The Meritocratic Mask Is Crumbling (Glen McGhee)

“The Merit Ladder”

You unlock the door to a university, and the corridor stretches infinitely upward. Every student walks the same stairwell, one step at a time. The walls are adorned with clocks, calculators, and grade sheets, ticking and tallying as if the universe itself measured effort with perfect fairness.

But something is wrong. Some students float effortlessly upward, their steps silent, their progress smooth. Others stumble on invisible obstacles, their feet dragging in ways the rules do not explain. They glance at the walls, at the clocks, at the calculators—every metric insists they are equal, every announcement proclaims fairness. Yet the disparity is undeniable.

A voice echoes from the ceiling, calm, clinical: “Merit is universal. Merit is measurable. Merit is scale-invariant.” The students nod, forced to believe, even as they watch their neighbors leap ahead. Some students whisper, “It’s not the merit—it’s the ladder.” And indeed, the ladder is uneven, its rungs hidden, shifted by invisible hands of wealth, culture, geography, and health.

In this world—the stairwell of American higher education—the illusion of fairness is maintained with meticulous care. But every so often, a student notices the truth, and then the voice falters, the clocks pause, and the corridors ripple with the secret that can no longer be hidden. For the myth of meritocracy is collapsing. The ladder was never fair, and now, as the illusion fades, everyone will see it.

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The Scale-Invariance Claim

For more than a century, American higher education has rested on an elegant but unspoken assumption: that the rules of meritocracy are scale-invariant. The ideology promises that any student—regardless of wealth, geography, culture, family background, or health—can climb the credential ladder. A student from a low-income rural household competes on the same metric as a student from an affluent suburb. A community college student is measured by the same ruler as an Ivy League undergraduate. Merit, the story goes, is constant across all scales.

This is the deep mathematical promise embedded in the system:
(X, merit) ≅ (X, λ·merit) for all λ > 0.
Change the scale—money, social capital, proximity, cultural background—and the metric of “merit” supposedly remains unchanged. Hard work is invariant. Ability is invariant. The measurement of learning is invariant.

But no part of this has ever been true. To understand the experience, one could step into Kafka’s The Trial, where invisible, arbitrary rules govern the fates of all, or into the unsettling dimensions of The Twilight Zone, where a carefully maintained illusion of fairness masks structural control. Episodes like “The Obsolete Man” or “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” illustrate societies where uniform rules are proclaimed but inequities are baked into every interaction—a perfect mirror for the fiction of meritocracy.

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The Characteristic Scales American Higher Ed Pretends Not to Have

Every foundational element of U.S. higher education has a characteristic scale. Once these scales are made visible, the meritocratic myth dissolves.

Financial scale.
With little money, a student cannot attend or persist. With substantial wealth, barriers disappear. Financial rescaling completely changes outcomes.

Social capital scale.
A family with generations of college experience confers knowledge, networks, and expectations that directly affect admissions, persistence, and post-graduation trajectories. First-generation students navigate blind. The system is not invariant under social capital rescaling.

Geographic scale.
Proximity to selective universities, high-performing high schools, or robust community college systems radically alters opportunity. Rural and small-town America operates at a completely different scale.

Cultural and linguistic scale.
Students whose home culture mirrors academic expectations “fit.” Students from culturally distant communities must perform costly translation work. This is not a scale-invariant environment.

Health and disability scale.
Students without health barriers move cleanly through the system. Students with disabilities or chronic illness face friction at every stage. Their outcomes follow a different curve.

A genuinely scale-invariant system would show consistent outcomes across all these starting positions. American higher education shows the opposite. The system has always been scale-dependent—and merit was never the dominant term.

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The Measurement Problem the Meritocracy Never Solved

The ideological foundation requires not only a scale-invariant world but a scale-invariant measurement system. GPA, grades, test scores, papers, and degrees must reliably track some underlying construct called “merit” or “learning.”

Higher education never developed such a construct. “Learning” is not stable across institutions or contexts. It is socially constructed daily by instructors with different philosophies, different constraints, and different biases. There is no psychometric framework that defines a scale-invariant measure of learning. The closest attempts—standardized testing regimes—have repeatedly collapsed under their own inequities.

Yet the system pretends that a 3.8 at an Ivy and a 3.2 at a regional university reflect a universal metric rather than two entirely different grading cultures.

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Grade Inflation and AI Cheating: The Mask Slips

Recent trends expose how fragile the entire measurement fiction has become.

Elite universities give A grades at unprecedented rates. Two-thirds of all grades at some institutions are now A’s. GPA averages well above 3.7 are defended as “signs of excellence,” but in practice they are rescalings of the ruler itself. Institutions under competitive prestige pressure simply adjust the metric to protect their reputation.

AI cheating accelerates the collapse. Students with resources buy tutoring, editing, and AI-powered writing tools. These tools outperform human novices. The ability to “perform merit” is now directly purchasable. The metric no longer measures writing ability or analytical thinking. It measures access to technology, coaching, and time.

The function of grades has shifted from signaling ability to signaling socioeconomic positioning. What was once ρ(ability) is now ρ(ability + money), with wealth as the dominant term.

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Literary and Cultural Parallels

This collapse is eerily familiar in literature and media. Kafka’s The Trial captures the experience of navigating opaque rules that punish effort unpredictably. Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 show societies that insist on fairness while structurally enforcing inequality. Ellison’s Invisible Man exposes the consequences of climbing a ladder rigged by invisible scales.

