Believe it or not, that other $60b isn’t one chunk of money, but other similar chunks of ~$20m that’s probably being spent in similarly idiotic ways. If this were an article about those, yes I probably would.
I get the joke, but CSUs are fairly inexpensive as far as universities go. Tuition at SJSU is about $9500 per school year for California residents. That's a year of education for almost 1700 students. It may not seem like a much money to some, but it certainly covers a lot.
The idea that AI is somehow at fault for the absolute fiscal disaster the UC and the CSU systems find themselves in is laughable at best and damaging at worst. These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA that was on a full academic scholarship) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry. Tuition has consistently gone up since the 70s, while housing, facility, classroom quality have all gone down.
It's been literally the biggest grift of the past 50 years[1]. Education should be free.
In real terms, tuition fees in public universities peaked in the early 2010s. They have not kept up with inflation since then. That explains a large part of the fiscal disaster.
Can you source this? My cursory research shows the opposite[1]. Imo, the fiscal disaster is in part due to enrollment declining (which, ironically enough, mainly affects low-income households).
Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online.
> Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online.
There exist parts or even degree courses in university education that cannot really be learned this way. Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment.
Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others.
Finally, keep in mind that computer science is "special" in the sense that:
- What the university teaches you or should teach you (a degree course at a university rather prepares you for an academic career in the field) makes you quite overqualified (in the academic sense) for many programming jobs. Such topics are possible, but in my opinion far from easy to learn by yourself.
- Many employers want very different skills from applicants, which often involve "fashionable" skills with a very short half-life. A university system is likely not the best kind of education system to teach this kind of skills: it rather (ideally) excels at teaching topics that are complicated, but have a much longer "half-life" before becoming outdated.
> Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.
What I can tell you is the following: a lot of academic topics are quite subtle - to get to more than a basic level, you have to learn things that are very subtle, and where you only can judge the correctness of the information years later (basically when you have finished your degree or even PhD).
Because of this, I would rather read the most renowned (and ideally hardest) textbooks in the respective area (if you really need to cheap out, download them at some shadow library) instead of trusting some AI.
I can tell you that for quite a lot of questions in my area of expertise, the answers that AIs gave were far from being sufficiently reliable for learners who want to get a deep knowledge about the topic, and the errors were often quite subtle.
In mathematics, for example, it is not uncommon to hang for hours over a page or even a paragraph, trying to understand why the statement holds - and this in a situation where the proof is for sure correct. Now imagine the situation of hanging over a page of text that you will need hours for understanding when you cannot even rely on the prior that the information in the text is correct ...
The information is how to use a lab, so you can do research, you know, the thing that happens largely on university campuses. (Now why taxpayer funded labs end up patenting things for private corporations, that’s what’s peculiar to me!)
Another example is history. It's theoretically possible to become an academic historian through private study and there are certainly no legal barriers to it, yet amateurs almost never make the transition except through higher education.
> These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry.
Find me a university that bans AI usage on campus in CS courses. I don't mind if students have access to AI and use it to help study, but I want some kind of assurance that they are able to build things without using AI.
As a hiring manager, I will immediately prioritize hiring graduates of that school. I can teach someone who knows how to code how to use Claude Code. I find the other way around quite difficult.
I heard they do CS exams on air-gapped machines at UC Berkley. Use of AI to do CS homework is strongly discouraged, and if someone cheated, it shows up at the exam...
Well seems like this is de facto the way companies are hiring right now. Unemployment for new grads is much higher than for people who have been in the industry for a while.
I don't care if they can write bubble sort off the top of their head. I do care that when they were in class, they had to go through the exercise of implementing bubble sort in their algorithm, realizing that they had an off-by-one error, identifying the problem, and fixing it. School is like working out at the gym, and AI is like bringing a forklift to the squat rack.
For a random person without relevant experience or education ~0%. The reason we care about education and experience is because it improves the odds they are worth interviewing.
