If we weren’t already boiling the oceans, I’d say that you should continue to use the free tier. A lot. Drive up their costs as much as possible without giving them any revenue by constantly asking it to generate useless crap.

The purpose of college today isn't to learn, it's to get a degree.

Because being more intelligent than before isn't the point anymore. It's to get a $50k certificate that says you can do jobs unrelated to what you studied. It's shows that you are breakable and thus likely to be a good worker.

Because they're not going to college to learn, they're going to get a degree. The prevailing mentality is "I'm paying for this so that I can go through the motions and graduate so that I'll meet the minimum qualifications for an entry level position."

It's a result of the commodification of education: treating universities like a business rather than as centers of learning. Everything's transactory.

Professors are afraid to fail students because the administration wants the best retention ratings, and cause bad reviews might mean they lose their jobs.

Oh, and because expecting college students to actually learn something is elitist, apparently...

Don't get caught forming coherent thoughts in complete sentences with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Someone might accuse you of being petite bourgeois and get your professor fired for playing favorites...

College used to be optional. Most people didn't go, you went there because you wanted to learn, or you wanted to go into a particular field that required higher knowledge.

Now, college is just a paywall that gets in the way of having a normal job that can pay you an ok amount of money if you're lucky. This is especially true now for when it comes to the prerequisites. Kids aren't there for knowledge. It's so they can get a job. No one cares about those college level English courses being forced on them when they're going to end up as middle management at an insurance agency. Especially now, when their PC will tell them their grammar sucks before they send out that email.

I think my brother's has like, a 6 in it? Maybe an ampersand...?

Uh-oh

Lol yes that is worrying. She could have just been having a brainfart though.. Everyone has those sometimes.

I've been to hospital quite a bit (visiting and assisting people mostly) and the standards have been very high for nurses, doctors, technicians etc. I hope that can comfort you somewhat.

Perhaps this isn't obvious to you but higher education, while valuable, has long just been a rubber stamp.

Many grads don't work on their feild of study and many people are just trying to get the paper so they can get a job.

It's been like this for 30 years.

Sure is disheartening and I don't much understand it beyond 'path of least resistance'. I'm not in the US though, I'm in Australia and our university fees are far lower for citizens.

I'll add that it's not universal, and I haven't met nor worked with all the students in my course as there's hundreds. But so far in my experience it's the international students (China, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Philippines) that have GenAI most ingrained in their workflows - its just presumed by them that everyone is using ChatGPT for their work in assignments. Conversely, I have worked with a German international student who wants very little to do with GenAI (like myself).

Worth mentioning that the international students pay 'full fees' for the courses, no government assistance like citizens - that means they pay 5-6 times as much for their courses, so I would have thought they'd have additional motivation to get value from their time studying, but that doesn't seem to be the reality of the situation.

Why not break into the CEO's house and unsubscribe them from their life?

Well.....I'm not saying that's a bad idea, per se, but....if you are going to do this, make it blatently obvious it was a break-in.

Then, put several rubber duckies in the water tank of their toilets. Big enough that they won't fit in the hole.

See, it's the type of thing that they won't discover for months/years. They'll long have forgotten about the break-in, and won't connect the dots there.

It will just be something that confuses the fuck out of them for the rest of their lives.