I’m neither an economist nor a computer scientist, and I don’t possess a crystal ball — so like most people, I struggle to know what to make of it all (even if my suspicions tend toward the latter). But I do teach political philosophy in a British university, so I have had to wrestle with the impact of large language models (LLMs) in one small domain: higher education. And here, my conclusion is simple. The threat they pose is existential.

However, the reasons for this are not straightforward. As often, reality is complicated. Still, we can make headway by bracketing out the question of what AI means for university research — which will differ dramatically across fields — and instead focus on teaching. Specifically, students who use LLMs to complete their coursework assignments. Ask anybody lecturing in a university today and they will tell you the same: the impact has been dramatic.

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The most obvious change is that whereas plagiarism software was previously very good at catching students passing off copied work as their own, LLMs evade this entirely. Programs like ChatGPT generate wholly original text based on the prompts you feed them, making plagiarism software useless. (It’s cheating, Jim, but not as we knew it.)

Likewise, software which claims to be able to detect AI-generated text is of no help, yielding false results in both directions. Students know this. I can only speak directly to the effect on essay-based subjects, but I can’t imagine the situation is any better in the sciences. In turn, we academics are painfully aware that at least some students are using the technology, and hence we are sometimes giving out grades for work spat out by machines, but fraudulently presented as human.

Shouldn’t we, the certified experts, be able to tell the difference between undergraduate work and LLM slop? Well kind of — but it’s tricky. A little while ago I was confidently pronouncing on my ability to spot AI-generated work in my field. When it comes to political philosophy, there is a certain tone of arch confidence — a panoramic control of the wider discipline — that it takes years of reading, writing, and thinking to pull off. No undergraduate has been studying the subject anywhere near long enough to be able to write with that level of control and authority. Hence when I find this tone in student work, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got an LLM-cheat.

As a colleague pointed out to me, however, this runs straight into the “toupée fallacy”. Imagine I confidently proclaim that men who wear toupées always look bad, and would be better off just going bald. After all, we can all tell they are wearing wigs! The problem here is that I’m assuming I can always spot a toupée. The good toupées are precisely the ones I don’t spot. Just because I can spot some toupées (the bad ones) doesn’t mean I can spot all toupées — indeed, the good ones are precisely the ones I miss, in turn feeding my mistaken confidence that I can spot them all. The same goes for student use of LLMs. Those who are effective at using the technology to cheat are precisely the ones getting away with it.

And even when I spot the coursework equivalent of a toupée, there’s usually nothing I can do about it anyway. My gut instinct that coursework feels like AI is, reasonably enough, insufficient proof to fail a submission. Unless the student is daft enough to have included a hallucinated bibliography of made-up AI references (and yes, this does happen), they always have plausible deniability. Their word, against my gut instinct. Unprincipled offenders win every time. After all, for a student willing to cheat on submitted assignments, a bit of extra lying isn’t much of a leap.

Yet it’s not just the problem of brazen cheating. In some ways, the more insidious threat LLMs pose to undergraduate learning is the promise of instant shortcuts. Why struggle through that difficult article, why read that complicated book, why force yourself through the problem set, when the internet can just summarize it for you?

The answer to which is: because it is only through the struggle, the forcing, the wrestling with ideas for yourself, over the course of years, that you can truly train and develop your mind. Indeed, this is the reason university humanities degrees put such a high premium on writing. Writing is thinking. Until you have tried to put your ideas on the page, you never really know if you understand them and have them under control.

Unfortunately, the truth of these facts only becomes apparent with experience — which is exactly what undergraduates lack. You may also be surprised to hear that people in their late teens and early twenties tend not to be good at putting off immediate pleasure in exchange for distant reward. Traditionally, one thing that universities were good at was teaching young people this skill by forcing them to acquire it. (One learns by doing.) LLMs, however, pose a direct threat to this entire process. They are a quick-fix drug dangled before students’ noses whose true effects appear to be the stunting of intellectual development.

What I would give to demolish the Silicon Valley cartels foisting this corrosive digital narcotic upon my students! Move fast and break things? How I wish I could return the favor.

By this point, it is abundantly clear that the only pedagogically robust response to LLMs in universities is at least a partial return to traditional methods. Reliance on online coursework has to be reduced; a significant return to paper and pen is required. This is the only way we can guarantee that students are not cheating in (all) their submissions. It is only by demanding that they prove their knowledge directly, in person, that we can incentivize them to go away and learn properly in their own time. Everybody in higher education knows this already.

But not everybody will admit it. University administrators in particular don’t want to admit it. This is not just because they’ve already invested huge amounts of money in online systems amid the headlong race to “embrace” AI and enter into hefty contracts with companies like Microsoft Copilot to teach students how to use AI tools. (As if middle-aged people like me are the ones who need to teach the kids how to use technology.) More than this, it is also the result of the sheer scale of modern university operations.

