The Audacious Ask of Higher Education
Part 2 of some collected thoughts at the end of academic year 4 of GenAI...
The Audacious Ask of Higher Education
In the last piece, I was trying to sit with militant apathy and the artifice of education. My point there was not that students are simply apathetic or that AI has somehow made them lazy. It was that students are being asked to move through a system full of contradictions, and then we are surprised when they notice or resist behaving in the ways we expect (or demand). After all, apathy is agency.
That discussion leads to the second thing sitting with me these days. It’s what I’ve been referring to as the audacious ask of higher education.
I would love to invoke this audacity in an inspirational way (vis-a-vis The Audacity of Hope): the idea that we lay claim to trying to do moonshots as part and parcel of higher education. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. When I say “the audacious ask”, I refer to how audacious it can be to ask students what we ask from them.
Higher education asks students to buy into something both literally and metaphorically. We are asking them to invest money, time, attention, energy, hope, identity, and often a very real amount of risk into this thing called a college education. And we are doing that in a moment when AI has made the value proposition of higher education feel even more unstable than it already was.
To be clear, I deeply believe in education. I have taught in higher ed for over 20 years, been a staff member for fifteen, and spent over 20 years as a student in higher education (you are reading that correctly). I read and write about it constantly. I believe and see deep value in the life of the mind, even if I find that phrase a little too precious at times.
But that belief and care for higher education also directs me to do my best to honestly look at what we are doing. Because when we sit down to think about what the ask is of students today, it is kind of wild.
We say to students, many of them 18 years old, some of them adults returning after years away, some of them parents, some of them working full time, some of them carrying all kinds of invisible and visible responsibilities: we want you to spend tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, on this thing called education.
There is no guarantee you will finish.
There is no guarantee that, if you finish, the degree will get you the job you were promised or implied or quietly encouraged to imagine.
There is no guarantee that the job, if you get it, will allow you to pay down whatever debt you took on to get there.
There is no guarantee that the thing you are studying now will remain stable in the job market you are supposed to enter later, especially when so much of the discourse around AI is that it will change, automate, eliminate, or at least reorganize large parts of work.
And then, while students are inside this system, we give them limited agency over what that education actually looks like.
Yes, there are majors and electives and pathways and advisors and all of that. But let’s be honest about the actual experience. Students often choose courses based on a short course description, a modality, a time slot, maybe a professor’s name, maybe whatever Rate My Professor or a friend says, and maybe what happens to still be open when their registration window finally arrives.
If there are fifteen sections of a course, those fifteen sections may be wildly different experiences. They may have different assignments, different instructors, different expectations, different policies, different relationships to AI, different grading patterns, different levels of care, different levels of flexibility, and different forms of hidden curriculum.
But students do not really get to tour the house.
I keep coming back to a discussion with Stefan Bauschard and Anand Rao. If you were asking someone to spend the cost of a house, or two houses, or three houses, depending on the institution and where you live, they would at least get to tour the house. They would get to inspect it. They would get to see the rooms. They would get to know what they are buying.
Yet in higher ed, we give them a brochure, give them a tour of a generic house, and then say, pay by the room, but you can’t see the way the actual room is set up and designed until after you have paid for each room. Sure, we’ll give you a 200-word description, but that’s going to represent all the rooms in that kind.
Consider this description of a kitchen:
”This inviting kitchen offers a clean, functional layout suited for everyday cooking and casual gathering. Generous cabinet space provides practical storage, while ample countertop area supports meal preparation, serving, and small appliances. The room includes standard major appliances, a convenient sink area, and well-placed lighting that keeps the space bright and usable throughout the day. A neutral color palette makes the kitchen easy to personalize with décor, finishes, or future updates. With room for a breakfast table or added storage, this kitchen balances comfort, efficiency, and flexibility, making it a useful central space within the home for daily living.”
It sounds good, but every reader here is imagining a completely different kitchen, and we’re all expected to feel like that is sufficient enough description to buy a kitchen?
If we buy the room and don’t like it afterwards (except for a super-small window that doesn’t actually give us a real sense of the room) or don’t follow the instructions on maintaining the room to the letter (pun intended), then we have to pay for the room again, potentially being given the exact same setup or a very different setup.
