Links and Commentary 10/3/25

The End of Learning?, Should College Be Harder, Microschool Scams, Mamdani vs Gifted and Talented, New College Blues

Author

James Shanahan
October 03, 2025

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

The End of Learning?

The latest declaration that LLMs have killed learning comes from Berkely computer science lecturer, Lakshya Jain.

You have to think through the thing you want to do, write the code for it, execute it, watch it fail, learn what was wrong, fix it, and try again. That forces you to learn the guts of what’s happening from first principles, and the more you do it, the better you become.

I can’t overstate how damaging it is for students to use AI as a means of short-circuiting this process. Part of the purpose of a college course is in learning how to think about and work through complex problems; none of that is achieved if students trade the experience of coding for the convenience of chatbots. In doing this, my students weren’t just cheating the course. They were cheating themselves out of vital development as engineers, failing to make the connections that practice and hard work help form.

He laments that he can’t get his students to stop using AI, even when they’re failing assignments and assessments where they can’t use AI because they’re in-person. Since it seems like we’ve been writing about these problems for years and I’ve certainly mentioned it here before, I think today I’ll make a very different kind of connection.

What we’re really doing is seeing which kinds of students actually care. The problem isn’t AI or even your pedagogy, Dr. Jain. The problem is your students. Too many students just don’t care about learning to think or work through complex problems. For them, the degree is a slip of paper that lets them earn a decent income from a job. Everything else is, at best, secondary. But what we should also understand is that this is more typical in come academic settings than in others.

Gender gaps in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) college majors receive considerable attention, and it is increasingly recognized that not all STEM majors are equal in terms of gender disparities (1–4). For example, the male-to-female ratio among U.S. college majors in biology, chemistry, mathematics, and many other STEM fields is now about 1-to-1 (2, 5), whereas in physics, engineering, and computer science (PECS), the ratio appears to have plateaued at about 4-to-1 (2, 4, 5). Here, we make two important contributions, showing (i) how gender relates to pursuit of a PECS degree throughout the achievement distribution and (ii) that student characteristics that predict PECS pursuit in the literature are not equally predictive of the gender gap throughout the achievement distribution. We find that a surprisingly large number of low-achieving men are majoring in PECS, relative to women, and this cannot be explained by an extensive set of student-level factors proposed in the prior literature (6–10). We can, however, explain the gender gap among high-achieving students. These patterns suggest that interventions to close the gender gap may work to attract high-achieving women; yet, something beyond these student factors may be attracting low-achieving men and repelling average- and low-achieving women, and without addressing those factors, it is unlikely that the PECS gender gap will fully close.

By examining the male to female ratio in terms of students’ achievements and the work done by programs to encourage students to apply and then to retain them, Cimpian & co. figured out that a bunch of male CS grads are underperformers who are helped along by various services in CS programs. When something like an LLM comes along and offers a shortcut to success, I’m not surprised that CS professors like Jain see the following:

Office-hour queues were at an all-time low, I was fielding far fewer questions than normal and attendance for my lectures was as sparse as I had ever seen. Meanwhile, the student traffic on our class forum had plummeted. In other words, nobody seemed to have any questions or need any help on anything, no matter how complex it was.

You have a degree program that cultivates middling talent and pushes it through to what was once an in-demand high-paying career. CS is ground zero for a view of education as nothing more than a skills transaction and a degree as nothing more than signaling. No wonder all these jobs have up and vanished. Do we remember coding boot camps? You know, where someone can attend a five-week intensive training and then code just as well as any fancy college graduate? Why should we pretend that a skillset someone can learn in a few weeks is somehow rarefied and indicative of anything other than the conditions of the job market in 2014? Why did we all assume that CS graduates must be some kind of unique world-historical geniuses? Because they got paid well and held high social status?

Should College Be Harder?

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker asks whether college should be harder. Before diving into the overall argument, let me point to a part that I relate to whole-heartedly.

Teaching was my favorite part of graduate school, and I signed up for as much training as I could. While I was teaching, or otherwise focused on students, my role in the project of higher education made sense to me: I was spending years learning about literature so that I could explain it to students who wanted to better themselves. Outside of class, though, the enterprise was murkier. I knew that what really mattered to my professional advancement was academic research. My teaching skills were basically irrelevant. In fact, I’d been warned that teaching was a distraction from the “real work” of writing articles for my peers.

A-fucking-men!