The Twilight Zone dramatized these dynamics for mass audiences. Episodes such as “The Obsolete Man”, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”, and “The Shelter” depict societies where declared rules are universal, yet outcomes are determined by hidden advantages. These narratives echo the experience of students forced to believe in meritocracy even while the structural scales—wealth, family education, geography, culture, health—determine success.

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What “Never Was Meritocratic” Actually Means

When HEI reports that American higher education never was meritocratic, it is not a moral accusation. It is an empirical one. The system was constructed with characteristic scales baked in. Wealth, social capital, proximity, culture, and health have always determined trajectories.

The ideology of merit obscured those scales by promising invariance where none existed. The promise served to justify gatekeeping, tuition inflation, credential inflation, and systematic exclusion. Legacy admissions, donor influence, geographic disparities, and familial educational background were not aberrations—they were structural pillars.

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The Collapse of the Meritocratic Narrative

The contemporary system is unraveling because the myth of scale-invariance—its core ideological justification—has been exposed as untenable.

Grade inflation reveals that institutions adjust the metric to preserve prestige.
AI reveals that performance can be outsourced or purchased.
Credential inflation reveals that degrees are required because employers have no alternative signal—not because the degrees measure anything.
Homeschooling and private micro-schools reflect widespread disbelief in the system’s ability to measure learning.
Employer skepticism shows that the labor market no longer trusts the bachelor’s degree as a signal.

Once the legitimacy of the metric collapses, the legitimacy of the entire structure collapses with it.

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The Devastating Implication: A System Built on a Mathematical Fiction

A truly scale-invariant system would show no significant correlation between wealth and degree attainment, no legacy effects, no geographic disparities, and no demographic patterning. The opposite is true in every dimension.

This system is not failing to fulfill its meritocratic promise. It never could fulfill it. It was designed for scale-dependence and shielded by the promise of scale-invariance.

Now that the mask is slipping, the $80,000 price tags, the exclusionary admissions processes, the credential inflation, and the crushing student debt load are losing their ideological justification. Without the fiction that merit is meaningfully and consistently measured, the system’s rationale dissolves.

The crisis of American higher education is not primarily a financial crisis or a demographic crisis. It is a legitimacy crisis. The foundational myth—meritocracy as scale-invariance—has collapsed. And with it, the justification for the entire credentialing apparatus is beginning to collapse as well.

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Sources
Higher Education Inquirer archives on grade inflation, admissions inequities, and credential inflation.
John Beach’s work on the social construction of “learning.”
HEI reporting on AI cheating, K-12 system collapse, employer distrust, and the shifting meaning of academic credentials.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
George Orwell, 1984
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Twilight Zone episodes: “The Obsolete Man,” “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” “The Shelter”

NCAA Football Is Dirty… And It Always Has Been

For more than a century, college football has wrapped itself in pageantry, school colors, marching bands, and the language of amateur virtue. It has sold itself as character-building, educational, and fundamentally different from professional sports. Yet from its earliest days to the present NIL era, NCAA football has been marked by exploitation, corruption, racial inequality, physical harm, and institutional hypocrisy. The truth is not that college football has recently become “dirty.” It has always been this way.

College football emerged in the late 19th century as a violent, chaotic game played almost exclusively by elite white men at private Northeastern universities. By the 1890s, dozens of players were dying each season from on-field injuries. In 1905 alone, at least 18 young men were killed. The brutality became so extreme that President Theodore Roosevelt summoned university leaders to the White House, demanding reforms to save the sport—or shut it down entirely. The NCAA’s predecessor organization was born not to protect players, but to protect football itself.

From the beginning, control and image management mattered more than athlete welfare.

As the sport spread nationally in the early 20th century, universities discovered football’s power as a marketing and fundraising engine. Gate receipts financed campuses, built stadiums, and elevated institutional prestige. With that money came cheating. Schools openly paid players under the table, provided fake jobs, and created academic loopholes to keep athletes eligible. The NCAA responded not by ending exploitation, but by codifying “amateurism”—a concept designed to deny players compensation while preserving institutional profit.

That amateur ideal was always selective. Coaches became highly paid public figures, administrators gained power and prestige, and universities used football to attract donors and students. Players, meanwhile, were expected to risk their bodies for scholarships that could be revoked, often steered into academic programs that prioritized eligibility over education. The system worked exactly as intended.

Race made the exploitation even starker. For much of the 20th century, Black athletes were excluded outright or limited by quotas, especially in the South. When integration finally occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, it did not bring equity. Black players disproportionately filled the most physically punishing positions, generated enormous revenue, and remained shut out of coaching, administrative leadership, and long-term financial benefit. The plantation metaphor—uncomfortable as it is—has endured because it fits.

Throughout the postwar era, scandals became routine. Academic fraud at powerhouse programs. Boosters laundering payments. Universities covering up recruiting violations while publicly moralizing about rules and integrity. The NCAA positioned itself as a regulator, but enforcement was inconsistent and often political. Blue-blood programs negotiated slaps on the wrist while smaller schools were hammered to make examples. Justice was never blind; it was strategic.

Meanwhile, the physical toll on players worsened. As athletes grew larger, faster, and stronger, the sport became more dangerous. Concussions were downplayed for decades. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was ignored until it could no longer be denied. Players suffering brain injuries were dismissed as weak, while universities and conferences cashed ever-larger media checks. The NCAA claimed ignorance, even as evidence mounted and lawsuits piled up.

