It is no secret that a lot college students are using ChatGPT to write their essays. Many professors don’t even comprehend how much their students depend on it. As a college writing professor myself, it has been a challenge to figure out how to detect AI usage and figure out how to deal with the students who are purportedly using it. My greatest fear is unjustly accusing a student who is actually putting in the work. It’s all backwards. It’s a total mess. Using ChatGPT to write an argumentative essay might generate something coherent, but it won’t in any way help the student think for herself or learn the arts of rhetoric, persuasion, and reasoning. Those used to be the pillars of education. Now they’re brushed aside for convenience’s sake.

The impact of AI and tech addiction is obvious society-wide. But is every college student falling prey to the trends?

A couple of articles I encountered over the past week comment on the quality of college student performance in the post-COVID world increasingly dominated by AI and technology dependence. The first piece, titled “The Average College Student Today” and written by a regional college professor, went viral on Substack with its piquant expose of college students’ declining interest and ability in succeeding at the university level. The second piece, written by Oklahoma Baptist University English professor Alan Noble, responded to the lament with a more positive perspective. Are today’s college students universally compromised by the pandemic’s residue and a poor, online mediated high school education?

Hilarius Bookbinder, the pen name for the author who wrote “The Average College Student Today,” seems to think so. He writes in his alarming article,

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

Attention spans, hijacked by smartphones and the overall frenetic pace of modern life, can no longer cope with a longform piece of writing. The digital interface, as Christine Rosen has written about in The New Atlantis, is fundamentally different from reading words on a page. The former revolves around the infinite scroll. We skim material, hardly ever reading it. We consume online “content” but don’t reflect or ingest its meaning and how it might fit into the big picture. Physical books, however, don’t come with a hundred other tabs above the pages. When you read, you can’t do anything else and still hope to focus, except maybe listen to classical music! I was recently chatting with a colleague about planning out a Composition II course and was warned against assigning more than a chapter or an essay to the class. Assigning whole books, if it wasn’t for a higher-level elective course, would almost definitely stump the students in their tracks.

Bookbinder has a lot more to lament about. And in the end, that’s what the post is about: Feeling sad over the current condition of higher education.

Noble, while acknowledging Bookbinder’s observations, says his experience teaching students is different. The reason might surprise. He believes his school, an overtly Christian liberal arts institution, has an overarching vision and purpose for education. Students who go there are not only taught subjects and disciplines but are shown why it matters. For a school like Oklahoma Baptist, the purpose of education is not to necessarily get a high-paying job but to delight in the pursuit of wisdom. It is about becoming holistic human beings, able to integrate their lives under the banner of a rich, life-giving worldview.

Can the standard secular campus offer such a vision?

Maybe it should start trying. Students are already checking out by the thousands. Of course, the technology is a massive part of the decline. Perhaps, though, universities have to reinvigorate their purposes and get students on board.