AI won’t kill the college degree, but it will change what it’s for

I had given them an analytical tool to help structure their recommendations, and when the first team presented, they confidently showed the tool and its output. But when pressed to explain the rationale behind their recommendations, they stalled. They could not defend their judgments. The rest of the teams performed similarly.

Defensible judgment is the difference between producing the answer and knowing how and why you got there. It forces us to make sense of all the output that AI is so good at producing, and “making sense” is a profoundly human exercise.

The issue was not that the students lacked information – thanks to the tool, they had plenty. It was that they could present the output generated but struggled to articulate the reasoning behind it. The tool was doing all the talking.

That’s my concern about AI and higher education. It allows students to bypass one of the central developmental processes of learning: discovering how to argue, persuade, defend, revise and ultimately convince others of one’s well-formed position.

What’s college for, really?

Credit: Auburn Media Production Group

Credit: Auburn Media Production Group

Ask five people what college is for and you will get five answers. Students may say employment. Parents: return on investment. Employers: workforce preparation. Faculty may say intellectual development while communities desire a citizen capable of participating in civil society. None of these answers is wrong, which is why the debate over whether college is “worth it” has become so muddled. College has always been asked to serve multiple purposes at once.

AI did not create that confusion – it intensified it.

For decades, the value of college has been packaged as content delivery, skill accumulation, labor-market insurance, and social signaling. AI destabilizes each part of that bundle. Content is easier to access, skills are faster to acquire, and even white collar jobs once considered “safe from automation” are being threatened. The social signal of a college degree still matters, but its public confidence in that signal is less automatic than it once was.

What remains is the part of college we have often undersold because it is hardest to measure: the developmental process itself.

A developmental environment is not simply a place where students acquire information. It is a place where they repeatedly practice the behaviors of judgment: making claims, defending them, revising them, encountering disagreement, weighing tradeoffs and taking responsibility for the consequences of their reasoning.

These capacities do not emerge from exposure to content alone. They emerge through developmental friction.

The problem, then, is not automation; it is the erosion of the formative process through which students learn to exercise judgment. In different ways, that capacity sits at the center of what each stakeholder ultimately hopes higher education provides.

College is worth its cost in the age of AI only if it develops graduates who can interpret, challenge, and take responsibility for machine-shaped decisions rather than merely execute them. Not just students who can produce sophisticated work, but people who can explain their reasoning, defend their assumptions, revise their thinking under scrutiny and hold their ground when it matters.

What cannot be outsourced

What matters now is not the end product, it’s the messy parts in the middle: the scribbles, scratch pads, crossed-out ideas and eraser marks.

These moments of uncertainty reveal whether a student actually understands what they are doing – and why they are doing it.

If college continues to measure success primarily by what students can produce, it will struggle to justify its value in a world where production is cheap.

But if higher education becomes a place where students learn to explain their reasoning, defend their assumptions, revise under scrutiny and take responsibility for what they conclude, it may become more essential than ever.

Colin Gabler is the Hurston Professor of Marketing and a Fulbright Scholar at Auburn University whose writing on social justice and higher education has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, AL.com, University Business, and The Columbus Dispatch.