The television era transformed college football into a billion-dollar entertainment industry. Conference realignment chased broadcast revenue, not regional tradition or student well-being. Athletes were asked to travel cross-country on school nights, miss classes, and perform under relentless pressure—all while being told they were “students first.” The hypocrisy became harder to conceal.

By the early 21st century, the contradictions finally cracked. Legal challenges exposed the NCAA’s amateurism rules as a restraint of trade. Courts acknowledged what players had long known: universities were profiting massively from their labor while denying them basic economic rights. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) was not a revolution—it was an overdue concession.

Yet even in the NIL era, the dirt remains. The system still lacks transparency. Booster-driven collectives operate in legal gray zones. Players are encouraged to chase short-term deals without long-term protections. There is no guaranteed healthcare beyond enrollment, no pension, no real collective bargaining for most athletes. Coaches can leave at will; players are scrutinized, transferred, or discarded.

The NCAA insists it is reforming. Conferences promise stability. Universities speak the language of athlete empowerment. But the underlying structure remains unchanged: unpaid or under-protected labor generating extraordinary wealth for institutions that claim educational mission while operating like entertainment corporations.

College football’s defenders often say, “It’s always been this way,” as if that excuses the harm. In reality, that phrase is an indictment. From the deadly fields of the 1900s to the concussion-ridden stadiums of today, from Jim Crow exclusion to modern NIL chaos, the sport has been built on control, denial, and profit.

The problem with NCAA football is not that it lost its way. It never had one.

What is new is not the dirt—but the visibility. Players now speak openly. Courts intervene. Fans question the myths. The mask is slipping, and the century-old fiction of purity is harder to maintain. Whether that leads to real change—or merely a cleaner narrative over the same exploitative core—remains to be seen.

But history is clear. College football did not fall from grace.

It was born compromised.

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Sources

– National Collegiate Athletic Association, History of the NCAA
– Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle
– Taylor Branch, “The Shame of College Sports,” The Atlantic
– Allen Sack & Ellen Staurowsky, College Athletes for Hire
– ESPN Investigations and NCAA Infractions Reports
– Boston University CTE Center research on football-related brain injury
– U.S. Supreme Court, NCAA v. Alston (2021)

Preston Cooper Is Wrong: Enrollment Is Only One of Higher Education’s Many Crises

In a recent American Enterprise Institute article, Preston Cooper insists that the post-2010 collapse in college enrollment is “a correction, not a crisis.” According to Cooper, students are becoming more discerning consumers, abandoning low-value colleges and low-ROI degrees while flocking to higher-quality institutions and more lucrative majors. In this narrative, the system is simply shedding inefficiencies. The market is working.

But this argument is incomplete to the point of distortion. Enrollment decline is not a tidy market correction. It is a symptom of profound structural problems: affordability, inequality, political interference, labor exploitation, deteriorating academic quality, widespread cheating, and the growing reliance on “robocolleges” and automated learning platforms with questionable educational value. Cooper’s analysis ignores all of this and reduces higher education to a single variable—student choices—when the system is being reshaped by forces far larger and more corrosive than consumer preference.

Affordability remains the biggest barrier to access. Surveys repeatedly show that adults who never enrolled or who dropped out cite cost as their primary obstacle, and higher education leaders themselves acknowledge that families often do not understand the real price until they are already overwhelmed. Tuition, fees, housing, food, and transportation are enough to make college inaccessible for millions. This is not a sign of students shopping wisely; it is evidence of a system that has priced out vast segments of the population.

Cooper’s argument also ignores how structural inequalities determine who even reaches the point of decision-making. Research from multiple institutions shows that disparities in academic preparation—rooted in racial segregation, school funding inequity, socioeconomic status, and access to quality teachers—heavily influence college-going patterns. Students from under-resourced schools or low-income families do not have equal access to information, support systems, or opportunities. The idea that they are “choosing” not to attend low-value schools disregards the constraints that shape those choices.

Meanwhile, colleges themselves are destabilizing. Shrinking enrollments and stagnant public funding have produced financial crises across the sector. Even reputable institutions rely on aggressive discounting, program cuts, hiring freezes, and dependence on contingent faculty. Student support services shrink while administrative costs continue to rise. Cooper’s framing of “let the weak fail” overlooks the collateral damage: students denied needed resources, programs eliminated, and entire communities harmed when regional colleges collapse.

The crisis extends beyond finances. Students’ freedom of speech is increasingly under pressure as state legislatures, governors, and politically reactive boards restrict curricula, censor faculty, and monitor student organizations. Expression around race, inequality, gender, and geopolitical issues is under surveillance or actively punished. Whether driven by conservative politics, donor pressure, or administrative fear of controversy, the suppression of student and faculty voices undermines the university’s democratic mission.

Cooper also fails to address the degrading working conditions of adjunct faculty, who now make up the majority of instructors. Adjuncts often earn poverty-level wages, lack health insurance, and have no job security. Many teach at multiple institutions simply to survive. The system Cooper describes as “self-correcting” rests on the exploitation of the people responsible for delivering the education students are supposedly choosing.

Then there are the emerging problems he completely ignores: robocolleges and AI-driven instruction. As institutions cut costs, many outsource teaching to automated platforms, online mega-providers, and algorithmic tutoring systems. These “robocolleges” promise efficiency but often deliver shallow instruction, predatory recruitment, weakened student support, and minimal human interaction. They generate revenue, but not always learning. Cooper assumes that students are leaving low-value institutions, yet many of these automated systems are themselves low-value—and increasingly difficult to regulate or evaluate.

