Earlier this month, The New Yorker released an article titled “What Happens After AI Destroys College Writing?” The nutshell was that the rampant use of AI to write papers, combined with the widespread practice of grade inflation (lowering academic standards), has forever changed what we expect from a college education. Writing skills, it seems, are optional.
But it’s a lot more than that, and the implications for tomorrow’s employers are profound. The article follows the thought processes of multiple undergraduates at New York University, representative of so many of their peers. These are smart kids who are now in the driver’s seat of deciding when to take the process of learning seriously and when to hand it off to an algorithm and sea of servers to do it for them.
This is your future workforce.
Fight It? Or Concede?
Colleges, even the most prestigious ones, are overwhelmed by the problem. Rather than fight it, many are trying to work with it. Teach by incorporating the responsible use of AI. But how? It requires controlling the environment. No take-home tests. Use of paper tests. Oral exams.
Many are trying, but it’s wildly complicated. Just ask high school teachers, who are getting the problem four years earlier. You’d think that the challenge would be a little less pervasive in the honors and AP classes, but it’s worse. The grade pressure is just too great.
Just ask one of the few high school honors students who refuses to use AI. For in-class projects, her ChatGPT-brained classmates (now future college freshmen) consistently relied on her answers in class when they couldn’t hide their phones. Meanwhile, they have 4.4 GPAs and are in the National Honor Society, while the AI-refuser gets As and Bs and just misses out on the NHS cut-off. Not National Honor Society material.
Now, she hates AI. Won’t use it. She can think for herself. She can problem-solve and out-reason every other 18-year-old in the room. Entering college, competing with other freshmen racing ahead at the speed of ChatGPT, she’s bound to fall academically behind.
After all, college now looks like this:
He opened Claude on his laptop. I [the New Yorker article’s author] noticed a chat that mentioned abolition. “We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class,” he explained, referring to the nineteenth-century Jamaican abolitionist. “But, obviously, I wasn’t tryin’ to read that.” He had prompted Claude for a summary, but it was too long for him to read in the ten minutes he had before class started. [He turned the AI-generated notes into concise bullet points, then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.] Alex searched until he found a paper for an art-history class, about a museum exhibition. He had gone to the show, taken photographs of the images and the accompanying wall text, and then uploaded them to Claude, asking it to generate a paper according to the professor’s instructions.
To get exactly what he wanted, the student refined the prompt a few times, and ultimately, received the equivalent of an A-minus.
Think for Me
Today’s future workforce doesn’t just use AI to produce schoolwork. They use it to plan their schedules, get dating advice, and even for mental health treatment. They use AI to think. They also use it to avoid the discomfort of pushing through difficulty.
You’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of AI means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether.
Not every future employee is using AI, of course, but studies show that at least one-third of them are (and that’s a low estimate).
This includes students at even the most elite schools—and why not? AI can get them an A, or close to it. (Isn’t it the final result that matters?) The NYT article reports that one Harvard undergraduate got approval to conduct an experiment in which AI wrote papers that had been assigned in seven courses. “The AI skated by with a 3.57 GPA, a little below the school’s average.”
Granted, colleges are adapting. They are administering oral exams. They are using old-fashioned blue books for in-class assignments. But it’s not the norm, not yet. In the meantime, these institutions are churning out graduates with resumes on Indeed.
Sure, many of these students do take seriously the classes that pertain to their majors, but the challenge is that you can’t always edit out what appears to be extraneous details in the real world. Especially since the “extraneous” details can end up mattering more than one might think.
Impact on Employers
Ultimately, what printing industry leaders must grapple with is that AI, while tremendously useful in churning out certain types of marketing copy, analyzing customer data, and writing code, is also churning out impatient, superficial thinkers. AI enables students to breeze through tasks that once required deep reading, analysis, and revision, all without learning a thing.
As a result, employers may encounter job candidates who appear highly productive but struggle with:
- Independent problem-solving
- Deep, original thinking
- Intellectual perseverance when tasks aren’t instantly solvable
Consider, too, that their resumes (especially when they are right out of school) might not reflect their true capabilities. When everyone gets an A, what is a 4.0 GPA really worth? When you can design that project in seconds using Gen AI, does that really count as a marketable skill?
How can you adapt? In your interview process, ask open-ended questions. When asking about specific tasks or accomplishments, ask interviewees to articulate their thought process. “How did you solve this problem (or come to this conclusion)?” Think “Working Girl” (the original, of course). Also do more than look at their (AI-generated) resumes. Ask them how they thought through hard problems and what they would do differently next time.
In other words, find out if they can think.