Although some institutions have already moved to integrate pen and paper exams, places like King’s College London, where I work, are trying to run away from the reality. This is in part because we have more students enrolled than we could possibly fit into exam rooms during a finite exam period. This is presumably why, at a meeting with our university “AI Lead” last year, my department was told that a return to having majority exam-based assessments was straightforwardly not an option.

Instead, my colleagues and I were told that the university AI policy is that we as teachers must strive to become so inspirational that our students will not want to use LLMs in any nefarious capacity. In this scenario, they will only use it to “enhance their learning” (whatever that means).

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Now listen, I’m not completely against this line of thought. In fact, I try to do this anyway. But can we please stop with the willful naivety? Students today arrive at university having been raised in a culture, and an education system, that hammers into them the mantra that the main reason you go to university is to get a classification on a piece of paper (preferably 2:1 or above), the major function of which is to be a ticket on the job market.

Some of my students see their degree as more than that: an opportunity to learn, explore ideas, expand their mental horizons through structured education where the only path to genuine reward is hard work. But let’s get real — they are the exception, the minority. Most are not like that. And who can really blame them? They are taking on tens of thousands in debt on the assurance that this is a necessary financial transaction undertaken to secure future earning potential. They are the customers, we are the retailers. UK universities have been fundamentally rigged this way for the last 20 years. And now you say that it’s my job to inspire a love of learning so deep that all of those factors can be overcome? That somehow my charisma in the lecture hall can compete with the narcotics of Silicon Valley? Please.

Yet this is precisely where the wider pieces start coming together and the threat becomes existential.

UK universities today are expected to operate like businesses. If we cannot attract sufficient numbers of students, and bring in the fees that they pay, then we cannot expect to stay open. Student fees effectively haven’t increased since they were hiked by the coalition government, meaning their value has fallen in real terms by about 30%. Until recently, the main strategy for dealing with this was massive increases in Master’s degrees, with a very deliberate focus on attracting international students, who pay much higher fees. Which in practice largely meant: the Chinese.

Who cares that rampant fraud has been committed as a result? UK degrees are now routinely awarded to students unable to send three sentences of coherent English in an email, who never say a word in class, and are manifestly cheating on coursework (many were relying on commercial online essay farms even before the arrival of LLMs). University teachers like me have tried to kick up a fuss — and are promptly told by administrators to pipe down and get on with despoiling our vocation. After all, who did we think was paying our salaries?

But about two years ago, the magic money tree started to shrivel. The story is complicated, but, in effect, Beijing started to tighten the taps, while the racist riots of summer 2024 rather put off international students from coming to our delightful shores. Universities panicked and are now pivoting away from an emphasis on Master’s degrees towards massively increasing undergraduate numbers.

The problem is that there are only a limited number of undergraduates across the sector. So now we have competitive cannibalization. The Russell Group, for example, is in a dog-eat-dog contest where some universities (like mine) massively increase undergraduate cohorts — at the direct expense of smaller, more provincial institutions. For now my job is safe – less so colleagues at the University of York, an equally venerable institution, but which last year was trying to shed 20% of its staff. And of course, this contest is simply being passed along, jeopardizing less prestigious institutions in turn. Many British universities are now facing financial collapse as a result.

These dogs, however, may also be in a race to the bottom. The entire contest is predicated on the assumption that undergraduates will still want to bother to come to university at all. Yet graduate recruiting is down, and there are emerging signs that this is a direct response to the rise of LLMs. Why hire 100 graduate trainees when you can just get one and ask Claude to do the rest of the work at a fraction of the cost and 1,000 times as fast? And equally, why take on £50k of debt to get a degree, if a degree no longer gets you a job anyway? As tech chiefs publicly predict the end of white collar work within the next two years, you can forgive the next generation for choosing to sit things out.

If LLMs gut the graduate workforce, it won’t just be the undergraduate essay that they put out of business. It will be the British university sector as a whole – which is easily big enough to take the rest of the economy with it. The chickens are coming home to roost. And when they land not just the shed, but the entire farm, may yet crumble under their weight.

Over and over, I felt the slow-motion gutpunch of realisation that an employer was never going to respond. Like many, I worked for free, drawing on savings from summer and university jobs from the previous year, to get my foot on a career ladder that wasn’t my first choice.

It hadn’t been until September 2009, 12 long months after Lehman Brothers’ collapse, that Gordon Brown announced his plan for youth unemployment. By that point, the damage had already been done. In the intervening year, youth unemployment rose at four times the average rate, putting an extra 157,000 18-24 year olds out of a job and leaving more than a quarter of a million unemployed for six months or more.

