Artificial intelligence did not wreck our colleges and universities. Leadership in higher education did. AI simply revealed the perverse incentives underpinning America’s system. Where the three actors of academia—administrators, faculty, and students—should strive in harmony toward Truth, our universities abandoned that pursuit long ago and reoriented themselves toward a new end: the appearance of learning.
American colleges depend on tuition, and administrators must keep the money flowing in. Student-derived revenue provides roughly 75% of operating budgets for the median private college, and roughly 50% for the median public college. Approximately 13 million students each year pay their tuition with federal dollars received through Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which governs student financial aid programs. Although students can only use this funding at accredited schools, the accreditation process is flawed, as many state and private accreditation organizations overemphasize outcome metrics like retention and graduation rates.
But maximizing for these metrics has unintended consequences. Most significantly, it incentivizes university administrations to churn out as many graduates as possible rather than focusing on rigor, which weakens academic standards. With these incentives in place, every student expelled for cheating constitutes lost revenue and a hit to the university’s rankings, not to mention the administrative cost, potential lawsuits, and public scandal that every institution wants to avoid.
The faculty have their own misaligned incentives. About 68% of instructional positions are now contingent, meaning that the majority of faculty depend on non-tenure, short-term contracts that are increasingly subject to the tyranny of student evaluations. If instructors are unpopular with their students, it is reflected in end-of-semester surveys that department chairs review before offering contract extensions. Thus, most instructors are strongly incentivized to appease their students to score well on course evaluations and keep their jobs.
It should come as no surprise when instructors are reluctant to report honor code violations that could ding their approval ratings. This system fosters a soft-on-academic-crime atmosphere that licenses cheating and replaces the student-teacher relationship with a transactional customer-satisfaction dynamic that rewards leniency and punishes the rigor of true learning.
From the student’s perspective, pursuing a degree is more pressure-filled than ever, with two major trends increasing pressure on students: credentialization and grade inflation.
About 36% of jobs require at least a bachelor’s degree, with most other positions favoring candidates who hold one. Meanwhile, about 94% of parents expect their children to attend college. The bachelor’s degree has crept into jobs that never before required one and has become a rubber stamp for a steady career. If the diploma is the goal, and the checkpoints along the way only measure what the student turns in, learning becomes a cost. The rational student cuts the cost and produces those outputs as efficiently as possible with AI.
Students are left feeling that they must obtain their credential, and they rationally decide that using AI will make the task easier and alleviate the pressure.
A related phenomenon is the pressure students face from grade inflation. When the average student earns an A, a single B+ reads like a scarlet letter. What used to be a competition for a B in a C-average class is now a fight for the one or two A+ grades in an A-average class. With a single mediocre exam performance or poorly written essay, a student may forfeit his chance at a top medical school or law school, where the median GPA of accepted students is somewhere between 3.82 and 3.96. There is no room for growth because there is no room for error.
Thanks to pandemic-related lockdowns, many of today’s college students spent their formative high school years in virtual classrooms, acing any test via a second browser tab or chatbot app. Instead of making flashcards or rewriting essays through trial and error, these students circumvented the strenuous process of learning. When they entered college, they were stuck playing a game of catch-up in an environment that punishes every mistake. For the student who never built the mental muscle, AI is not an escape from work he should have done but a mobility scooter for his mind, carrying him through work he cannot trudge through alone.
The whole incentive structure now comes into view: The administrator cannot afford to expel the cheater, the instructor cannot afford to accuse him, and the student cannot afford to stop. No one in the university has a structural incentive to promote learning, only the appearance of learning, which is why AI conquered the higher education landscape within a couple of years.
The Advent of AI in Education
I was part of the first college class for whom AI was a daily feature of academic life. Some of what I witnessed resembled the recent case of the Brown professor, who allowed students to take a midterm exam at home only to see the class average rise from its usual range of 65–80 out of 100 to a whopping 96. Most of what I saw was more subtle, and perhaps even more destructive.
There was an unimaginable escalation of students’ dependence on AI. The synonym finder became the essay writer; the spellchecker became an editing agent; the brainstorming tool became the brains. Students used AI to summarize required readings, finish their homework problems, and review their notes for exams. By the time I graduated in May, many students around me could no longer synthesize a difficult text, draft a paper, or form opinions without first consulting the machine. My experience was not unique. A 2026 survey of British undergraduates found that 94% of students used generative AI to help with assessed work, a trend that holds true across American institutions.
The problem is not the prevalence of AI but how AI distorts learning by widening the gap between what a student knows and how he performs. Never before have so many students produced coherent work about which they have little to no prior knowledge.
Achieving a high test score and turning in a well-written paper are no longer finish lines that can only be crossed after months of daily, sequential training. In running terms, thousands of students are finishing marathons without ever lacing up their sneakers.
How Did This Happen?
While AI has widened the gap between students’ knowledge and performance more than ever before, the perverse incentive structure began separating them decades ago. Two ideologies built this flawed incentive structure: libertarian economics and therapeutic progressivism.
Libertarian logic tells us that the university is a marketplace of credentials, and the degree is its prized commodity. Students pay tuition to the university, enjoy the amenities, and, in exchange, the university awards them a credential. The student is a consumer, the university is a vendor, and any actual learning is a side effect of this exchange. Many conservatives absorbed this premise without noticing, and they repeat it every time they assert that higher education should be judged by return on investment.
