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Tuesday, July 29, 2025

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

Tuesday, December 9, 2025

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.

Monday, December 22, 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”

Friday, August 22, 2025

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.

Friday, November 22, 2024

Accreditor ACCSC Again Grants Maximum Renewal To Troubled For-Profit Colleges (David Halperin)

College accreditor ACCSC has renewed approval of four for-profit colleges owned by California-based International Education Corp. (IEC), a company that was forced to shut down many of its campuses in the past year after a U.S. Department of Education investigation revealed the schools were rigging student entrance exams and engaging in other fraudulent conduct.

By memo dated November 15, ACCSC noticed the public that it had renewed accreditation of four IEC-owned schools for five years, which is the maximum period of renewal that ACCSC grants to colleges. Three of the schools — in Gardena, Riverside, and Sacramento, California — are branded as UEI College, while the fourth, called United Education Institute, is in Las Vegas.

Abuses at IEC schools

In February, the Department of Education terminated financial aid eligibility to another IEC-owned chain called Florida Career College, and the school closed. As part of the resolution of that matter, the CEO of IEC, Fardad Fateri, stepped down. The Department acted because it found, as described in a detailed 38-page letter sent to FCC in April 2023, blatant cheating at FCC on “ability-to-benefit” entrance exams for students without a high school diploma.

Republic Report, relying on interviews with numerous FCC staff, had first exposed that long-running rampant misconduct, along with other blatant recruiting and financial abuses, at FCC. FCC’s misbehavior lured numerous students — veterans, single parents, immigrants, and other struggling Americans — into low-quality school programs that left them deep in debt and without the career advancement they sought.

The Department’s February settlement agreement with IEC indicated that the Department had an open investigation of potential violations at UEI similar to those found at FCC. The settlement barred UEI from administering ATB tests going forward. As part of the settlement, the Department agreed to end its investigation of UEI, if UEI complied with the settlement agreement. That investigation of UEI is apparently now over.

However, a September 2023 letter from ACCSC to IEC revealed that the company was also under investigation by California’s attorney general. It’s unclear whether that investigation remains open.

ACCSC was not the accreditor of Florida Career College, but it does accredit some of the UEI campuses. Soon after the Department announced in April 2023 that it was moving to cut off federal student aid to FCC, ACCSC placed UEI College and International Education Corp. on “System-Wide Warning” status, citing the Department’s findings that senior IEC leaders knew of and encouraged the cheating, and also citing IEC’s alleged failure to inform ACCSC of the Department’s investigation in a timely manner. ACCSC also noted that IEC had voluntarily halted ability-to-benefit testing and enrollment at UEI; the accreditor’s May 2023 order included a requirement that such testing and enrollment be suspended — suggesting already that there might be questions about ATB testing at UEI.

Yet now ACCSC has renewed accreditation for IEC/UEI schools for the maximum period, the same renewal that it would grant to the best-behaving schools. The renewals are effective back to dates in 2020 and 2022, reflecting in part that ACCSC delayed decisions on renewal while the schools were being evaluated, so the schools must seek renewal again soon. But it’s fair to ask whether the full five-year renewals were appropriate, or whether, instead, ACCSC continues to tolerate college abuses, to the detriment of both students and of the U.S. taxpayers who support the hundreds of millions in federal financial aid that have flowed to ACCSC schools.

ACCSC executive director Michale McComis did not respond to a request for comment regarding the renewal for the IEC schools.

Abuses at other ACCSC-accredited schools

The question of ACCSC’s tolerance for predatory college abuses is again squarely presented as ACCSC faces its own next review: its application to be renewed in 2026 by the Department of Education as a recognized accreditor, a status that allows schools it accredits to be eligible for federal student grants and loans. The maximum renewal period for this gatekeeper status is also five years. That review process is already underway at the Department.

The last time ACCSC was up for renewal, in 2021, the Department, citing failures by ACCSC in curbing long-running abuses at another awful predatory college operation, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (owner of now-shuttered Independence University), delayed renewal of recognition, required ACCSC to explain its conduct, and ultimately extended ACCSC f0r three years instead of five — although the way the process went forward, the practical effect, disappointingly, was a five year renewal.

Data shows many ACCSC schools have left students worse off than when they started.

Since ACCSC’s last review, the accreditor has engaged in other troubling behavior.

Most notably, as Republic Report first reported, in July 2023, ACCSC had watched while Atlantis University, a Miami-based for-profit school, acted in blatant violation of an ACCSC rule governing the use of “branch campuses” tied to a school’s central campus. Atlantis’s executive director was, at the time, the chair of ACCSC.

The Atlantis branch campus, called Florida Palms University, shut down soon after our report. ACCSC then put Atlantis on warning status, via a letter that, as we noted at the time, was heavily redacted in the version released to the public. Whatever problems the many blacked-out passages of the October 2023 letter concealed stood in sharp contrast to ACCSC’s unconditional five-year renewal of Atlantis in December 2022. ACCSC removed Atlantis from warning status by February 2024.

This year, after Republic Report had repeatedly been able to learn valuable information about the bad behavior of some ACCSC-accredited schools through the public release of detailed letters from the accreditor to schools like UEI and Atlantis — at least the unredacted portions — ACCSC moved away from transparency and accountability. It started releasing, instead of the actual letters to schools, vague summaries that keep the public in the dark about what is actually happening.