Anyway, Rothman goes on to point out that students also faced major incentives to do less academically and distinguish themselves in other ways. Coursework was as much of a distraction for the students as for the professors, it seemed. It sure seems like that is the case for Lakshya Jain in the previous link! Rothman thinks that there was an unspoken assumption that all the important learning university students weren’t doing academically would somehow sink in via “osmosis” and that this assumption was probably wrong insofar as academic learning was concerned. What he would like to see is for colleges to refocus on academic learning and for professors to become harder graders and refuse to accept low-quality work. That may mean professionalizing the teaching responsibilities at the cost of research or, perhaps, separating those roles so that researchers are less often required to teach.

Of course, the hard thing is that we live in a world of adjuncts doing most of the teaching these days. The researchers are already teaching way less than the lecturers and adjuncts so it’s not clear they could do more of less. Rothman does worry, however, that the vibrant and diverse crop of professors and all their many approaches to teaching is some of the magic that really connects for star students. But I think he also overlooks how professionalization and its partner, standardization, come with their own imperatives that will, I think, make schools less rigorous, not more because things will be highly gameable and the programs that are the most successful will be those that matriculate the most students meeting standards, not necessarily exceeding them.

No, I think harder means individually college students need to be devoting a lot of time to their studies, getting poor marks and having to recover, and maybe embracing the intellectual productivity that comes from struggling. This isn’t something that requires technological scaling but human scaling. We need students to be face to face with professors for written and oral exams. They need tutorials and seminars, not lecture halls in the hundreds. They have to be able to speak in defense of their ideas and their approaches and, if they can’t they need to be made to. And if they still can’t then the degree isn’t for them. But all of this requires the time and labor of humans. Universities are not, I fear, organized for humans so much as they are organized to make money. Until that changes, throughput and funding are all that will matter.

Microschool Scams, Child Labor, and Rent Seeking

I’ve written a lot about the connections between schools and the labor market. Human capital theory remains an important underpinning logic of how our schools function, even if the overall focus is shifting toward nationalistic and religious values and school choice schemes. What I sometimes forget is that people want schools to lend them children as free labor. I don’t often write about microschools because gathering data about them is basically impossible and I don’t just want to fly off the handle and make blanket judgements. What I will say, though, is that they’re poorly overseen and therefore ripe for scams. You may remember the Harper’s article about school vouchers in Arizona I linked a few weeks back. Here’s one example of what parents are sending their kids to when they form a voucher-funded microschool:

One particularly memorable class took place outside Tucson, at a suburban home decorated like a pirate ship. The instructor—a retired public school teacher who met her husband at a pirate-themed church social, and who has subsequently adorned her house with a fantastic array of buccaneer trappings, including a handmade forty-foot-long wooden bark permanently aground on their front gravel—let me audit her Kids in the Kitchen class, which teaches kids (and their parents) a number of recipes using products from Juice Plus+, a health-supplement company notorious for its multilevel-marketing schemes. (One of its subsidiaries, Tower Garden, sells an aeroponic gardening system that costs at least $670 and is a popular use of ESA funds.)

Corporate advertising in Arizona’s public schools is tightly regulated, but at Kids in the Kitchen no such restrictions exist—the class itself was essentially an hour-long advertisement. When I later hinted to the instructor that, though I admired her entrepreneurial gusto, parents using public funds to purchase Juice Plus+ products seemed like a stretch, she brushed the concern aside. “Public schools have a free-lunch program,” she said. “So why shouldn’t Juice Plus+ be eligible?”

Yeah, basically this lady’s multi-level marketing pyramid scam is being funded by Arizona taxpayers because parents used vouchers to form a microschool that, for one of its classes, sends kids to this lady’s “class” where they learn to “cook” using Juice Plus+ and they’re paying for the materials being used. This is rent-seeking! You’re just taking government money to fund your business and delivering next to nothing of value in return! Yikes. So glad parents have this choice. But surely it’s just a one-off bad apple situation. There’s no way predatory small businesses are looking at microschools as cash-cows or sources of child labor, right? About that…

Elijah is one of 26 middle school students enrolled in a new microschool in Elizabeth City-Pasquotank, North Carolina. The school is an experiment meant to instill emotional intelligence and entrepreneurial skills through project-based learning, which includes a partnership with the local Water Street Real Estate Company, according to district leaders.

