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?
The problem is that AI depends upon human research, as it cannot do research itself on how to such things recover locked phones, R+R torque converter, etc. run experiments, etc.
Obviously, brick and mortar are needed for lab and clinical experience....but...the rest?
Absolutely, no!
This is true for engineering, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, and almost any other STEM field.
( And...I have a doctorate in a STEM field.)
My homeschooled children entered college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. They did very well.
Imagine. Graduating 3 or 4 years ahead adds up to big bucks ( millions) over a life’s career.
When was one of them needed to learn calculus?
There was one particular experiment where only 20% of the students taking the class figured out the right solution. I was slated from my group to present on that experiment (side note: I split from my two partners on the analysis, because I realized they were making a huge mistake in their solution. They wouldn't budge).
I was one of 20%. I gave my presentation, and the professor slapped his hand down and said to the effect:"See? That's what this class was about! I had one student that actually told me:'We didn't learn that in class.' But the point is to apply your knowledge to look fot the solution!".
Now, we DID actually learn the subject in class, but it required recognizing the data and understanding what the data was saying.
Side note: the 80% who got it wrong tried to take a slope of an exponential curve suggested by the data. Can't do that unless you plot the points on a logrhythmic plot. Then you can take the slope and use it, and only if certain conditions are met.
Point is...book learning works. May even get you good marks on tests. But real world experience can throw something at you that book learning alone won't resolve.
This was in 2023—when AI was much much dumber than it is now?
Stunning.
So much productivity for everybody.
Indeed. Largely replaced search engines for me. One of the things it is exceptionally good at summarizing an article, analyzing it, showing arguements pro and con, and presenting its results nicely formatted, However, it does not do the research that it draws from, and sometimes it errs.
And as a teacher lamented, students mostly use AI to do their homework, and she cannot stop the practice.
Then there is the bias issue.
“The problem is that AI depends upon human research, as it cannot do research itself”
You are describing the publicly available heavily curated (think balls and chains) version of AI.
The stuff in the lab can be very creative.
More technical discussion:
https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/08/openai-huggingface-breach/
SI. Not AI.
A college lab is not the real world.
You must have taken a college course in reasoning.
We were not discussing that. Well, I surely wasn’t.
Question: Are homeschool resource businesses providing homeschooling tools, texts and advice based on AI homeschool programs?
Seems like a natural. Weingarten will not be happy.
” The problem is that AI depends upon human research, as it cannot do research itself on how to such things recover locked phones, R+R torque converter, etc. run experiments, etc.”
Modern AI can accelerate research by rapidly reviewing literature, proposing hypotheses, analyzing data, writing code for simulations, or assisting with design. In purely digital or computational domains it can explore possibilities at high speed. But the core claim remains accurate: for embodied, experimental, or hardware-dependent tasks (phone recovery, automotive R&R, physical experiments, etc.), AI is limited to consulting and rearranging human research rather than conducting it itself.
School administrators are pushing it. Got to spend more money on hiring more administrators!
Agree!
But cost!
A quick check shows, as expected, homeschool resource companies are utilizing AI quite extensively for data, texts and personalized tutoring.
But, parents can elect to use the traditional non-AI dominated homeschool paths, if they are more comfortable with it.
WRONG!
How about:
To get drunk
To buy friends at greek houses
To be indoctrinated....ok, I call truce on that one
To give women lifelong anxiety training
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