Posted on 07/31/2025 7:00:27 AM PDT by Angelino97
Students don’t have the same incentives to talk to their professors — or even their classmates — anymore. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have given them a new path to self-sufficiency. Instead of asking a professor for help on a paper topic, students can go to a chatbot. Instead of forming a study group, students can ask AI for help. These chatbots give them quick responses, on their own timeline.
For students juggling school, work and family responsibilities, that ease can seem like a lifesaver. And maybe turning to a chatbot for homework help here and there isn’t such a big deal in isolation. But every time a student decides to ask a question of a chatbot instead of a professor or peer or tutor, that’s one fewer opportunity to build or strengthen a relationship, and the human connections students make on campus are among the most important benefits of college.
Julia Freeland-Fisher studies how technology can help or hinder student success at the Clayton Christensen Institute. She said the consequences of turning to chatbots for help can compound.
“Over time, that means students have fewer and fewer people in their corner who can help them in other moments of struggle, who can help them in ways a bot might not be capable of,” she said.
As colleges further embed ChatGPT and other chatbots into campus life, Freeland-Fisher warns lost relationships may become a devastating unintended consequence.
Asking for Help
Christian Alba said he has never turned in an AI-written assignment. Alba, 20, attends College of the Canyons, a large community college north of Los Angeles, where he is studying business and history. And while he hasn’t asked ChatGPT to write any papers for him, he has turned to the technology when a blank page and a blinking cursor seemed overwhelming. He has asked for an outline. He has asked for ideas to get him started on an introduction. He has asked for advice about what to prioritize first.
“It’s kind of hard to just start something fresh off your mind,” Alba said. “I won’t lie. It’s a helpful tool.” Alba has wondered, though, whether turning to ChatGPT with these sorts of questions represents an overreliance on AI. But Alba, like many others in higher education, worries primarily about AI use as it relates to academic integrity, not social capital. And that’s a problem.
Jean Rhodes, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has spent decades studying the way college students seek help on campus and how the relationships formed during those interactions end up benefitting the students long-term. Rhodes doesn’t begrudge students integrating chatbots into their workflows, as many of their professors have, but she worries that students will get inferior answers to even simple-sounding questions, like, “how do I change my major?”
A chatbot might point a student to the registrar’s office, Rhodes said, but had a student asked the question of an advisor, that person may have asked important follow-up questions — why the student wants the change, for example, which could lead to a deeper conversation about a student’s goals and roadblocks.
“We understand the broader context of students’ lives,” Rhodes said. “They’re smart but they’re not wise, these tools.”
Rhodes and one of her former doctoral students, Sarah Schwartz, created a program called Connected Scholars to help students understand why it’s valuable to talk to professors and have mentors. The program helped them hone their networking skills and understand what people get out of their networks over the course of their lives — namely, social capital.
Connected Scholars is offered as a semester-long course at U Mass Boston, and a forthcoming paper examines outcomes over the last decade, finding students who take the course are three times more likely to graduate. Over time, Rhodes and her colleagues discovered that the key to the program’s success is getting students past an aversion to asking others for help.
Students will make a plethora of excuses to avoid asking for help, Rhodes said, ticking off a list of them: “‘I don’t want to stand out,’ ‘I don’t want people to realize I don’t fit in here,’ ‘My culture values independence,’ ‘I shouldn’t reach out,’ ‘I’ll get anxious,’ ‘This person won’t respond.’ If you can get past that and get them to recognize the value of reaching out, it’s pretty amazing what happens.”
Connections Are Key
Seeking human help doesn’t only leave students with the resolution to a single problem, it gives them a connection to another person. And that person, down the line could become a friend, a mentor or a business partner — a “strong tie,” as social scientists describe their centrality to a person’s network. They could also become a “weak tie” who a student may not see often, but could, importantly, still offer a job lead or crucial social support one day.
Daniel Chambliss, a retired sociologist from Hamilton College, emphasized the value of relationships in his 2014 book, “How College Works,” co-authored with Christopher Takacs. Over the course of their research, the pair found that the key to a successful college experience boiled down to relationships, specifically two or three close friends and one or two trusted adults. Hamilton College goes out of its way to make sure students can form those relationships, structuring work-study to get students into campus offices and around faculty and staff, making room for students of varying athletic abilities on sports teams, and more.
