Data, Dishonesty, and Declining Rigor

AI didn’t break higher ed. It revealed the cracks: falling standards, eroded norms, and a growing disconnect between degrees and the job market. These problems predate ChatGPT. Colleges had already begun relaxing expectations around attendance, participation, and performance, especially through online and hybrid formats designed for convenience, not rigor. But the shift wasn’t merely structural. In chasing enrollment and cutting instructional costs, many institutions de-emphasized disciplines with deep traditions of structure and rigor, expanding instead into programs that are easier to scale online—but often less grounded in formal methods or measurable outcomes.

Online and hybrid courses haven’t just changed how students learn; they’ve reshaped what many now expect from faculty, coursework, and from college itself. Even in-person classes now often mimic online ones: asynchronous lectures, automated grading, and minimal oversight. Access may have expanded, but rigor declined. Worse, the system created perverse incentives for both sides. Students can drift through with minimal effort, while colleges collect tuition without paying for proctors, classrooms, or meaningful engagement. By Fall 2023, over half of all undergraduates were enrolled in at least one online course, down from a pandemic peak of 61 percent in 2021—but still far higher than the 37 percent pre-pandemic baseline (NCES).

Courses are filled with countless deadlines for assignments submitted through LMS—on time, flawless, and perfectly formatted. But unless you watch a student produce the work, it’s often safer to assume they didn’t. The occasional flawed submission is almost a relief—it signals genuine academic effort. But when the norm looks artificially perfect, we pile on more busywork to preserve the illusion of difficulty.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1984, when I took financial accounting at the University of Missouri, the grade came from a proctored midterm and final. We had two lectures each week of frenzied note-taking, plus a one-hour lab where the TA demonstrated problems. Homework wasn’t graded—no points, no deadlines. Just a simple question: do you want to learn or not? That structure built discipline, self-efficacy, and the understanding that not all effort is rewarded equally. Today, students in my financial accounting sections complete roughly 75 graded tasks, and the reality is that students are often rewarded for meeting deadlines more than mastering material.

Max Weber described the rise of the industrial economy as rooted in a cultural shift: work became not just survival, but a moral calling. The “protestant ethic,” he argued, prized discipline, method, and accountability—values that once shaped serious education. Students were expected to struggle, persist, and improve under structures that demanded real effort.

Today, we’ve traded that ethic for a customer-service model. The burden of failure has shifted from student to institution, and colleges have responded by softening deadlines, removing requirements, and lowering standards—all in the name of “access.” According to the 2023 Faculty Attitudes on Technology survey by Bay View Analytics and College Pulse, nearly half of tenured faculty say academic standards are falling, and over a third admit to lowering rigor to avoid failing students.

Lowering standards doesn’t help students—it undercuts them. Young people don’t thrive on indulgence. They grow when they’re expected to stretch, struggle, and improve. Easy grades and endless accommodations don’t build confidence, but instead erode it, leaving behind resentment and a quiet contempt for a system that demands so little.

The collapse of expectations has less to do with student effort than with the erosion of program structure. Disciplines like accounting endure because they are built on formal logic, practiced with precision and verified through accountability. In 1494, Luca Pacioli laid out the method of double-entry bookkeeping and insisted it be taught “diligently and with great care,” under a master who explained both the mechanics and the reasoning. That philosophy of disciplined learning became the foundation of global commerce—and it still works.

The university has long served multiple aims: cultivating moral character, transmitting culture, building intellectual capacity, and preparing students for economic life. These goals are not mutually exclusive—but in today’s debt-driven landscape, it’s understandable that students and families focus on financial returns. When institutions mislead on that front, they erode trust not only in their economic promises, but in their civic, moral, and intellectual mission as well.

That ideal of a rigorous education that forms both intellect and skill has quietly been abandoned. In place of structured, skill-based instruction in fields like accounting, nursing, and engineering, many programs now emphasize interpretive, feelings-driven coursework that rewards compliance over competence. The result? Business graduates fluent in “behavioral science” who can’t read a financial report—but can recite ethical frameworks developed by faculty later discredited for research fraud.

Higher education has failed in two ways: by misrepresenting what degrees are worth, and by eroding the standards that give education meaning. AI didn’t cause these failures; it has simply revealed them.

The problem goes beyond pedagogy—it’s economic. Too many degree programs are misaligned with labor markets, yet they’ve become central to the business model of higher education. Students select these programs believing they’re acquiring valuable skills, but often graduate into careers that don’t require a degree at all.

Just as Max Weber observed that prosperity was fueled by a new ethic of disciplined work, the age of artificial intelligence will demand thinkers trained in structure, logic, and rigor.

