DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: $400K for AI Cheaters Luxury Camp: How many colleges will survive?

“I just don’t see a world in which parents continue to indefinitely fork up nearly half a million to send their kids to AI Cheating Young Adult Luxury Camp,” tweets Tyler Austin Harper, a professor turned Atlantic writer. “Some will, but how many? Enough to sustain most colleges?”

He envisions a “black-swan-esque event where significant chunks of higher ed collapse suddenly.” Colleges are playing chicken with parents, he tweets. “The wager seems to be that college is so entrenched as the default that parents will continue to pay for it even as the value proposition and quality collapse due to AI. I think that bluff gets called.”

The Syracuse University is in trouble, reports Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez in the Wall Street Journal. Total cost of attendance at the private university increased to $98,544 this year. Enrollment fell short.

Syracuse borrowed “nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms,” they write. To fill the dorms, the university may need to lower admissions standards, risking its prestige and reducing its appeal to students whose parents can pay tuition.

To be fair, most universities have done much worse than that to damage their prestige.