Comment by DrillShopper

> They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done" for whatever it means at that moment

I graduated university around the turn of the century, long before the current AI boom started, and the majority of my classmates were like that. Learning the bare minimum to escape a class isn't new especially if you're only taking that class because you have to because every adult in your life drilled into you that you'll be a homeless failure if you don't go to college and get a degree. The LLMs make that easier, but the university, if the goal wasn't just to take your tuition dollars to enrich a vast administrator class instead of cover the costs of employing the professors teaching you, could offset that with more rigorous testing or oral exams at the end of the class.

The real lesson I learned during my time in university is that the two real edges that elite universities give you (as a student) are 1) social connections to the children of the rich and leaders in the field that you can mine for recommendations and 2) a "wow" factor on your resume. You can't really get the first at a state school or community college, and you definitely can't get the second at a state school or community college, despite learning similar if not the same material in a given field of study.

It hasn't been about (just) the learning for a long time.