[stackskipton]

>you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?

Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort.

Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.

[ghostly_s]

> For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities

More true at an Ivy than anywhere else.

> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools).

If this guy thinks AI is motivating his previously guiless student body to start cheating on these tests, rather than simply changing the way they are cheating, he's been sniffing too many of his own farts.

[onemoresoop]

Sadly this is true. Another take is that if you don’t use AI but everybody outperforms you on exams using AI at some point you’re forced into it as well.

[userbinator]

Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.

This is already starting to happen, at least for software engineering positions. There have been plenty of stories of candidates with degrees from prestigious institutions failing to answer the simplest of questions correctly. FizzBuzz is a famous example, but there are many others.

[bmitc]

That motivation isn't necessarily inherent in the attendees though. That has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.

It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.

[aleph_minus_one]

> That [motivation] has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.

I don't think so.

The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.

If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.

The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.

[Avicebron]

If only they could communicate with each other and explain their reasoning.

Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company."

University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure you have good employees and we have people who aren't struggling to pay back loans because they have an engineering degree but can't make more than 50K at a dead end job."

[aleph_minus_one]

I basically do agree with you. The only problem that I see with your suggestion is that companies often don't know what they actually, really want from their employees.