Take the University of New Mexico’s psychology program, its second-largest undergraduate major. It advertises pathways into clinical work, management, and executive leadership. But the data tells a more constrained story. According to the College Scorecard, median earnings for UNM psychology graduates five years out hover around $45,000—roughly equivalent to the wage for Social and Human Service Assistants, the most likely outcome, though likely not the career students imagined when they enrolled. Students enrolled with the promise of upward mobility. What they got was debt and disappointment.

This is bigger than one program at one school. Psychology is the fifth most commonly awarded bachelor’s degree nationwide, with 129,600 degrees conferred in 2021–22 (NCES, Table 322.10). But it also ranks among the majors with the highest underemployment and lowest median earnings (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2024). That misalignment between promise and outcome is at the heart of higher ed’s trust problem.

Psychology isn’t inherently unserious. But in too many institutions, it’s taught more as a vibe than a discipline, an appealing blend of activism, pop science, therapeutic language, and minimal math demands. For students uncertain about their future, it feels relevant and affirming. For universities chasing enrollment, it’s low-cost to deliver and easy to market. The result is a major that often substitutes engagement for rigor, offering students neither the intellectual structure of the sciences nor the labor-market traction of the professions. This isn’t merely misrepresentation—it’s institutional negligence.

And it raises the central question in education: who are we teaching, and what are we teaching them? For centuries, the “who” was narrow, often restricted by class, gender, and race. Expanding that access is one of higher education’s great achievements. But access alone is not justice. If we broaden the “who” without safeguarding the rigor of the “what,” we give students seats in the classroom but deprive them of meaningful outcomes. A degree means nothing if it represents nothing. It may carry symbolic weight, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Students may not always see the gap at first, especially if grades are high and expectations low. But over time, outcomes speak louder than intentions. And when those outcomes disappoint, trust in the system collapses.

That failure doesn’t just appear in earnings data; it shows up in the classroom. A system willing to exaggerate economic outcomes cannot be trusted to assess learning outcomes. Students learn quickly what’s real and what isn’t. They see a university that rewards the appearance of effort more than the substance of learning. Work is submitted that wasn’t written by the student, and instructors pretend not to notice. Assignments are polished, but understanding is shallow. The rituals of college persist, but the substance has withered—and under scrutiny, the system unravels. Not because of AI, but because of poor leadership.

That’s why AI feels so dangerous to modern universities. It doesn’t just threaten pedagogy—it exposes the illusion. When anyone can generate passable work with a prompt, the weakness of our assessment systems becomes obvious. The answer isn’t to ban AI. It’s to raise standards. Design assignments that demand original thought and reinforce structure, effort, and accountability.

If we want students to thrive in a world of intelligent machines, we must demand more of them—not less. That means restoring rigor in the classroom and holding students accountable for their own learning. Real learning pushes them beyond comfort and into competence. There is no shortcut. We already know what works: proctored exams, high expectations, and treating learning as the student’s responsibility, not the institution’s. These reforms may shrink enrollment, but they will restore higher education’s integrity and purpose, and create the conditions for sustainable growth.

We are entering an era of economic expansion that will dwarf the Industrial Revolution. Just as Max Weber observed that prosperity was fueled by a new ethic of disciplined work, the age of artificial intelligence will demand thinkers trained in structure, logic, and rigor—on a scale we’ve never seen.

But higher education is not preparing them. Instead of deep, demanding scholarship, many colleges now offer convenience, illusion, and credential inflation. As Jefferson warned more than two centuries ago, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

At its best, higher education is both a cornerstone of civil society and a driver of economic mobility. The public recognizes this and supports it through generous subsidies. But like any large, publicly funded system, higher education suffers from inefficiencies and abuse. Chief among them is the erosion of rigor: colleges have replaced the hard work of instruction with rubrics, deadlines, and automated tasks. Students submit work they didn’t write. Faculty assign work they don’t read. What passes for engagement is often simulation. And at the program level, degrees are frequently misaligned with labor markets—sold as pathways to opportunity but producing few measurable returns.

Defenders of the system point out, rightly, that not all value can be measured in dollars. Intellectual growth, civic understanding, and moral development matter, and higher education has long been a home for those goods. Greek and Latin, subjects without discernible economic return, carry enduring civic value. However, while these goods are real, they’re often pitched as byproducts of programs marketed as career gateways. When students take on debt expecting increased earnings, those promises become a public concern. We have no macro-level tools for measuring intellectual development, but we can measure debt, wages, and employment. And by those metrics, many programs fall short. Degrees marketed as career pathways often produce earnings no higher than a high school diploma.

Federal law now reflects this distinction: under Section 84001 of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, programs that fail to improve earnings over a high school baseline lose loan eligibility. Colleges are free to offer philosophical enrichment or spiritual exploration. But once they take public funding and market themselves as engines of economic opportunity, they incur an obligation to deliver. As the line goes: Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. The moment you take Caesar’s coin, you accept Caesar’s accounting.