The rise of automated education connects directly to another crisis: academic integrity. AI-assisted cheating is now widespread across campuses. Students, overwhelmed by cost pressures, mental health struggles, large class sizes, and insufficient support, increasingly rely on AI tools to complete assignments without understanding the material. Instructors struggle to identify misconduct, institutions scramble to respond, and genuine learning becomes harder to guarantee. This is not the sign of a system “correcting” itself. It is evidence of a sector that has lost its footing and is failing to uphold educational standards.

Cooper’s argument rests on the assumption that higher education should primarily be judged by short-term labor-market returns. But higher education is more than a job-training pipeline. It is a public good that supports social mobility, civic participation, community development, scientific and cultural advancement, and democratic life. A system that suppresses speech, exploits faculty, overrelies on automated instruction, and cannot distinguish real learning from AI-generated work is not corrected. It is in crisis.

The enrollment decline is real, but it is only the surface. Beneath it lies a system plagued by affordability barriers, entrenched inequality, political intrusion, labor precarity, academic degradation, technological misuse, and rising distrust. To call this a “correction” is to look away from the deeper rot. For students, educators, and communities, it is a crisis—one that demands urgent structural reform rather than market-based optimism.

Sources
National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). “The Biggest Barriers to Higher Education Enrollment Are Cost and Lack of Financial Aid.”
Inside Higher Ed. “Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, and DEI.”
Brookings Institution. “Persistent Gaps in Academic Preparation Generate College Enrollment Disparities.”
Deloitte Insights. “Top Risks in Higher Education.”
Independent Institute. “Higher Education’s Triple Crisis.”
PEN America. “Tracking Campus Free Speech Legislation and Suppression.”
American Federation of Teachers / AAUP. “The Gig Academy: Precarity and the Exploitation of Adjunct Labor.”
The Century Foundation. Analyses of Online Program Management (OPM) and automated higher education risks.
Inside Higher Ed and Times Higher Education reporting on AI-driven cheating and academic integrity.

Everyone is Cheating, Even the Professors (Jared Henderson)

There's a lot of talk about how AI is making cheating easier than ever, and most people want to find a way to stop it. But the problem goes much deeper than we typically assume. This video covers AI-assisted cheating (like with ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), the value of education (and Caplan's signaling theory), and the reason why professors and researchers commit fraud. 

When Educators Back the Cheating Platform: The Strange Case of Chegg (Glen McGhee)

Chegg — once a poster child for pandemic-era edtech growth — is now in free fall. In 2025 the company announced it would slash 45 % of its workforce, citing plunging web traffic, collapsing revenue, and the onslaught of AI tools that let students bypass paid homework help altogether.

It’s a dramatic reversal for a company that sold itself as a learning aid. But behind that collapse lies an even more troubling paradox: many teacher pension funds and public retirement systems — in whose names educators put decades of trust — hold millions in Chegg stock. Why would those funds invest in a company whose business model many of their own beneficiaries see as unethical, even corrosive?

We’ve seen this pattern before. In the early 2000s, retirement funds like these were major institutional investors in for-profit higher education companies such as EDMC, ITT Tech, and the University of Phoenix. Those institutions promised strong returns but ultimately collapsed under fraud allegations, predatory practices, and declining enrollments. Many public-sector workers indirectly suffered as the funds lost money. Chegg’s story looks eerily similar: high growth promises, an ethically contested business model, and exposure of public retirement funds to extreme financial risk. The repetition suggests a structural pattern: when education is financialized and commodified, the people meant to serve it — educators and students — are exposed to both moral and economic hazards.

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The Downward Spiral: Why Chegg Is Crashing

Chegg’s decline didn’t begin yesterday. It was seeded by technological disruption and a fragile business model dependent on volume, content access, and student compliance. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard have undercut Chegg’s core service: paid homework help and explanations. Students can often get free answers faster and more flexibly. Google’s “AI overviews,” which display answer snippets directly in search results, divert traffic away from Chegg’s site, reducing ad and subscription conversions. Chegg has even sued Google, alleging unfair competition.

Earlier in 2025, Chegg laid off 22 % of its staff and closed its U.S. and Canada offices to cut costs. That was supposed to be a stabilization move, but it foreshadowed deeper troubles. The more recent 45 % layoff is sweeping: 388 jobs are being cut, $15–19 million in severance charges are expected, and $100–110 million in cost savings are projected for 2026. Chegg’s stock has lost approximately 99 % of its value since its 2021 peak. Yet the company is still pursuing a pivot toward B2B “skilling” markets, though skeptics doubt whether this can make up for the erosion of its original model. In short, Chegg is facing structural obsolescence. The ecosystem that once made its growth plausible is collapsing around it.

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Pension Funds and the Strange Attraction to Chegg

Several public pension and teachers’ retirement systems hold millions in Chegg: Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System owns $4.5 million, California State Teachers’ Retirement System owns $4 million, New York State Common Retirement Fund owns $13 million, Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Fund owns $9.3 million, California Public Employees’ Retirement Fund owns $5.3 million, a Florida retirement fund owns $3.3 million, Ohio Public Employees Retirement owns $1.5 million, and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas owns $630,000.

