are offset by the gains in productivity. The labor cost per unit of output can remain stable or even decrease.
- In the stagnant sector, there are no corresponding productivity gains to offset the higher wages. The labor cost per unit of service must therefore increase.
4) Resulting Price Trend: Consequently, the prices for services in the stagnant sector (e.g., concert tickets, college tuition, healthcare) constantly rise and faster than the prices for goods from the progressive sector (e.g., electronics, cars). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#/media/File:Pric...
5) A lot of European countries fund these expensive services through general taxation rather than direct user fees. So the cost goes up but it's always a certain percentage of GDP. In the US that's not going to fly, so there will be increasing pressure to automate teaching over time.
marstall
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc.
I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
nancyminusone
There's no problem with that.
It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
j4coh
Next try it on something rare you're an expert in, and be amazed at the low quality.
cogman10
But you aren't a student paying for a university education presumably taught by someone that has experience in the field.
Perhaps the insights are good or bad and that's fine if you can correct later with a conversation with your doctor. But would you want a doctor trained by the same AI?
Importantly, you have no idea what part or what percentage of the conversation was accurate. How much of it was a hallucination from a chi manipulator? How much of it was based on dated research? How much of it came from a random blog post by a crazy person?
eertami
I somewhat suspect you would not find it so amazing if you paid £9000/year for it, though.
IAmBroom
Well, that's certainly one piece of anecdata. I guess that refutes the experience of all the college students.
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locallost
I've had this experience as well, but I also noticed I am much less blown away when the information is put to the test.
So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.
j45
This type of use while asking for annotations for all facts can be insightful to have the start of an informed conversation with a professional.
sureglymop
The student confronting the teacher was great! Well done.
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DerC4ptain
Slides were generated via gamma obviously
josefritzishere
What peice of trash thought that was an appropriate thing to do?
IAmBroom
The real question.
Some human decision-maker is responsible.
josefritzishere
Were I a student I'd be coordinating a class-action lawsuit. The impropriety and lack of responsibility is staggering.
danishSuri1994
AI can help with content generation or scaffolding, but teaching is still a bidirectional feedback process. When the model can’t adapt to misunderstanding or context, students immediately feel the gap. It’s a UX failure more than a “should AI be allowed” issue
gdulli
We don't talk enough about AI as a vehicle for what's essentially austerity.
j45
Teaching isn't bi directional.
Understanding before application are two different steps.
The issues you're outlining can be solved by arranging technology to go through a process to satisfy the above.
Still, instruction, and instructors aren't really needing to be replaced, it's the silent elephant in the room that is rarely talked about that hopefully considers evolving.
IAmBroom
> Teaching isn't bi directional.
... said no decent teacher, ever. The flows aren't symmetrical, but they are bidirectional.
Der_Einzige
The obsession with “dialectics” as being seen as superior to autodidactic or didactic teaching is one of the greatest disasters in human history. Plato and Socrates can suck a big fat one for ruining human history by writing a bullshit justification for why educators should rule society and why they should act as the arbiters of the state and the arbiters of who eats lobster thermador and who starves.
“Those who can’t do… teach”.
onetokeoverthe
[dead]
Outrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces.
Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between multiple colleges.