If AI kills online grading sooner or later everyone will know. What will happen to the reputation of online higher education among employers? What will happen to the demand for online higher education?
Not just online is threatened
AI is creating a grading catastrophe for fully online courses, as my struggles with oral exams showed. But it’s also causing a crisis across all education, because AI can be used for any work done outside class. And even some in-person courses use online tests. Grading is now hard everywhere, and the more a course or degree is online, the worse the problem.
Imagine the TikTok videos
The mainstream elite media are ringing alarms about this crisis for higher ed in general. The especial problems of online education, however, are still found only in niche places. Reddit threads by professors detail their experiences and conclude, “online degrees are meaningless.” Meanwhile the subreddit r/cheatonlineproctor has students trumpeting their cheating successes and offering advice.
How long before these realities hit popular culture? The comedy potential is endless—cheaters bragging to classmates, clueless professors convinced students did the work, and powerless professors knowing they didn’t. And what if popular culture became filled with employers stuck with graduates who can’t do what their degrees promised?
TikTok videos for the youth. Streaming sitcoms for us older folks.
What employers want from higher ed
But would a broken grading system leave employers burned?
Employers may use degrees to determine the extent potential employees have the skills employers want. Skills can be narrow, like a specific programming language, or broad, like communication. Call this the certification value of higher ed. If grades and degrees don’t measure skills, the certification value is gone.
Employers also use degrees to determine the extent potential employees have other traits not directly taught. Traits like general cognitive ability or conscientiousness. This is the signaling value of education.
The original—quite cynical—signaling theory goes roughly like this. Students learn nothing in college, or at least nothing rewarded in the labor market. Smarter students finish faster and with less effort. Therefore, less smart students drop out because it’s not worth their time and effort, and only smart people graduate. Employers want smart people, so they hire people with degrees. Degrees signal smartness.
Later the idea evolved: degrees signal conscientiousness. Getting a degree shows sustained commitment to doing whatever the college requires. And there is empirical evidence. Degree holders earn more than people one course short of a degree.
AI and online education, separately and especially combined, erode signaling. If grades and degrees require no effort and no cognitive ability, then grades and degrees signal neither conscientiousness nor cognitive ability.
Whither higher education?
Higher education serves many purposes. Many, like citizenship and enjoyment of learning, have nothing to do with jobs. And some job-related purposes work fine in the age of AI. People can still learn skills to use at work—if they want to.
Demand for higher education comes from many sources—signaling, certification, acquiring skills, and non-career goals. Their importance varies by degree and field—think engineering vs English. Some employers may not care if grading doesn’t work. Others may think grade inflation already broke grading. Yet others may decide that without accurate grades, degrees are irrelevant for hiring.
Still, to the extent that demand for higher ed depends on certifying skills and signaling ability, AI is eroding it. AI plus online learning are eviscerating it. Some parts of higher ed, especially parts of online higher ed, will face a crisis unless they (we!) can fix grading.