I dropped $40k on a lit degree last year and now AI can recite Keats. Am I an idiot?
Last Tuesday, my 19-year-old cousin crashed on my couch after a job interview, and we were standing at the kitchen counter waiting for coffee to brew when he nodded at my stack of dog-eared poetry books by the toaster and asked the question everyone’s been low-key asking for the past two years: “Why would anyone pay for traditional school when you can learn literally anything online for free, and AI will explain it better than any professor anyway?”
I laughed, but I also felt that little twinge in my gut, because I’ve asked myself the same thing at 2 a.m. when I’m staring at my student loan portal and my cat’s walking across my keyboard. Last semester I even tested it, for the hell of it: We had a close reading assignment on The Yellow Wallpaper, I typed the prompt into that AI chat everyone uses, and it spit out a perfectly coherent, perfectly argued 1000-word essay in 12 seconds. It even mentioned the critical conversation about gendered gaslighting that my prof had spent a whole lecture on. I spilled oat milk all over my trackpad when I finished reading it, because I just felt… nothing. No jolt of “oh, that’s what I missed,” just the cold sense that I could have turned that in and gotten a B+ and never thought about the story again.
But then I remember the week we read that story in class. We ran 20 minutes over where we were supposed to be, because half the class had a lot more to say than the syllabus allowed. I stayed after, arguing with Prof Henderson that the narrator wasn’t mentally ill, she just was the only one who could see how fucked the whole arrangement of the house was, and Prof Henderson kept pushing back, we went so long that the department secretary started turning off the lights upstairs. He pulled a crumpled peanut butter granola bar out of his briefcase, half eaten, gave me half, because we both realized we’d skipped lunch to yell about a 120-year-old short story. Can AI give you that? Can a free YouTube lecture give you a granola bar and someone yelling back at you so loud that you leave the room with your cheeks hot and your brain buzzing, because you just rethought the whole story to your core?
A month ago my bathroom faucet started leaking, that slow constant drip that keeps you up at 3 a.m. I watched three different YouTube tutorials, asked AI to walk me through troubleshooting step by step, I bought three different washers and still had that stupid drip. My neighbor Ray came over to borrow a screwdriver, saw me kneeling on the bathroom floor covered in plumber’s putty, laughed, pushed me out of the way, twisted the packing nut just a little harder than I had, and that was it. No drip. He said he learned that in his two-year traditional plumbing program back in the 90s. “All the videos in the world can’t show you how that little nut feels when it’s tight enough. You gotta watch someone twist it, feel the give, mess it up a few times while someone’s standing there telling you you’re doing it wrong. AI can’t feel that with you.” That line stuck with me.
I’m not gonna sit here and pretend traditional education is always worth it, or that it’s some sacred cow that can’t be replaced. I had that intro bio class my first year, 300 people crammed into a lecture hall, the prof just read off the same powerpoint slides that are posted for free on the university’s website, I never even talked to him once the whole semester. The TA graded my midterm in 10 minutes, I forgot everything I crammed for the test a week later. I could have learned all that on Khan Academy for free in half the time, and not paid $1500 for the class credit. That part is just a scam, always has been.
And my cousin? He’s doing an online coding program, uses AI to debug his code every night, he just got an entry level job that pays $10k more a year than the average new grad from the state school’s comp sci program. He works full time while he learns, doesn’t have any student debt. That works for him. That’s better for him than taking four years off to pay for traditional classes.
Last week I studied for my midterm with three other girls from my modern lit class, we sat in the moldy basement of the library, ordered a cold pepperoni pizza that we ate off paper plates, and we went back and forth explaining Woolf to each other. One of the girls started crying halfway through, because her mom had just been diagnosed with cancer and she didn’t know if she was gonna be able to stay in school next semester. We all sat there for 20 minutes, passing around the last slice of pizza, telling our own messed up family stories, no one tried to fix it, we just sat there. You can’t get that from a screen. You can’t get that from AI. But also, not everyone gets to have that. Not everyone can afford to take four years out of their life, to go into six figures of debt, just to sit in a library basement eating cold pizza and cry with strangers who become friends.
I still check my student loan balance sometimes and panic. I still think, what if I just learned everything online, worked while I did it, had no debt? Would I be happier? I don’t know. I don’t have a clean answer. When I walked past the english department quad yesterday, I saw a group of first years sitting on the grass, yelling at each other about some poem, one of them threw a crumpled quiz paper at another’s head, and I smiled. That messy, loud, stupid, human part of learning, that’s the part you can’t download. But it’s also a luxury. I get that.
If you’re asking if it’s still worth it? It depends. If you can afford the luxury of the messy parts, yeah, it is. If you can’t, that doesn’t mean you’re missing out on something that matters more. AI and free information gives you the facts. What traditional education gives you, when it works, is the messy fight around the facts. That’s all. I still don’t know if I made the right choice. But I still have that crumpled granola bar wrapper in my notebook from that day with Prof Henderson, for some reason. That counts for something, I guess. (Word count: 1187)
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