I was lucky, as it turned out. I caught a break, never suffered long-term unemployment and eventually found a career path that has been good to me. But for many of my contemporaries that career start took a toll that endured for many years. According to work by the Resolution Foundation, the generation that entered the labour market alongside me between 2008-11 took six years to make up their lost wages and graduates were 30% more likely to work in low wage jobs than students who left university before or after them.

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How society can survive Covid-19

By Will Tanner

Even worse effects were experienced after previous downturns. The cohort that entered the labour market during the mass unemployment of the early 1980s were earning between 13 and 21% less, on average, two decades later. A study of school leavers in the Netherlands in the 1990s found that delaying their entry into the job market by a year reduced their likelihood of finding a job in the following two years from 60% to 16% for men, and from 47% to 13% for women.

We cannot afford to be as lethargic about youth unemployment this time. As the latest ONS figures show, coronavirus may kill fewer young people than previous pandemics (peak mortality during the Spanish Flu was among 28-year-olds) but it has greater potential to sentence them to a life of lower earnings, worse jobs and weaker productivity. The downturn we are entering will be deeper than any other in living memory, and it may also be longer lasting. We must avoid long-term unemployment becoming a rite of passage for a generation.

This will be harder than it sounds. Young people are typically the most vulnerable in recessions because they are most expendable. As existing jobs are lost and new openings become scarce, newly minted youngsters are usually first to be fired and last to be hired. The thinning of the labour market means young people are forced to compete with people with years of experience. Their ambitions and dreams can disintegrate and the skills they built up can fade as time goes on. These effects will already be being felt by the many young people on furlough.

The priority for the Government should be to keep as many young people in work as possible, and to bounce them back into work as quickly as possible when they fall out. The extension of the furlough scheme will help to achieve the first of these objectives, at least for now. But very soon ministers will have to consider options that were previously unthinkable to salvage a generation — and protect the future economy.

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Put bluntly, we will need to start paying employers and institutions to keep young people in work and study. That is a sentence to make fiscal conservatives and economic liberals baulk. But in case you have not noticed we are not in normal times and the normal rules do not apply.

Evidence from other countries provides some evidence of the effectiveness of limited, targeted wage subsidies. A recent evaluation of France’s policy of small business hiring credits for low-wage workers, introduced just three months after the fall of Lehman Brothers in December 2008, found that it had strong and immediate employment effects. Another study of Sweden’s Anställningsstöd employment subsidy programme, which supports up to 85% of wages for underemployed workers, found that firms that hired through the scheme grew quicker than counterparts that did not.

A less expensive option would be for the Treasury to waive employers’ National Insurance contributions for younger workers. Saving these frictional costs will not generate thousands of new jobs but it might shift the balance in favour of younger workers for existing posts. In the current environment, when youth unemployment is surging ever higher, the usual protests about the deadweight costs are less salient. Whatever its form, some kind of Coronavirus Youth Job Retention Scheme will be needed to keep young people in work long after the furlough scheme is over.

But in a severely dampened economy, jobs and wages are always going to have limited reach; there will simply be fewer jobs around. So ministers should consider keeping some young people in education for an extra year. It is little unremarked upon, but it costs the taxpayer marginally less — around £4,000 a year — to support an 18-year-old in college than it does to support them on the basic Universal Credit allowance for a year. These costs fall even more if the effects of lower long-term unemployment on productivity and earnings are taken into account.

Some young people may not want to — in which case we should not force them — but many might want to learn. Given the hammer blow dealt to university finances by plummeting international student numbers, there is a strong case for asking the best institutions to develop cheap one-year courses to upskill the coronavirus generation. It would be an elegant way for the Government, which has rightly resisted a sector-wide bailout, to support the best institutions through the next few years.

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For those of less academic persuasion, this is the moment that apprenticeships should come into their own. One of the virtues of the Conservatives’ apprenticeship reforms is that every firm in the country now has access to a pot of money they can draw upon to fund apprentices, funded from a levy on the biggest employers. These pots could be topped up, co-payments by small businesses could be suspended, or golden handshakes introduced to encourage more firms to hire school leavers as apprentices and put them on a technical path to skilled employment.

Even before this crisis, younger generations had a bad lot. Unlike previous generations, today’s graduates leave university saddled with debt and with marginal tax rates of up to 51%. The pension they receive will be smaller, but they will have to work for longer and contribute more to receive it. The things that previous generations took for granted — a home, a secure job, the ability to settle down and start a family — are harder won and later found, if at all.

As the country begins to emerge from lockdown, where the focus has inevitably and rightly been on the mortality rates of older generations, the focus must swing quickly to the effect on young people. Leaving school or graduating from university is meant to be a wonderful time of adventure and exploration. The unlucky Class of 2020 face heartbreak and listlessness. The scars they will bear from this disease may not generally be visible or medical, but they will last a lifetime unless something is done right now.