These investments raise hard questions. Do pension fund managers assume Chegg will survive its technological disruption? Are they prioritizing short-term returns over long-term reputational or ethical risk? Do they believe the stock is undervalued and thus a “contrarian bet”? Are they following passive index allocations rather than making deliberate choices? Some fund managers defend such investments as fulfilling fiduciary duty: to maximize returns for their beneficiaries within acceptable risk parameters. Ethical considerations, they argue, should not trump financial sustainability — especially in a system underfunded and under stress. But when the bet fails, the consequences fall hardest on retirees, educators, and the public who trusted those funds to safeguard their futures.

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Do We Owe Them Sympathy?

It’s tempting to feel a bit sorry: pension funds losing money is a headline nobody wants. But sympathy is complicated. These funds store and grow the life savings of public-sector workers — teachers, librarians, and staff. A poorly timed speculative investment can damage retiree security and erode public trust. On the other hand, this is no innocent failure; it is a foreseeable risk in backing a business facing existential challenges. It reflects a broader pattern of financialization in education: turning learning into a profit-seeking venture, exposing it to wild swings, and treating educators and students as market participants. Losses are regrettable, especially at the human level, but they also demand accountability. Institutions must explain why they placed trust in Chegg when its vulnerabilities were visible.

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What This Reveals: Institutional Contradiction

This episode exposes several deeper contradictions at the intersection of education, finance, and values. Many educators see Chegg as a threat to academic integrity, yet the institutions managing their retirement funds believed in its upside. Some investors are attracted to the “turnaround bet,” seeing potential in a company trading at a fraction of its former value, though the risk is very high. Some funds may hold Chegg because their portfolios track broad indices, ceding moral discretion to the market. Education has become infrastructure built on venture logic, and the Chegg collapse is a warning: when learning becomes a commodity, its institutions become as unstable as any tech startup. Finally, if pension funds backed a cheating-enabled platform, what else might their capital support, and how does that affect trust in those institutions?

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A Moral and Institutional Reckoning 

Chegg’s collapse is not just a market drama; it’s a moral and institutional reckoning. A company built on a questionable model is now evaporating under AI pressure. Meanwhile, public pension funds — meant to safeguard the futures of educators — placed bets on that very evaporation.

We might feel a pang of sympathy for the financial losses. But our greater duty is to probe the judgment of those entrusted with public capital, and to demand coherence between values and investment. If the administrators of teacher retirement funds cannot align ethics with asset allocation, then their claims to serving the public good are weakened — and so is the trust on which the idea of public education depends.

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Sources

Barron’s: “Chegg Is Suing Google. The Stock Is Sinking.”
Reuters: “Chegg to lay off 22% of workforce as AI tools shake up edtech industry.”
SF Chronicle: “Bay Area educational tech company slashes 248 jobs as students turn to AI tools for learning.”
The Cheatsheet Substack: “Meet Chegg’s Biggest Backers.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Work in Public Education and Hate Chegg? You Might Be an Investor.”
Wikipedia: “Chegg”

LSAT Suspended in China (Derek Newton*)

A friend of The Cheat Sheet sent us this important development — delivery of the LSAT, the Law School Admissions Test — has been suspended in China.

Go ahead, guess why.

According to the announcement from the test provider:

We have been increasingly concerned about organized efforts by individuals and companies in mainland China to promote test misconduct.

They continue:

While security is always a concern, these enterprises are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Yup.

I don’t mean to single out China. It’s one of a handful of countries in which test fraud is incredibly common and incredibly profitable. It’s so bad that any test delivered online in China is, in my view, compromised beyond validity.

To be clear as well, this is not a new problem (see Issue 232). In Issue 137, we noted that organized criminal gangs in India were giving up selling drugs because selling test fraud was more profitable.

More from the announcement:

This type of [cheating] activity is not limited to the LSAT; these enterprises purport to offer cheating services for virtually every standardized test.

True. Again — this is not a China problem or an LSAT problem. But this is a gigantic problem.

The announcement again:

After careful consideration, we have decided to take the additional step of suspending online testing in mainland China following the upcoming October international administration of the LSAT. We will be taking a variety of steps to enhance the security of the October LSAT. Because we do not currently offer in-person testing in China, the October test will be the last LSAT administration in mainland China until further notice.

And — round of applause.

This was not an easy decision. The LSAT in China must be a cash machine. Pulling it off the shelves involves more than just money, it raises real questions of fairness and access. So, seeing a company put the validity of their assessment and the sanctity of its scores ahead of money and ahead of awkward questions, is great.

It’s great.

If people keep stealing your lunch money, quit carrying your lunch money until you can figure out a better way. Like this:

We will continue to monitor and respond to this situation and will continue to evolve our security measures and employ a wide range of tools to protect the integrity of the test both in the U.S. and internationally.

Integrity is not cheap. But it is worth more than whatever it costs. Good for LSAC, the test provider.

And I know this is crazy, but every standardized test ought to hold themselves to the same standard. Give a secure, valid assessment or don’t give one at all. Colleges and universities, I’m looking at you.

Anyway, this is big news, and I do hope that others recognize the leadership this takes.

*This article first appeared at The Cheat Sheet.  

The Hiroshima Remake: Clayton Christensen, AI, and the Educational Apocalypse (Glen McGhee)

In 2013, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen made a dramatic prediction: “In 10 to 15 years, 50 percent of colleges and universities will be bankrupt.” Grounded in his celebrated theory of disruptive innovation, Christensen imagined a future where online learning would gradually displace traditional institutions. Supported by co-author Michael Horn and the Clayton Christensen Institute, this vision rested on a core belief that technological innovation would creep in from the margins, slowly forcing the higher education sector to adapt or die.