It can sound like I’m overly fixated on course descriptions, but honestly, what does it say about what we offer and what we ask of students that we make them make 4-6 decisions every semester around these supposed important parts of their education with such limiting information and a sense of what to expect? Every choice is a roll of the dice; on top of all the other dice-rolling we’re asking of them.
I know some are going to say but that’s not the point or that it’s not higher education’s fault that so much of this is structured as transactional because education is supposed to be transformative (To which I agree and hope for). But that is the system we are working in currently and have been for a long time. It is structured around the value proposition. We can work to undo that, but that takes a lot of work, being ready to give up things we hold dear or benefit from personally, and a willingness to be politically active to advocate better. Until there is better collective effort on that front, it’s still an audacious ask of students.
Again, this is not me saying higher education has no value. I am not making some cynical claim that college is a scam or that learning does not matter. But I do think we have to own the risk we ask students to take.
We have to own how much of the system is built around institutional legibility and convenience rather than student meaning. We have to own how often we tell students that this is all for their benefit while building structures that make sense first to the institution, the registrar, the accreditation process, the grading system, the semester calendar, the department, or the budget.
And we also have to own what it means when AI enters that already unstable bargain.
Because now students are not just asking, why do I have to be in this room? They are asking, why do I have to do this work this way? Why do I need to write this particular paper in this particular form? Why do I need to read this much material if a tool can summarize it? Why do I need to do the first draft alone if I am going to be entering workplaces where AI is increasingly part of the workflow? Why am I being told not to use the tools that the same institution, the same employers, and the same world are telling me are going to matter? Why am I paying this much to be told to pretend the world outside the classroom does not exist inside the classroom?
Not all students always ask these questions with precision or generosity. The question shows up as avoidance. It shows up as a pasted-in AI response. Sometimes, it shows up as a student doing the minimum because the system has taught them that the minimum is often the most rational way to survive.
We make a mistake when we only treat that as an integrity problem. We need to better own that it’s also a value problem…and a relevance problem…and a transparency problem…and a relationship problem…and an efficiency problem.
We have built so much of higher education around grades as the reward mechanism. Move through the course. Complete the tasks. Get the number. Accumulate the credits. Protect the GPA. Graduate.
Grades are efficient. Not a full representation of learning. They are efficient. Many of us have felt this when we get to the end of a semester and realize deeper learning has happened with a student that our accounting system of grading can’t account for.
Grades allow the institution to convert a mess of learning, labor, effort, struggle, confusion, improvement, and uneven human development into a number or letter that can move cleanly through the system. Then we tell students to be thoughtful, deliberate, reflective, curious, and deeply engaged. But at the end, your work and learning are assigned a number. We shouldn’t be surprised; after all, institutions chase the Carnegie standards, which are a product of 19th and early 20th-century industrialization.
How do we ask students to be deliberate in a system that is permeated with an efficiency mindset? Audaciously…that’s how we ask it.
We are asking students to love learning in a system that often trains them to chase points. We want them to resist shortcutting while the institution has, in many ways, been shortcutting around them for years.
AI shows up and gives students a shortcut machine. Students turning toward AI is, in many cases, a perfectly rational response to the bargain we have put in front of them. It may not be the right response or one that serves their learning, but it is rational.
Higher education is a high-cost gamble for access to a precarious future, and students will look for ways to reduce the cost of that gamble in time, energy, attention, and effort.
And if the system says AI is both everywhere and nowhere, both the future of work and banned from the assignment, both transformative and unspeakable, then students will make sense of that contradiction without us.
That is part of the audacious ask too.
We are asking students to invest in higher education while we are still figuring out what higher education is in the age of AI. We want them to trust that our old structures still matter, while simultaneously feeling uncomfortable about what our institutions are (or aren’t) doing.
In the next part, we’ll consider what these two parts have to do with the final consideration, what do these things mean as we step into academic year #5 in the fall of GenAI being available.
One final note: We’re all caught in this: students, faculty, staff, administration, and the world at large. Many of us struggle (self-included) with what all this means and how we proceed. This post is not to foist blame per se but to help us better understand how this looks to students and what that means for what we do next. Higher education has been leaning on inherited structures, promises, and reward mechanisms while the world around those structures keeps changing. This is hard work, and we’re trying to figure out these structural challenges and what it means for higher education. Thank you, everyone who shows up to continue to figure this out.