ACCSC is also the accreditor of troubled Connecticut-based for-profit Paier College, which faces possible closure after losing access to federal student aid and having been sued for deceptive practices by the state’s attorney general. ACCSC placed Paier on warning status in June, citing low graduation rates and weak validation of faculty credentials. But that action by ACCSC came six months after the school, facing scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Education, voluntarily withdrew from eligibility for federal student grants and loans.

Another ACCSC school, Career College of Northern Nevada (CCNN), abruptly closed in February, replacing its website with a closure notice and literally locking students out of the building.

In June 2023, yet another ACCSC-accredited school, Hussian College, suddenly shut down. In June 2022, ACCSC had put Hussian on system-wide warning, citing concerns about student achievement at the schools. But ACCSC removed the warning and renewed Hussian’s accreditation in December 2022.

ACCSC also accredits Florida’s for-profit Southeastern College. There is much evidence suggesting that that school, owned by ultra-rich Floridians Arthur and Belinda Keiser, effectively receives improper subsidies from Keiser University, a non-profit college controlled by the Keisers.

ACCSC’s renewal application and the new Trump administration

Members of the public have until December 6 to submit written comments to the Department of Education regarding ACCSC’s bid for renewal.

The Biden administration, and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, to their credit, took much more seriously the Department’s obligation to review accreditors for their vigilance in guarding against predatory college abuses than the first Trump administration and Secretary Betsy DeVos did. If the second Trump administration, and new education secretary pick Linda McMahon, truly want to help students, and truly want to implement the incoming administration’s professed commitment to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal government programs, then it should continue the Biden team’s work of holding predatory colleges accountable — and also holding accountable the accreditors that allow such abuses to persist.

[Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Republic Report.]

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

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.

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

Sunday, November 2, 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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”

Thursday, July 1, 2021

The Growth of "RoboColleges" and "Robostudents"

In a previous Higher Education Inquirer article, I presented frightening full-time faculty numbers at some large online universities which I call "robocolleges." Full-time faculty at these robocolleges, in fact, are nearly nonexistent. Bear in mind that all of them are regionally accredited, the highest level of institutional accreditation, and the list includes well-known public university systems as well as for-profit ones.

Robocolleges have de-skilled instruction by paying teams of workers, some qualified and some not, to write content, while computer programs perform instructional and management tasks. Learning management systems with automated instruction programs are known by different names and their mechanisms are proprietary. As professor jobs are deskilled, tasks can be farmed out at reduced costs.

Besides the human content creators who may be given instructional titles, other staff members at robocolleges are paid to communicate with students regarding their progress. The assumption is that managing work this way significantly reduces costs, and it does, at least in the short and medium terms. However, instructional costs are frequently replaced by marketing and advertising expenses to pitch the schools to prospective students and their families. Companies like EducationDynamics and Guild Education have filled the niche of promoting robocolleges to workers at a reduced cost but their overall impact is minimal.

Meanwhile, companies like Chegg profit from this form of learning, helping students game the system in greater numbers, in essence creating robostudents.

The business model in higher education for reducing labor power and faculty costs is not reserved to for-profit colleges. Community colleges also rely on a small number of full-time faculty and armies of low-wage contingent labor.

In some cases, colleges and universities, including many brand name schools, utilize outside companies, online program managers (OPMs), to run their online programs, with OPMs like 2U taking up as much as 60 percent of the revenues. OPMs can perform a variety of jobs, but are best known for their work in enrollment and retention. Prospective students may believe they are talking to representatives of a particular university when in fact they are talking to someone from an outside source. Noodle has disrupted the OPM model by selling their services ala carte, but only time will tell whether it has an impact, or whether schools will merely find less costly outsourced servicers.

Outsourcing higher education has been a reality in US higher education for decades. And automation is also part of education, as it should, when it performs menial tasks, such as taking roll and doing preliminary work to determine student cheating. It's likely that more schools will become more robotic in nature to reduce organizational expenses. But what are the long-term consequences with long-term student outcomes, when automation is used to perform higher level tasks, and when outsourced individuals act in the name of brand name colleges?

To get a small glimpse of this robocollege phenomenon, these schools cumulatively have about 3000 full-time instructors for more than a half-million students.

American Intercontinental University: 51 full-time instructors for about 8,700 students.

American Public University System has 345 F/T instructors for more than 50,000 students.

Aspen University has 34 F/T instructors for about 9,500 students.

Capella University: 216 F/T for about 38,000 students.

Colorado State University Global: 34 F/T instructors for 12,000 students.

Colorado Technical University: 59 F/T instructors for 26,000 students.
Devry University online: 53 F/T instructors for about 17,000 students.

Grand Canyon University has 461 F/T instructors for 103,000 students.*
Liberty University: 1072 F/T for more than 85,000 students.*
Purdue University Global: 346 F/T instructors for 38,000 students.

South University: 0 F/T instructors for more than 6000 students.

Southern New Hampshire University: 164 F/T for 104,000 students.

University of Arizona Global Campus: 194 F/T instructors for about 35,000 students.
University of Maryland Global: 193 F/T instructors for 60,000 students.

University of Phoenix: 127 F/T instructors for 96,000 students.

Walden University: 206 F/T for more than 50,000 students.

*Most of these full-time instructors are faculty at the physical campuses.

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