But 2025 has not brought the slow-motion disruption Christensen foresaw. It has delivered something far more devastating: a collapse so rapid and total that it renders the theory itself obsolete. What we are witnessing is not disruptive innovation—it is educational annihilation. It is, in effect, a Hiroshima moment for higher education, where the landscape has been scorched so thoroughly by artificial intelligence that there is no longer a recognizable battlefield.

Christensen’s model depended on institutions surviving long enough to be gradually disrupted. But AI has bypassed that timeline and obliterated the very foundations of traditional education. Instead of online learning rising up through the ranks, we now have a student body increasingly dependent on generative AI for every aspect of their academic experience. One student recently summed it up by saying, “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.” That statement isn’t an exaggeration—it’s the new norm.

Universities aren’t being challenged in slow increments. They are being wiped out. Since 2020, at least 80 nonprofit or public colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia forecasts as many as 80 more colleges could collapse in 2025 alone. Even flagship institutions like the University of Arizona are reporting deficits in the hundreds of millions, while West Virginia University has undertaken massive cuts to academic programs and faculty. DePaul University is projecting a $56 million shortfall. The collapse is system-wide, not isolated to struggling outliers.

The impact extends beyond institutional budgets. It touches the core of what education is supposed to be. The widespread use of AI by students to complete their coursework has created an invisible yet devastating consequence: cultural debt. This is not simply a matter of plagiarism or cheating. It’s a loss of intellectual development, critical thinking, and meaningful engagement. We are producing graduates who may hold credentials, but lack the capacity for independent analysis. We are entering a world where degrees are increasingly decoupled from knowledge, and where assessment is rapidly losing all credibility.

Christensen never accounted for the possibility that a technology would be so powerful, so universally adopted, that it would destroy the institutional context his theory depended on. His disruption model assumed time—time for adaptation, time for hybrid models to form, time for competition to play out in a recognizable marketplace. But AI has left no time. It has created a moonscape, a terrain so decimated that rebuilding on it seems nearly impossible. There is no “University 2.0” waiting in the wings. There is only confusion, cost-cutting, and chaos.

The metaphor of Hiroshima is not used lightly. Just as nuclear weapons rendered conventional military strategy irrelevant, AI has rendered conventional education strategy meaningless. This isn’t Schumpeterian creative destruction—it’s creative annihilation. Christensen and Horn imagined a reformed and responsive university sector. What we have instead is a hollowed-out system where students learn to game the machine, faculty burn out trying to preserve integrity, and administrators chase tech partnerships while gutting their academic cores.

The movie is already being made. It isn’t a Hollywood fantasy. It’s the lived reality of students wondering why they’re still paying five figures for an education they can automate. It’s the story of adjuncts discarded in cost-cutting purges. It’s the grim resignation of faculty who know their lectures are being fed into the same machine that replaces them. And it’s the slow recognition among lawmakers and funders that the 200-year-old institution of American higher education may not survive the decade.

Christensen’s theory pointed a loaded gun at higher education. AI pulled the trigger. What comes next is unclear, but it won’t be disruption in the old sense. It will be a reckoning with what happens when the ground beneath you no longer exists. The educational Hiroshima has already happened. Now we must decide whether to rebuild—or retreat into the ruins.

Sources

Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, Jossey-Bass, 2011
Christensen Institute: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/disruptive-innovation/
Michael B. Horn, “Bringing Disruptive Innovations to Education,” 2024 — https://michaelbhorn.com
Business Insider, “Half of US Colleges Will Be Bankrupt,” 2013 — https://www.businessinsider.com/clay-christensen-higher-education-on-the-edge-2013-2
Inside Higher Ed, “University of Arizona's $240 Million Deficit,” 2024 — https://www.insidehighered.com
Inside Higher Ed, “WVU Academic Cuts,” 2023 — https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/09/19/wvu-begins-largest-academic-purge-its-history
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Higher Education Risk Index, 2024
BestColleges, “Major College Closures Since 2020” — https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/closed-colleges-list-statistics-major-closures/
AACU Research on AI in Higher Ed — https://www.aacu.org/research/leading-through-disruption
Marketing AI Institute, “AI Cheating in Higher Ed” — https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/ai-cheating-schools-universities
CNBC, “College Closures Could Jump Amid Financial Challenges,” 2024 — https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/11/college-closures-could-jump-amid-financial-challenges-fed-research.html
SR.ITHAKA.org, “Making AI Generative for Higher Education” — https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/making-ai-generative-for-higher-education/
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Today’s AI Threat More Like Nuclear Winter Than Nuclear War,” 2024 — https://thebulletin.org/2024/02/todays-ai-threat-more-like-nuclear-winter-than-nuclear-war/
Hackeducation.com, “The Education Apocalypse,” 2013 — http://hackeducation.com/2013/11/07/the-education-apocalypse
NBER Working Paper No. 33867, “Generative AI and Labor Market Impact,” 2024 — https://www.nber.org/papers/w33867

The Digital Dark Ages of Higher Education: Greed, Myth, and the Ghosts of Lost Knowledge

In a time of unprecedented data collection, artificial intelligence, and networked access to information, it seems unthinkable that we could be slipping into a new Dark Age. But that is precisely what is unfolding in American higher education—a Digital Dark Age marked not just by the disappearance of records, but by the disappearance of truth.

