Higher education faces crisis as students rely on AI for thinking

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Universities are basically training students to be worse than ChatGPT. Academia is having a full-blown existential crisis, and honestly? It’s about time.

Professors across the globe are watching in horror as their students basically become human ChatGPT clones—except way more expensive and infinitely less reliable.

According to Business Insider, South African researcher Anitia Lubbe says universities are failing to teach critical thinking as students let AI do their thinking for them.

Lubbe, an associate professor at North-West University, first outlined these concerns in an essay for The Conversation.

She argues that higher education is “focusing only on policing AI use” instead of asking whether students are genuinely learning.

Most assessments, The Conversation reports, still reward memorization and rote learning — “exactly the tasks that AI performs best.”

As first reported by Business Insider, Lubbe recommends five strategies for universities:

• Teach students to evaluate AI output as a skill
• Scaffold assignments across deeper levels of thinking
• Promote ethical and transparent AI use
• Encourage peer review of AI-assisted work
• Reward reflection over rote results.

Kimberley Hardcastle, a business professor at Northumbria University, warned that AI allows students to “produce sophisticated outputs without the cognitive journey traditionally required to create them,” calling it an “intellectual revolution” that risks handing control of knowledge to big tech.

Ted Dintersmith, a former venture capitalist turned educator, tells Business Insider that “schools are already training kids to follow distantly in the footsteps of AI,” leaving them unprepared for a future job market dominated by automation.

According to Business Insider, researchers warn that college exams increasingly test skills that AI can replicate, making plagiarism and academic dishonesty a “wicked problem.”

Many U.S. colleges are grappling with an identity crisis, struggling to balance innovation and tradition as AI reshapes the academic landscape.

Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com.