May 27, 2026 — 5:00am
My stepdaughter is in her final year of high school and I am an academic, yet I’ve recently advised her to think twice before enrolling in university.
Why? Because right now kids are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have a terrible campus experience while being graded on who can write the best AI prompts.
In the three years since ChatGPT was released we have arrived at a point in which all of Australia’s universities are committing widespread, industrial-scale fraud. The students who began their studies back then are now graduating and entering the workforce, and we’ll soon begin to see the results of a real-time experiment in degree by GPT.
The value of a tertiary qualification was being undermined long before AI. We’ve seen plenty of grade inflation, decreasing admissions standards, dumbing down of courses, commercial essay-writing operations and other forms of cheating. But now every student can outsource almost every facet of the learning process to an AI assistant – from lecture notes to readings summaries to asking Gemini or Claude to curate their tutorial engagement. To achieve a high distinction one does not need to attend a single lecture or read a single text. So, why bother?
