I dropped $40k on a literature degree and now AI can write sonnets. Am I an idiot?
Last Tuesday I was leaning against my kitchen counter, stirring burnt oat milk into my coffee, when my 19-year-old cousin sent me a text that made me snort coffee out my nose. The mug’s got a chip right on the rim, from when I dropped it moving out of my dorm junior year, so some of it dribbled down my wrist anyway. The text said, “Yo, why would I go to college when I can learn anything I need from AI and YouTube? Just tell me real.”
I stared at the text for ten minutes while my coffee went cold. I’ve had this conversation a dozen times in the last year, usually at cookouts or awkward work happy hours, some guy in a branded hoodie going on about how traditional education is a scam, a relic from a time before you could ask any question and get a tailored answer in 10 seconds. Last month I was at a friend’s backyard cookout, one of those guys who just raised a little funding for an AI education startup was holding court by the grill, going on about how professors are just overpaid gatekeepers now. I was holding a burnt hot dog I didn’t even want, and I just nodded, because half of what he said made sense. I use AI to draft boring work emails, I used it last week to figure out why my dryer kept making that clanking noise, I even asked it to help me write a eulogy for my neighbor’s cat last month. Information isn’t locked up in lecture halls and expensive textbooks anymore. That’s just a fact.
But I didn’t say what I actually thought, because it sounds corny, and I didn’t want to be the old person yelling at the cloud about the good old days. What I thought about was that 15-page paper I wrote junior year on working-class poetry of the 1800s. I pulled an all-nighter, my roommate and I ate a cold pepperoni pizza that’d been sitting in the fridge for three days, she proofread it for me while we watched bad reality TV, I turned it in half-asleep. Got a C minus. I was pissed, obviously, but after class my professor, this old guy with a beard that had more gray than brown, pulled me aside. I thought he was gonna yell at me for turning in garbage, but he said he liked that I connected the poems to my grandma, who worked in a textile factory in North Carolina her whole life. He said I got the historical context wrong, way wrong, but that connection was the thing that mattered most. We stood there in the hall for 20 minutes talking about my grandma, about how those poets would’ve loved that I saw her in their work.
Can AI do that? Sure, it can write a paper connecting factory work to 19th century poetry. It can even make the connection really well. But it can’t have my grandma. It can’t have that all-nighter with my roommate, that embarrassment of the C minus, that weird little moment after class where an old man who’d been studying poetry for 40 years saw something in my messy, wrong paper that was worth talking about.
I thought about that time in my sociology 101 class, I argued with a girl in front of the whole room that social media wasn’t that bad for teen self-esteem. I was so cocky, I thought I was right, and she just laid me out, talked about her little sister who’d stopped eating because of Instagram filters, and my face got so hot I wanted to crawl under the desk. I didn’t talk for the rest of the semester. But that moment? I think about it every single time I see my 13-year-old cousin scrolling TikTok for 5 hours straight. I’ve read a dozen thinkpieces on teen mental health, none of them stuck with me like that awkward, humiliating argument in a stuffy lecture hall.
I’m not sitting here saying traditional education is for everyone, okay? It’s absurdly expensive. I got lucky, my parents had saved for my degree since I was a kid, I only had 10k in loans that I paid off three years after graduation. If I’d had to take out 80k in loans for a literature degree? I’d be an idiot. A lot of people can’t afford to take four years to fumble around and learn things that don’t immediately translate to a job. And a lot of people learn way better on their own, building stuff, learning as they go. My cousin wants to code, he’s already building little apps for his friends in his spare time, why would he go into debt for a computer science degree if he can get a job without it? I wouldn’t blame him if he skips it.
I also can’t deny I forget most of what I learned anyway. I can’t name all the Romantic poets, I can’t recite more than two lines of Wordsworth, I mixed up the date of the Peterloo Massacre just last week at trivia night. AI can pull all that up in two seconds, faster than I can even spell it. So what’s the point, really?
Last weekend I went hiking in the hills an hour outside the city, and they reminded me of the Lake District, I went there a year after I graduated. I remember standing there looking out over the water, and suddenly I could hear my old professor’s voice, droning on about Wordsworth, about how he wrote about hills like they were old friends. I got all teary for no reason, just standing there. AI could tell me everything there is to know about Wordsworth in 10 seconds. It can write a better sonnet than I ever could. But it can’t give me that stupid, warm feeling in my chest when I see a hill that reminds me of that old professor, that C minus paper, that chipped coffee mug from my dorm.
I texted my cousin back yesterday, after thinking about it for a week. I didn’t tell him yes or no. I just said, it’s worth it if you can afford to waste a little time being wrong, and messy, and figuring out what you care about, not just what you need to know. If you can’t do that, don’t do it. No hard feelings either way. That’s the best answer I got. I still don’t know if I’m right.
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