Some other red flags before we get to the real kicker:

Consciously modeled on Alpha School, a slickly advertised private school that boasts only two hours of instruction time through an artificial intelligence-backed curriculum, this microschool is testing a new reality for American schools in the Trump era, and will have consequences for the community that’s embracing it.

Of course, instead of a billionaire-funded curriculum management company building out a bespoke “AI” set of courseware like in Alpha School, we have the Water Street Real Estate Company of Elizabeth City-Pasquotank, North Carolina. I’m sure they’ll provide just as good of an “AI” education product. Just kidding, they’re just going to put the kids in front of Khan Academy for two hours a day and call it learning.

So, what will the kids be doing? They’ll be providing the labor for a series of AirBnB vacation rentals that are managed by the real estate company who runs their microschool.

Throughout the year, they will learn about entrepreneurship, business strategy, market operation and logistics, hospitality and experience design, Bartlett says. Students will be split up into groups with a different focus area, such as furnishing the place and creating guidebooks for guests. For the students, this means spending mornings studying the usual core academic subjects and afternoons working on projects, according to those running the program.

“You also have to think about ‘what is that going to ignite in their brain?’” Bartlett says, arguing that working on the rental unit will impart valuable insights to the students and will provide market feedback about how well they are performing, based on whether the rental outperforms other nearby Airbnb listings.

And of course:

For students, the work they will do is unpaid.

To summarize, 26 eleven-year-olds are going to be going to a microschool paid for by the taxpayers of North Carolina. This microschool that they are paying to run is operated by a real estate company and the eleven-year-olds are going to do the work of managing beach-front rental properties for this company plus some Khan Academy lessons in the morning. They aren’t being paid but are, instead, learning about the hospitality business and real estate because, I guess, they are working in these rental properties. Their efficacy and learning will be judged by the performance of these rental properties.

And we’re good with this? Oh, not even good. This is a pilot program for the district, and they want tons of businesses to operate similar micro schools?

If the microschool is successful, it will also serve as a proof of concept, Parker says. That will enable district leaders to bring a more hands-on learning approach into the traditional public schools, he adds.

What the hell are we doing, people? This is insane. Worse still, at least one parent is super excited.

Wilson, Elijah’s mother, is as excited about the microschool as her son. She thinks it will unlock opportunities for him.

“I want him to understand there’s so much more out there,” Wilson says.

She believes that working hands-on in the community every day will make learning feel more relevant to Elijah and give him specific training that usually takes years of experience to acquire.

“Just think about how much you would have to learn to be able to do that,” she says.

All I can say is caveat emptor.

Mamdani vs Gifted and Talented

NYC Mayoral front runner Zorhan Mamdani said this week that he would phase out gifted and talented programs in the early elementary grades. Already people are freaking out as though he’s completely ending gifted and talented programming altogether.

Notably, NYC is weird and uses a single standardized exam given to four-year-olds to determine if children are admitted onto the gifted and talented track. There is, apparently, an option for onboarding kids into the program in 3rd grade and Mamdani would leave that in place but as the primary pathway. Moreover, he plans to keep the SHSAT that controls admissions to the eight elite exam schools in NYC, so it’s not clear to me that Mamdani is against testing overall, though that’s the accusation of his critics. But, people really like their gifted 1st grade classrooms! The main worry is that middle class parents will take their kids to private schools, further depriving publics of resources and enrollment.

I think this is a good signal for me to look into the research on gifted and talented programs, the child development behind giftedness, and whether NYC’s schools are even taking the right approach to begin with. At this point, though, as the parent of an NYC kid who will be four next year and therefore eligible for this gifted testing, I don’t give a fuck. My kid will be fine. She’ll go to public school even though we can afford private school. At least she’s not being put to work in an AirBnB.

New College Blues

It seems like letting Chris Rufo run a college hasn’t gone very well. Peter Greene has the lowdown:

Annual cost per student at other Florida state system schools = $10,000. At New College it’s more like $134,000. No, that is not one my typos.

Apparently they’re running it like a Ponzi scheme.

Part of the expense appears to be related to retention and graduation problems. Enrollment dipped, and New College offered guaranteed admissions to certain local students. Moody quotes a faculty member:

“It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme: Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts of students, and then they say, ‘Biggest class ever’ because they have to backfill all the students who have left,” they said.

Might I suggest opening some microschools? You can farm the kids out as free labor and recoup some of the costs.

Thanks for reading!