Posted on 09/28/2026 12:02:18 PM PDT by SmokingJoe
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn't just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
The AI didn't just give the students answers. It used strict pedagogical guardrails. It guided. It questioned. It forced the students to do the cognitive work.
It offered perfect, one-to-one tutoring, personalized to the exact moment a student misunderstood a concept.
That level of attention is mathematically impossible to scale in a physical lecture hall.
For a thousand years, the university was the only place to get a premium education.
Now, it’s the bottleneck.
If AI can double your learning speed for a fraction of the cost, what exactly are students taking on decades of debt to pay for?
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bfl
I have wondered for years why schools don’t let every student learn at their own pace with Khan Academy or similar video instruction.
Notebook LLM is a great learning tool.
The reason for the elite universities (not the state universities) is social networking, not education.
Universities particularly stare universities will concentrate on their new primary mission of providing sports entertainment!
Not sure how to say this...
... This article was written by AI.
I’m sure if it. Take a step back. Every sentence is meaningless. It just makes ridiculous statement after ridiculous statement. Colorful metaphors queued behind the last colorful metaphor.
This is garbage.
AI has a football team?
But where’s the actual study reported , or is this, “persons who were not authorized to discuss the study , but had knowledge of it .”
one of the biggest things you pay for with an elite college education is..
access to quality marriage prospects.
Because it exposes the incompetence of many of the teachers the administration and the uselessness of the teachers unions. It’s always about money.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6
“The present study took place during the Fall 2023 semester in Physical Sciences 2 (PS2), which is an introductory physics class for the life sciences and is Harvard’s largest physics class (N = 233). Students were randomly assigned to two groups, respecting the constraint that students who regularly worked together in class during peer instruction were placed in the same group in order to maximize the effectiveness of their in-class learning. The demographics of the two groups were comparable (see table S2A), as were previous measures of their physics background knowledge “
“Learning gains were measured by comparing the post-test scores of the AI group and the in-class active learning group to the pre-test scores of the two groups combined. Students in the AI group exhibited a higher median (M) post-score (M = 4.5, N = 142) compared to those in the in-class active learning group (M = 3.5, N = 174). The median learning gains for students, relative to the pre-test baseline (M = 2.75, N = 316), in the AI-tutored group were over doubleFootnote 5 those for students in the in-class active learning group.”
Now days universities exist for a place to grow ivy.
Get thee to a swunnery!
Ivy league schools are more about making connections than education. Catch 22 is you already have to have connections to be admitted.
insert Carlin quote here.
In other words, people who are going to take the final exam, put the textbook on the shelf , and , porospectively never do Physics again. Not really eliminating university. I’d guess if they tried even something like experiments with LASERs in their homes, the outcones for the two grops would differ substantially. But I am really glad this kind of instruction will work its way dowm to homeschoolers .
Re: “group work”
Group work sucks! ....a complete waste of time, but attendance is mandatory. I am currently studying Biochemistry.
If it weren’t for the more expensive version of ChatGPT, I would be failing. AI is a terrific teacher.
Personally, I think just one exam taken at a testing service should be enough to award a credential. The cost should be about $50 rather than the $2,600 my local state university charges.
Even though I will be 80 in a few weeks,I am not auditing. I am taking it for a grade.
Universities aren’t intended to teach everyone. They are intended to weed out those who don’t learn. Incompetent instructors who can’t speak English are a feature, not a bug, in the system.
Weed out? No. Not if they can help it. Heck I recently read an article about a student at a CT university who cannot read or write. Yet there she is, a student in the university… Colleges don’t want to weed anyone out they want to collect tuition and fees for providing a non-education. That’s their purpose today.
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