It’s not like we were building great quality products beforehand. Can we stop with the anti-AI sanctimony ? Some build great stuff, and some terrible, and software has predominantly been garbage for 15 years or more.
Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. However, the layoffs happened at some of the CSU's where enrollment numbers are drastically down. I think Sonoma State is having a really bad time getting students and CSU Dominguez Hills has always had issues with attracting students compared to nearby CSU Long Beach. I'd imagine at some point these campuses may end up on the chopping block.
I briefly attended a CSU in the 90's and this was well discussed even back then with predicted population declines. There's just too many CSUs. You'll always need the ones like Stanislaus and Bakersfield to serve their communities and it turns out, they're the ones doing ok. However, there's too many in LA and SF, and the situation is not helped by housing costs in those cities. SFSU itself has had -30% enrollment in the past 10 years.
The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.
Can one really not imagine a case where the cheating machine being used by students is a bad thing for teachers? Does everything have to be "politically motivated"?
There are tons of reasons AI is actively making the school system worse (amongst many other aspects of society). Immediately jumping to "political coalition thing" seems strange.
Unions are always against whatever management wants. Then it becomes a bargaining chip for what the union wants. That's how collective bargaining works.
Why wouldn't the political coalition of teachers not be a "real" teacher-related reason? It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.
As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.
I think unions in industries where their workers are at risk of eventually getting replaced by AI are pretty universally against it, because protecting the jobs of members is the whole purpose of a union. It’s like how the teamsters are against self-driving cars.
> A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart.
The NYT often has a bias against AI, but the article's contents are actually a pretty reasonable summary of the different attitudes towards AI in academia. Then they went and slapped a terribly sensationalist headline on it, which doesn't seem well supported by the actual article.
If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline. It happens here too, and its really annoying because often the article has a much more nuanced picture than the headline would have you believe. In an era when people do read the article after reading the headline it's somewhat forgivable - getting someone's attention then they get the nuance, but in the internet era when people just read the headline it's anachronistic.
Sure, if it bleeds it leads. But I've been a news consumer since the 1980s and a reader of the NYT almost as long as it's had a web site. It is my strong impression that its headlines have gotten noticeably worse. The main one that annoys me, and I don't actually see an example of it on the main page right now, is the teaser headline that forces you to click through to know what the article is even about[^1].
[^1]: You can often inspect the URL to see the original descriptive headline before the clickbaiters got to it which makes it even more annoying.
Blame the economics of the Internet. Companies use clickbait because it works, there have been many examples of this, and if a company wants to stay revenue generating in this day and age it must use clickbait.
Quite funny to think that we might have AI models meticulously nudging newspaper editors in order to carefully control the public's Overton Window about AI, playing some 5d chess.
I don't discount that it's possible that NYT headline policy could have changed in the last decade, but sensationalism when it comes to newspaper headlines is the historical norm. "Clickbait" is an ancient phenomenon:
"In A History of News, Mitchell Stephens notes sensationalism can be found in the Ancient Roman gazette Acta Diurna, where official notices and announcements were presented daily on public message boards, the perceived content of which spread with enthusiasm in illiterate societies."
Yeah that title is absurd, tho it did make me read the whole thing out of pure incredulity. The “tearing itself apart” apparently refers to the fact that the CSU system spent $16M on AI tools during a $2B+ budget deficit, which… yeah. Doesn’t take an economics professor to see the problem with that thesis!
The author does seem interested in supporting the headline, but I think they're too good of a journalist to pull off the outrage. It mainly comes through in passages like this:
After I pointed out to Janos that Marx himself would have had a field day with MarxGPT, he laughed… by interacting with ChatGPT, he and his students solidified its role in the public education ecosystem; and their ability to do so was the result of the transfer of almost $17 million of worker-generated public funds to a private, for-profit company.
If this wasn’t the NYT, I’d assume this was a joke. Sadly, I think it is indeed intended as something of a slam dunk…
They do get to AI critics eventually, though obviously ‘activists dislike X’ isn’t really proof for ‘X is tearing us apart[, Lisa!]’. Namely,
“We feel like a guinea pig for what A.I. is going to do to higher education,” Kenney said. The embrace of generative A.I., she went on, is “a step down the path of creating a really different kind of future citizen and worker.” This kind of student would be intellectually passive, less likely to see themselves as agents of their own lives.