This is not a passive erosion of information. It is a systemic, coordinated effort to conceal institutional failure, to commodify public knowledge, and to weaponize mythology. It is a collapse not of technology, but of ethics and memory.

A Dark Age in Plain Sight

Digital decay is usually associated with vanishing files and outdated formats. In higher education, it takes the more sinister form of intentional erasure. Data that once offered accountability—graduation rates, job placement figures, loan default data, even course materials—have become reputational liabilities. When inconvenient, they vanish.

Gainful Employment data disappeared from federal websites under the Trump administration. Student outcomes from for-profit conversions are obscured through accounting tricks. Internal audits and consultant reports sit behind NDAs and paywalls. And when institutions close or rebrand, their failures are scrubbed from the record like Soviet photographs.

This is a higher education system consumed by image management, where inconvenient truths are buried under branded mythologies.

The Robocolleges and the Rise of the Algorithm

No phenomenon illustrates this transformation more starkly than the rise of robocolleges—fully online institutions like Southern New Hampshire University, University of Phoenix, and Liberty University Online. These institutions, driven more by enrollment growth than educational mission, are built to scale, surveil, and extract.

Their architecture is not intellectual but algorithmic: automated learning systems, outsourced instructors, and AI-driven behavioral analytics replace human-centered pedagogy. Data replaces dialogue. And all of it happens behind proprietary systems controlled by Online Program Managers (OPMs)—for-profit companies like 2U, Academic Partnerships, and Wiley that handle recruitment, curriculum design, and marketing for universities, often taking a majority cut of tuition revenue.

These robocolleges aren’t built to educate; they’re built to profit. They are credential vending machines with advertising budgets, protected by political lobbying and obscured by branding.

And they are perfectly suited to a Digital Dark Age, where metrics are manipulated, failures are hidden, and education is indistinguishable from a subscription service.

Myth #1: The College Degree as Guaranteed Mobility

The dominant myth still peddled by these institutions—and many traditional ones—is that a college degree is a golden ticket to upward mobility. But in an economy of stagnant wages, rising tuition, and unpayable debt, this narrative is a weapon.

Robocolleges and their OPM partners sell dreams on Instagram and YouTube—“Success stories,” “first-gen pride,” and inflated salary stats—while ignoring the mountains of debt, dropout rates, and lifelong economic precarity their students face. And when those stories come to light? They disappear behind legal threats, settlements, and strategic rebranding.

The dream has become a trap, and the myth has become a means of extraction.

Myth #2: Innovation Through EdTech

“Tech will save us” is the second great myth. EdTech companies promise to revolutionize learning through adaptive platforms, AI tutors, and automated assessments. But what they really offer is surveillance, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.

Institutions are increasingly beholden to opaque algorithms and third-party platforms that strip faculty of agency and students of privacy. Assessment becomes analytics. Learning becomes labor. And the metrics these systems produce—completion rates, engagement data—are as easily manipulated as they are misunderstood.

Far from democratizing education, EdTech has helped turn it into a digital panopticon, where every click is monetized, and every action is tracked.

Myth #3: The Digital Campus as a Public Good

Universities love to claim that their digital campuses are open and inclusive. But in truth, access is restricted, commercialized, and disappearing.

Libraries are gutted. Archives are defunded. Publicly funded research is locked behind publisher paywalls. Historical documents, administrative records, even syllabi are now ephemeral—stored on private platforms, subject to deletion at will. The digital campus is a gated community, and the public is locked out.

Third-party vendors now control what students read, how they’re taught, and who can access the past. Memory is no longer a public good—it is a leased service.

Greed, Cheating, and Digital Amnesia

This is not simply a story about decay—it is a story about cheating. Not just by students, but by institutions themselves.

Colleges cheat by manipulating data to mislead accreditors and prospective students. OPMs cheat by obscuring their contracts and revenue-sharing models. Robocolleges cheat by prioritizing growth over learning. And all of them cheat when they hide the truth, delete the data, or suppress the whistleblowers.

Faculty are silenced through non-disclosure agreements. Archivists are laid off. Historians and librarians are told to “streamline” and “rebrand” rather than preserve and inform. The keepers of memory are being dismissed, just when we need them most.

Myth as Memory Hole

The Digital Dark Ages are not merely a result of failing tech—they are the logical outcome of a system that values profit over truth, optics over integrity, and compliance over inquiry.

Greed isn’t incidental. It’s the design. And the myths propagated by robocolleges, OPMs, and traditional universities alike are the cover stories that keep the public sedated and the money flowing.

American higher education once aspired to be a sanctuary of memory, a force for social mobility, and a guardian of public knowledge. But it is now drifting toward becoming a black box—a mythologized, monetized shadow of its former self, accessible only through marketing and controlled by vendors.

Without intervention—legal, financial, and intellectual—we risk becoming a society where education is an illusion, memory is curated, and truth is whatever survives the deletion script.

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Sources and References:

• Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed

• Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake

• Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains

• U.S. Department of Education archives (missing Gainful Employment data)

• “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship” (2018)

• SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

• Internet Archive reports on digital preservation

• ProPublica and The Century Foundation on OPMs and robocolleges

• Faculty union reports on librarian and archivist layoffs

• Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education coverage of data manipulation, robocolleges, and institutional opacity

Chegg: A Critical History of a Disruptor Turned Controversy Machine

Chegg, once hailed as a Silicon Valley disruptor democratizing access to education, has undergone a profound and troubling transformation since its founding in 2005. What began as a textbook rental company evolved into a billion-dollar homework help empire—an empire that, critics argue, has done more to undermine academic integrity than to foster genuine learning. Its business model capitalized on the structural weaknesses of American higher education and, in the process, normalized a shadow system of paid cheating.