The Update Space
Upcoming Sightings & Shenanigans
Keynote speaker at the Reimagining the Liberal Arts in the Age of AI Conference, July 21-23 at the University of Mary Washington.
EDUCAUSE Online Program: Teaching with AI. Virtual. Facilitating sessions: ongoing
Recent Recordings, Resources, & Writings:
Davis, L., & Eaton, L. (May 2026). Expanding OER with GenAI. EDUCAUSE Review.
AI x Higher Ed Podcast with Anand Rao & Stefan Bauschard. Episode: Universities Must Adapt to AI—Here’s How They’re Doing It (May, 2026)
Damm, C., & Eaton, L. (2026, March). From prompt to practice: A framework for transparent GenAI use in higher education. EDUCAUSE Review.
Eaton, L., Nemeroff, A., & Sun, X. (2026). AI-assisted course design and development. In K. S. Ives, M. Cini, & R. Schroeder (Eds.), AI applications in online higher education administration: Strategies for maximizing returns and improving outcomes. Routledge.
Margin of Thought with Priten: Season 1, Episode 5: How Can We Center Pedagogy During the AI Tech Wave? (February 2026)
Online Learning in the Second Half with John Nash and Jason Johnston: EP 39 - The Higher Ed AI Solution: Good Pedagogy (January 2026)
The Peer Review Podcast with Sarah Bunin Benor and Mira Sucharov: Authentic Assessment: Co-Creating AI Policies with Students (December 2025)
David Bachman interviewed me on his Substack, Entropy Bonus (November 2025)
The AI Diatribe Podcast with Jason Low (November): Episode 17: Can Universities Keep Pace With AI?
The Opposite of Cheating Podcast with Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant (October 2025): Season 2, Episode 31.
The Learning Stack Podcast with Thomas Thompson (August 2025). “(i)nnovations, AI, Pirates, and Access”.
Intentional Teaching Podcast with Derek Bruff (August 2025). Episode 73: Study Hall with Lance Eaton, Michelle D. Miller, and David Nelson.
Dissertation: Elbow Patches To Eye Patches: A Phenomenographic Study Of Scholarly Practices, Research Literature Access, And Academic Piracy
AI Syllabi Policy Repository: 200+ policies (always looking for more- submit your AI syllabus policy here)
Finally, if you are doing interesting things with AI in your higher ed classrooms, consider being interviewed for this Substack or even contributing. Complete this form, and I’ll get back to you soon!
We periodically host small-group workshops and leadership sessions for higher ed teams. You can learn more about our current offerings here.
AI+Edu=Simplified by Lance Eaton is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Lance - I cannot argue against the case you make about the compromised value proposition or the inherent opaqueness of HE as a consumer commodity. I agree.
The only other perspective I can offer that justifies the rationale for the cost and uncertainty of the HE investment is that it is one of the safest ways for families to invest in the transition of their children from childhood to "apprentice adulthood," as my father used to call it. How much would you pay to get your kid out of the house, operating semi-independently, living in a relatively safe supervised community, and doing something constructive (whether they learn anything practical or not)? How much different is the cost of feeding, housing, transporting, educating, and mentoring that child into adulthood on your own rather than outsourcing it?
As the parent of two college-age kids, I can attest that there is a certain point where, for my own sanity, I need to GET THE DAMN KIDS OUT OF THE HOUSE and on a pathway to maturity. I want my sanity back from pre-kids days. I want my own life back somewhat to who I was before kids.
How much would I pay for that relief? I can't put a figure on it, but the margin between them NOT going to college and them getting out on their own can be managed against what my personal happiness is worth - not to mention my marriage.
The problem here is that we never acknowledge that college is not necessarily there for education - it's a socially acceptable facility for a life transition to adulthood. What students get out of it intellectually and in financial security is mostly a matter of their own motivation. I do not hold a college responsible for that. It is an opportunity for its enrollees - take it or don't.
100%! Not only the students, but we ask the faculty (and staff) to buy into this audacious act as well. Million dollar question is how do we change it? All of these systems and institutional processes are so baked in -- they feel impossible to change. (BTW I feel much the same about the topic of high stakes testing in K-12.)