Universities should be places which are at the bleeding edge of development and providing society with the best new ideas/tech, etc has to offer. Junior workers should be hotbeds of exciting talent which have the ability to revolutionise industries.
By creating such milquetoast environments to study in, which are seemingly scared or unable to prepare people for the future, students are being done a disservice.
Far too many people are far too comfortable with their cushty positions, and it's not doing the youth any favours.
1. Everyone already employed is "cheating" and not using fundamentals. Therefore to prepare them for the workforce them must just learn to "cheat" effectively... at the expense of the "ideals" (read: direct skills or knowledge.)
2. "Milquetoast environments" -- A general "tough love" trope, but I'm unclear on how this tough-school will somehow match the unique issues of the tough-work. Mix incompatible types of difficulty and people are just worse-off.
For that matter, why not flip the argument around? If the future competition everyone slinging stuff through LLM slop all day, perhaps ensuring students have fundamental skills to differentiate themselves becomes more important, rather than less.
>In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything. They would embezzle dorm funds to spend on their friends and lie about having Covid to get the UberEats credits that the school offered to those in quarantine. Some kids I knew published a paper that claimed a groundbreaking new A.I. advancement. Online sleuths quickly pointed out that it appeared to be just a stolen Chinese model, to which the two Stanford co-authors responded by blaming the plagiarism on the third author.
>In junior year, 49 percent of the 849 computer science majors who responded to an annual campus survey said they would rather cheat on an exam than fail. A friend of mine captured the school’s ethos while we were discussing the tech hardware and other items our student club neglected to return to corporate sponsors. It was all, I recall her saying, “just a little bit of fraud.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/chatgpt-ai-colleg...