I think everyone would agree they’re “guinea pigs”, as are we all in a way — such is the curse of living in interesting times. The rest seems pretty plainly speculative, though.
This winter, the [critics at SFSU] circulated a petition asking the chancellor’s office to invest in protecting faculty jobs and academic programs rather than renew the OpenAI contract.
I asked my students how they felt about having AI teacher avatars and they had a lot of negative things to say. The one thing that stood out the most to me was "it's disrespectful".
A lot of this is about admins, but I also find it weird when university lecturers embrace LLMs, which are fundamentally opposed to the principles of academia as I understand it.
Isn't this one of the better uses of AI? Any librarian would have knowledge gaps and bias. Librarian-provided info is best-effort and not considered perfect. They're librarians, not subject matter experts. An AI could give (and cache, since books don't change) summaries of any book, and compare them, far better than a librarian except for niche areas a particular librarian might have read themselves.
The need for physical libraries is fading anyway. I love books, and I spent many happy hours as a student (a long time ago) in the uni library, doing research the only way you could back then.
But now ...? For STEM, at least, everything is digital. You don't need to go to the stacks to get an old journal article.
And yes, it's sad, and it feels like an era is ending. But that's because it is.
Physical libraries still serve as a place students go to study. It's not about the books, it's having a designated quiet place along with meeting rooms and what not, in addition to computers and printers they can use.
> In addition to the welcome message for incoming students, she has used her A.I. avatar to communicate with parents and alumni in languages she does not speak. She said she was working on creating a kind of hologram of herself that could do the same.
This reminded me of back when it was popular on websites to use transparent video to have owners of companies virtually "walk" onto the webpage and talk directly to the user. Stuff like https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson... There's a similar awkward period right now as people try to figure out AI.
> Some have chosen to link their fate to the technology, dedicating themselves to learning prompt engineering, while others are staging a revolt against it.
I don't understand why these are seen as mutually exclusive choices. I think I would be in both of these camps if I were a student.
Can't speak for the OP, but I find LLMs extremely useful in some work contexts, while also being horrified and appalled at how my Uni is trying to apply these tools ad nauseum on everything.
So yes, both attitudes are simultaneously possible.
a very good question. and yes, it's the protest against using AI while knowing if it doens't work out the way the protestor intended then they will fall behind. so the protestor wants everyone to stop and pay attention and think about what students and teachers are being asked to embrace, while they are also going ahead and using it because they know otherwise they'll hurt their chances at success if the tide doesn't subside.
it's okay to be in multiple camps when things change fast. its a survival instinct.
It's like you're making the best you can of the current situation you find yourself in as an individual while also working toward changing the overall situation.
I feel like adding more internships with the companies like OpenAI, Oracle, etc would go a long way in improving outcomes and is probably even cheaper than donating licenses and compute.
So peanuts.
The public universities budget in California is something like 60 billion.
This isn't even a rounding error.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's been literally the biggest grift of the past 50 years[1]. Education should be free.
[1] https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png
[1] https://myelearningworld.com/cost-of-college-vs-inflation/
You pay for the rubber stamp.
There exist parts or even degree courses in university education that cannot really be learned this way. Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment.
Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others.
Finally, keep in mind that computer science is "special" in the sense that:
- What the university teaches you or should teach you (a degree course at a university rather prepares you for an academic career in the field) makes you quite overqualified (in the academic sense) for many programming jobs. Such topics are possible, but in my opinion far from easy to learn by yourself.
- Many employers want very different skills from applicants, which often involve "fashionable" skills with a very short half-life. A university system is likely not the best kind of education system to teach this kind of skills: it rather (ideally) excels at teaching topics that are complicated, but have a much longer "half-life" before becoming outdated.