Chambliss worries that AI-driven chatbots make it too easy to avoid interactions that can lead to important relationships. “We’re suffering epidemic levels of loneliness in America,” he said. “It’s a really major problem, historically speaking. It’s very unusual, and it’s profoundly bad for people.”
As students increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for help and even casual conversation, Chambliss predicted it will make people even more isolated: “It’s one more place where they won’t have a personal relationship.”
In fact, a recent study by researchers at the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that the most frequent users of ChatGPT — power users — were more likely to be lonely and isolated from human interaction.
“What scares me about that is that Big Tech would like all of us to be power users,” said Freeland-Fisher. “That’s in the fabric of the business model of a technology company.”
Yesenia Pacheco is preparing to re-enroll in Long Beach City College for her final semester after more than a year off. Last time she was on campus, ChatGPT existed, but it wasn’t widely used. Now she knows she’s returning to a college where ChatGPT is deeply embedded in students’ as well as faculty and staff’s lives, but Pacheco expects she’ll go back to her old habits — going to her professors’ office hours and sticking around after class to ask them questions. She sees the value.
She understands why others might not. Today’s high schoolers, she has noticed, are not used to talking to adults or building mentor-style relationships. At 24, she knows why they matter.
“A chatbot,” she said, “isn’t going to give you a letter of recommendation.”
Smart people know that still the key to success is networking with other human beings.
Simple solution, bring back Blue Books.
My thoughts exactly. “What do you think? Do you know how to write?”
That’s why you pay attention in elementary school. You should be able to establish a thought process for more than 10 seconds, brainstorm, jot down ideas, organize, write, edit, proofread, and submit writing that communicates your thinking and ideas so that other people can understand.
Not being helped by many professors using AI to grade their papers now.
I still am in touch with 8 of my college friends from 35+ years ago, and we’re in wildly different fields. Mostly met in mandatory core classes, studied and hung out together. We all went our seperate ways, but always touched base a few times a year and still do.
The year after I graduated from the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB), they did away with blue books. They also changed from a quarter system to semesters. Networking is important as a part of the college experience. AI. does away with a big part of that.
"May you live in interesting times."
Back when I was teaching, one of the biggest struggles was to get the kids to stop yapping with each other instead of doing their work.
Class.........Class......SHUT UP!!!!!!!
MORE LEGACY OF “PARTICIPATION TROPHIES” IMO
Blunt AI reality...
Employment and compensation in those two occupations are about to go down.
Waaaay down.
🎩🏌️
If it’s feasible, oral exams would also be good, because you have to recall just what you turned in, and if you just have AI do it, you’ll be exposed.
I like to play “Crowder” with AI, I state an assertion and then I tell it, “Change My Mind”. It works. And I’ve even gotten the AI to admit a few times, that I am right.
Garbage in, garbage out.
I agree they are being prepared for a future in which managers lead teams composed of both human workers and bot helpers while the obvious reality is no one knows how much “improving as a human” is going to be an important part of the equation in any field. What we do know is that investing in genuine human relationships is crucial for our ability to cope and thrive, is critical for our overall wellbeing and cannot yet be replicated by AI.
I will predict more like garbage, garbage. In the long run I bet I am correct.
I recently used Grok to create templates for VA Disability Nexus Letters, etc. I plugged in all the parameters and it spit out strategies and guidance. I then took all that information and asked Grok if it was true...again a reivew. Then I asked for Grok to re-write certain templates so it was more human sounding. Good.
Now I have a package and guidlines to take with my VSO (human review no doubt) so that the claim will pass all muster and be successful.
Same with my trilogy. I wrote two books featuring my two headed turtle. The books are suitable fo all humans. The third book has lots of chapters but not tied together too well. I plugged in he first two books, all the notes on the third book and let Grok point out some plot points and directions I can take the story.
I will do the writing and perhaps I can use AI as a editor looking for grammatical mistakes, etc, but I regards AI as a tool, like a pen to assist, not necessarily create out of whole cloth for my projects.
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