Education Links, 5/29/2026
Austin Scholar on relevant lessons; Freddie DeBoer on how college works; and on Chetty's metrics; Hollis Robbins on a market opportunity in credentialing
The state says fifth graders need to learn about the water cycle. The kid loves surfing. AlphaRead serves a passage on how the water cycle drives ocean swell. Required topic delivered, interest honored, comprehension scaffolded all in the same passage. The kid who’s obsessed with horses learns the branches of government through a piece on how cavalry units functioned in the American Revolution. The kid who loves SpaceX learns photosynthesis through a piece on growing food on Mars.
The lectures are incidental, the textbooks are incidental, and the personalized AI tutor will turn out to be incidental too. What is not incidental is the social and institutional pressure that compels an ordinary late adolescent to sit in a room and slog through the Federalist Papers when every fiber of their being would rather be doing anything else.
His point is that college is not about information transfer. It is about creating an environment that induces learning. On AI, he writes,
No chatbot can manufacture the desire to learn. And the people who insist otherwise will, a decade from now, write the same essays they’re writing today about how this time the revolution is really, finally, coming.
I don’t think that colleges endure because they have found the magic formula for creating a learning experience. I think that they endure because it is a social norm that people take for granted.
Going to church used to be such a social norm. But a norm that had persisted in the West for centuries faded out within a couple of generations. I think that the norm of going to college could suffer from a similar preference cascade. AI’s educational capabilities or lack thereof are not going to be the driver.
On another topic, deBoer writes,
A construct that cannot be reproduced, challenged, or transparently explained to the people being measured is not, in any meaningful operational sense, a measurement. An evaluation system that pleases neither teachers nor students nor administrators and which produces results that are inconsistent to the [point] of incoherence should never be the basis of real-world employment decisions.
He is referring to Raj Chetty’s “teacher value added” metrics. Jerry (Tyranny of Metrics) Muller wins again.
How to evaluate teachers? If we had smaller school districts and no teachers’ unions, then the evaluations could be done by parents and principals based on what they observe, not on using formal metrics. This is a case where substituting econometric noise for Hayekian tacit knowledge is a really bad idea.
Whoever builds the first credible institution that records what students actually know and turns it into a respected form — not a credential, not anything borrowed from a dying system — will define a brand new category, set a new standard, and authorize a new public language for bundles of learning. Tyler Cowen suggested some years ago that if he were designing a school from scratch, “the people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be their instructors.”
She sees this as a market opportunity, because otherwise students will have “stranded credits,” because they will not finish college or the colleges themselves will close.
I have pointed out several times that the Swarthmore College Honors program uses examiners from outside of the college, which is more rigorous than having professors make up their own exams. And I have pointed out that the AI could dramatically lower the cost of implementing such a system. You give the AI the syllabus, spell out the expectations for students, and the AI makes up the exam and grades it. All the college has to do is proctor the exam.
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“His point is that college is not about information transfer. It is about creating an environment that induces learning.”
College is not a norm. It shouldn’t be like high school (or even like colleges have been for the last several decades.). Only scholars should go to college (plus those few students who are capable of achieving a STEM career or a career in medicine or law.)
What is a scholar? The short answer is a learner who seeks knowledge for its own sake. The shorter answer: if you’re not one you already know it.
“I don’t think that colleges endure because they have found the magic formula for creating a learning experience. I think that they endure because it is a social norm that people take for granted.
Going to church used to be such a social norm. But a norm that had persisted in the West for centuries faded out within a couple of generations. I think that the norm of going to college could suffer from a similar preference cascade. AI’s educational capabilities or lack thereof are not going to be the driver.”
That is straightforward and insightful. Yes, I think this is it.
I’m an old dad - 52, three kids 10, 8 and 6. My friends’ kids are largely graduating high school now and figuring out college while I watch with trepidation.
Things have changed, though. I’ve definitely noticed that both my friends and their kids kind of acknowledge that going away to school is a somewhat absurd luxury. Lots are still doing it - most even - but more are going to local colleges than did when I graduated.
And two other interesting differences: college-as-credential seems to be so universally accepted now that nobody even bothers to discuss it anymore. That’s DEFINITELY different than when I left for college in ‘92.
And here’s the weird one: they all seem to be paying a lot LESS for school than any of us thought it’d cost. The sticker price just seems to be the “if you pay this number, we’ll literally give your dog a degree” starting point. Every one of my friends kids have received a massive discount for no particularly good reason - whatever arcane measure schools use to decide what class makeup they want seems to result in heavily skewed costs, and everyone is paying the cheapest tuition they can find.
Still: I’m desperate for this whole edifice to crash before I need to start worrying about it. But time moves very quickly and I doubt it’ll be all that much different before my kids are in the middle. But my grandkids? Oh yeah. I don’t imagine this absurd approach will still be hanging around then.