Why do you need equipment to learn something? You can learn the information outside of a lab.
>Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others.
Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.
What I can tell you is the following: a lot of academic topics are quite subtle - to get to more than a basic level, you have to learn things that are very subtle, and where you only can judge the correctness of the information years later (basically when you have finished your degree or even PhD).
Because of this, I would rather read the most renowned (and ideally hardest) textbooks in the respective area (if you really need to cheap out, download them at some shadow library) instead of trusting some AI.
I can tell you that for quite a lot of questions in my area of expertise, the answers that AIs gave were far from being sufficiently reliable for learners who want to get a deep knowledge about the topic, and the errors were often quite subtle.
In mathematics, for example, it is not uncommon to hang for hours over a page or even a paragraph, trying to understand why the statement holds - and this in a situation where the proof is for sure correct. Now imagine the situation of hanging over a page of text that you will need hours for understanding when you cannot even rely on the prior that the information in the text is correct ...
There is a single person responsible for this.
His name is Reagan.
Sooooo... A few days of claude code "thinking", for a few hundred people?
As a hiring manager, I will immediately prioritize hiring graduates of that school. I can teach someone who knows how to code how to use Claude Code. I find the other way around quite difficult.
(not suggesting this is an effective or smart move).
The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.
Is this a political coalition thing or is there a real teacher-related reason they don't like it?
As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.
No, but that would make it a "political coalition thing", which is why I asked
Well, of course. Horse buggy manufacturers and drivers were dead set against automobiles.
The NYT often has a bias against AI, but the article's contents are actually a pretty reasonable summary of the different attitudes towards AI in academia. Then they went and slapped a terribly sensationalist headline on it, which doesn't seem well supported by the actual article.
This has been the case for essentially all newspapers since time immemorial. Reporters write the articles, editors write the headlines.
[^1]: You can often inspect the URL to see the original descriptive headline before the clickbaiters got to it which makes it even more annoying.
"In A History of News, Mitchell Stephens notes sensationalism can be found in the Ancient Roman gazette Acta Diurna, where official notices and announcements were presented daily on public message boards, the perceived content of which spread with enthusiasm in illiterate societies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensationalism
(* in keeping with this site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
The author does seem interested in supporting the headline, but I think they're too good of a journalist to pull off the outrage. It mainly comes through in passages like this:
If this wasn’t the NYT, I’d assume this was a joke. Sadly, I think it is indeed intended as something of a slam dunk…They do get to AI critics eventually, though obviously ‘activists dislike X’ isn’t really proof for ‘X is tearing us apart[, Lisa!]’. Namely,
I think everyone would agree they’re “guinea pigs”, as are we all in a way — such is the curse of living in interesting times. The rest seems pretty plainly speculative, though. …hopefully an economics professor chimes in!Isn't this one of the better uses of AI? Any librarian would have knowledge gaps and bias. Librarian-provided info is best-effort and not considered perfect. They're librarians, not subject matter experts. An AI could give (and cache, since books don't change) summaries of any book, and compare them, far better than a librarian except for niche areas a particular librarian might have read themselves.
But now ...? For STEM, at least, everything is digital. You don't need to go to the stacks to get an old journal article.
And yes, it's sad, and it feels like an era is ending. But that's because it is.
This reminded me of back when it was popular on websites to use transparent video to have owners of companies virtually "walk" onto the webpage and talk directly to the user. Stuff like https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson... There's a similar awkward period right now as people try to figure out AI.
I don't understand why these are seen as mutually exclusive choices. I think I would be in both of these camps if I were a student.
But since that’s not going to happen it’s in everyone’s self interest to use AI as effectively as possible.
It’s the world’s biggest Prisoner’s Dilemma.
So yes, both attitudes are simultaneously possible.
it's okay to be in multiple camps when things change fast. its a survival instinct.
Why is it always the same kind of intellectually challenged people who need custom avatars?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU
“Our professors were pretty anti-A.I., and then C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI and things changed,”
Ok, another corrupt university run by bribes.