I am 29 years old.
I went back to university this fall in Belgium after several years mourning the loss of my first degree.
I had no idea what to expect of the education landscape in 2026 since the last time I was in a classroom, genAI wasn't even a whisper. We still did everything with pencil and paper and laptops were still as useful as books, which is to say everything before me was still used manually.
Plagiarism back then meant students copy-pasted a paragraph from Wikipedia and got caught for it, but even then, you had to use your brain to know what paragraph to copy. Students were still reading.
Now I sit in my lecture halls with students' Neo Macbook airs and iPad 999s (forgive me, I don't know what number of any technology we're on) with AI open. There is no shame about using Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini in the classroom. I witness the students openly putting the lecture slides and reading into genAI for quick summaries. I even saw a student in front of me make ChatGPT make fanfic of her characters, and she was laughing to herself about it.
Is the point of fanfic not to be excited about creation? Is the point of university not to be excited about studying?
I befriended older students like a 28-year-old from Catalonia, Spain and 46-year-old from Dover, England. My Spanish friend leaned over to whisper to me during one class that she was surprised by how empty it was. I turned around to look at the empty seats – students were openly skipping. The professor would post the lecture recording in Canvas later, so there was no point in attending. And they would feed the video and slides into genAI.
I turned back to her and said these are 18-year-olds.
I know it's not a great answer. But we are older. We have been without education before. We understand the value of education now that we have been without; we are happy to commute 1-hour to be in a classroom manually taking notes. University excites us.
18-year-olds have followed a path already made for them: go to kindergarten, go to elementary school, middle school, now high school, take your university exam, now go to university.
Their entire life has been schoolschoolschool. It's no wonder they act out in university when it's more school, and they're on their own for the first time. It's the perfect recipe for reckless and selfish decisions.
But as I told my friend, they are 18-years-old. It's not a surprise they're skipping classes or making AI do the work for them.
Maybe we got the early Life Path wrong.
Maybe 18-25 should be about no school and just exploring. University was originally about scholarship, not necessarily about securing a job (but even then, the university-to-job pipeline is thin these days.) I imagine university and society would be a different place if universities were 25+ and a choice. Every older student is excited to be here, even if they're struggling. It's the good struggle. It's the worthy struggle that says 'this hard, but I'm going to work through it.'
I know I will stand next to my Spanish and British friend at graduation in three years smiling. We will have made it. We will have degrees, knowledge, and experience we're excited about compared to the 21- and 22-year-olds who breathe a sigh of relief that school is finally over. They can collapse into a puddle on the floor and never think about classes again.
I have no grand message to conclude this brief essay with other than: no wonder kids are tired, skipping classes, and using genAI for their work. We criticise the 18-year-old for using free tools at their disposal, and being excited about freedom at last, but never wonder why it is that way.
I think we have done irreparable harm in emphasising the way things should be from birth to roughly 22-years-old. When do they learn to hear their own thoughts? When do they get to experience life? When do they get to make mistakes with bad relationships and learn how meaningful good ones are? What about their sexualities?
Yeah, no wonder. They're exhausted.