The student’s growth in virtue, development of critical thinking skills, and pursuit of the transcendentals (Truth, Beauty, and Goodness) are cast aside because they cannot be measured. Yet to reduce education—the integral formation of the whole person—to nothing more than a means to a financial end is to reduce the person himself to nothing more than a unit of capital.
The other ideology of the modern campus is therapeutic progressivism, which sees the student as a patient whose feelings need to be managed rather than a citizen whose personality and preferences need formation and ordering. In the university, the student-as-patient mindset has fueled an ever-expanding accommodations regime, syllabi designed to minimize stress, and an enormous bureaucracy of administrators hired to please the student-customer.
In this system, the professor is not to challenge or judge students, for to do so would be an act of “aggression.” The school cannot stand for Truth, for to do so would be to encroach on its students’ truths. Everything from dress codes in the classroom to common-sense guest policies in the residence halls—even grading assignments—is off the table, for to have such policies would only “hurt” the students. Do not even consider running students’ papers through an AI checker; just think of all the emotional damage inflicted on the patient!
These two ideological messes stand at opposite ends of our political spectrum but are united in one belief: the student is a consumer, and the university is a service provider. While the libertarian view makes the case economically and the progressive view makes it psychologically, both degrade higher learning by distorting the ends of education. Rigor, to the libertarian, is just an inefficient cost added to student-customers’ degrees. To the therapeutic progressive, rigor is a harm to the students’ well-being because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
AI brings our universities’ already distorted ends to their logical fulfillment. It cuts the cost the libertarian despises and dissolves the discomfort the progressive dreads.
A Better Answer
Conservatives have every right to be disgusted with academia. The very institutions founded to impart the fruits of Western Civilization have spent a generation deconstructing them and fostering a sense of Western self-loathing. Whenever anyone tries to realign the university to its proper ends, students, faculty, and administrators close ranks behind “academic freedom,” a principle invoked only as a defense mechanism against reform.
The Trump administration deserves credit for bursting this bubble. Its funding settlements proved that even the most ideologically committed universities will change their policies to keep taxpayer dollars flowing. Yet while the administration has made strides in restoring university life, it has also fallen victim to some of the same ideological undercurrents that led us here in the first place. If we are ever to restore the American university to a system that forms citizens and is resilient in the face of emerging technologies, we must use the federal arm to realign the incentive structure in accordance with a conservative understanding of education.
The Trump administration’s single attempt at clarifying the ends of the university, the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, rightly targets the stifling ideological conformity of progressive wokeism but ignores the commodification of education and value-neutrality that allowed such ideological mania to take over.
It declares “truth-seeking” a “core function of institutions of higher education,” one that is fulfilled by “maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas.” Just like that, the Compact repeats the libertarian fallacy of the university as a kind of marketplace, where the best idea is supposed to win.
We cannot revive the university by simply reopening the marketplace that facilitated its decline. We must, first, order it to a positive vision of its own ends. A university can afford neutrality on many things, but not on the fundamental axioms of inquiry: it must hold that Truth exists, that It can be known, and that It is worth pursuing.
The conservative approach to higher education has a better answer: the university exists to take a young adult and, through discipline in the legitimate intellectual pursuit of Truth, form him into someone capable of thinking for himself and governing himself—a citizen fit for a republic. This vision is durable, and doubly so in the face of AI. While exams, essays, and even credentials are subject to AI counterfeits, a well-formed mind and a virtuous heart are not.
Using the Federal Arm
Instead of further dismantling the federal governance of higher education, the Trump administration should use its leverage formatively. The precedent for conditioning Title IV funding eligibility is strong and effective. Institutions of higher learning are required to have training, reporting mechanisms, and fire drills for accreditation eligibility and federal funding. Verifying whether a school’s assessments are real cuts even closer to the heart of the education the federal government is subsidizing. Title IV fueled the distorted incentive structure, and a prudent realignment of Title IV funding can fix it.
First, the Trump administration should require institutions receiving Title IV funds to report AI-resistant measures of academic competency such as proctored in-person written or oral exams in all courses. This measure makes the gap between GPAs and actual knowledge visible, incentivizing universities to restructure their curricula and assessments around true learning, since they will begin to compete in the public rankings for the smallest gap.
Second, have the Department of Education direct accreditors to pair retention and completion measures with demonstrated learning measures and to take academic integrity seriously. In order to meet accreditation standards, universities should be forced to implement sufficient AI-resistant modes of assessment (blue book exams, in-class essays without use of personal computers, and in-person tests), fund just processes for adjudicating academic honor code violations, and minimize the importance of student satisfaction surveys in instructor retention.
Third, if the gap between students’ performance and actual knowledge persists, tie Title IV funding directly to universities’ implementation of the demonstrated competency standards above.
Students should not have to be tempted by take-home online exams. Professors should not have to choose between enforcing the honor code and keeping their jobs. Administrators should not have to choose between a financially viable university and an academically rigorous one. With these changes, the federal government and the subsidiary accreditors do the dirty work for the universities by restructuring the incentives.
The Right holds more authority today over American higher education than it has in generations. It, too, faces a choice: stand by while AI finishes the demolition of higher education, or fight to restore the university’s mission of forming citizens in Truth.