Origins: Textbooks, Student Debt, and Disruption

Chegg was born at the intersection of inflated textbook costs and the neoliberal university. Founders Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra sought to bring the efficiencies of the sharing economy to the campus bookstore. In its early years, Chegg attracted investor attention by promising cheaper textbook rentals—a modest but important service in an era of spiraling student debt.

But as textbook rentals became commodified, Chegg pivoted. By the early 2010s, it was building a suite of digital services: step-by-step solutions, tutoring, and subscription-based homework help under its Chegg Study brand. When Chegg went public in 2013, it promoted itself not just as a tech company, but as a partner in “student success.” In reality, it had found a way to turn student desperation into a profitable SaaS model.

Homework Help or Cheating-as-a-Service?

Chegg’s transformation into a homework help platform would eventually earn it a darker moniker: “Cheating-as-a-Service.”

Nowhere is this critique more powerfully detailed than in education journalist Derek Newton’s Cheat Sheet, a Substack project dedicated to exposing the industrial-scale cheating facilitated by platforms like Chegg, Course Hero, and Studypool. Newton, who has tracked the issue since 2019, documented case after case in which students used Chegg not to learn—but to submit answers for graded assignments and exams. Faculty across disciplines and institutions began reporting widespread cheating enabled by Chegg, especially during the remote learning surge triggered by COVID-19.

In one issue of Cheat Sheet, Newton wrote:

“Chegg isn’t an education company. It’s a cheating company. It monetizes academic dishonesty, obfuscates accountability, and deflects responsibility while raking in millions in subscription revenue.”

According to Newton, Chegg’s "ask an expert" function—where students submit specific questions and receive solutions within minutes—became a tool of choice for real-time cheating during online exams. Despite university honor codes, many students saw Chegg as a normalized part of academic life. Meanwhile, Chegg’s refusal to proactively block cheating or cooperate fully with universities left institutions scrambling.

Pandemic Profits and Ethical Collapse

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as universities shifted online, Chegg’s subscriber base soared. Students confined to Zoom classrooms flocked to digital platforms for support—or shortcuts. By 2021, Chegg had nearly 7 million subscribers and posted annual revenues of $776 million. Its stock price peaked above $100 in February 2021.

But that growth came with growing backlash. Professors and academic integrity officers called for investigations. Some universities demanded IP logs and timestamps from Chegg in academic misconduct cases. In response, Chegg adopted a policy of releasing user data only under subpoena—shifting the burden to faculty and administrators.

Chegg, for its part, insisted it was simply offering "study support" and denied facilitating cheating. But the evidence presented in Newton’s Cheat Sheet and other academic publications told a different story.

Collapse, AI Disruption, and Image Repair

In 2023, a new threat emerged: OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Free, flexible, and fast, ChatGPT began to supplant Chegg for the same user base. In a rare moment of corporate honesty, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig told investors that ChatGPT was impacting the company’s subscriber growth. Wall Street panicked. Chegg’s stock plummeted, its valuation shrank, and the company began rounds of layoffs—first 4% of its workforce, then 23% in 2024.

Desperate to stay relevant, Chegg pivoted again—this time toward “CheggMate,” its proprietary AI chatbot built in partnership with OpenAI. Yet the damage to its brand, and its future, was already apparent.

By 2025, Chegg was struggling to define its purpose in a rapidly changing education tech landscape. Its subscription model had been undermined by free AI. Its name remained tainted by years of academic dishonesty. And efforts to shift into AI tutoring raised further concerns about data privacy, surveillance, and automation in learning.

A Mirror of Higher Education’s Failures

Chegg’s rise and fall cannot be understood in isolation. It thrived in a system where students are overburdened, instructors are underpaid, and administrators look the other way as long as graduation rates and tuition dollars remain stable. Its gig-based backend—where underpaid "experts" supply answers for a global audience—mirrors the adjunctification of academic labor itself.

Derek Newton’s Cheat Sheet and other critical reporting have exposed how edtech platforms exploit the credibility crisis in higher education. The real scandal isn’t just that Chegg exists—it’s that the ecosystem made it necessary.

Conclusion

Chegg’s legacy may one day be viewed not as a revolution in learning, but as a symptom of higher education’s marketized decline. Like diploma mills and for-profit colleges before it, Chegg served the needs of students abandoned by the system—but did so at the cost of academic trust and intellectual growth.

As the AI era unfolds, and companies like Chegg scramble to reposition themselves, the Higher Education Inquirer will continue to ask: who profits, who pays, and who is left behind?

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Sources

• Derek Newton, Cheat Sheet newsletter: https://cheatsheet.substack.com

• Chegg Inc. 10-K and Investor Calls (2015–2025)

• The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Is Chegg Helping or Hurting?”

• Inside Higher Ed, “Chegg, ChatGPT, and the New Arms Race in EdTech”

• Bloomberg, “Chegg Warns of ChatGPT Threat”

• Reddit threads: r/Professors, r/College, r/AcademicIntegrity

• The Markup, “Chegg’s Gig-Economy Model and Academic Labor”

• The Atlantic, “The Cheating Economy”

• Higher Education Inquirer Archives on EdTech and Academic Integrity