Economist Tyler Cowen, co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog and a professor of economics at George Mason University, laid out a series of proposals for how artificial intelligence should reshape higher education in an interview with Scott Carlson of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The interview, published by the Chronicle, is gated but available free with registration. Cowen highlighted the excerpts in a post on Marginal Revolution.

A common thread runs through the proposals: Cowen treats AI’s place in the classroom as an unresolved question that can only be answered through small-scale trials, presenting each idea as an experiment rather than settled policy.

One “AI-only” class as an experiment

Among the ideas Cowen described is allowing students to take a single course with no professor at all, apart from final grading — with the grade based on process rather than exam answers.

“Another proposal I’ve made is that schools should let people do one class, only one class, AI-only — no professor, except a professor grades at the end,” Cowen said. “The professor grades not answers to an exam but the workflow of how the student used AI to learn the Glorious Revolution, or the Civil War, or whatever the student learned. Eventually, another AI will grade your AI log. But let’s start today with a professor, and try this for one class. I’m not sure how it will go.”

He noted the model could be especially valuable for small schools with limited course catalogs, where “a student now can create a class in literally everything.” If the first class succeeds, students could be allowed to try two. Grading the workflow rather than final answers would also make the student’s documented process — logged and reviewable — the primary evidence of learning under the model.

“I think the students doing this on their own are more likely to figure out how to blend AI and education than we would from a distance with some kind of centralized vision,” Cowen said. “Let them experiment.”

Students should lead the change

Asked by Carlson whether students should be leading the change at colleges and universities, Cowen answered: “Absolutely. Students know more about AI than their professors do. Some of this comes from cheating, which is unfortunate.”

“But the notion that the professors teach the students AI — I wish. It’s not always possible,” he continued. “You could imagine setting up a class where the students teach the professors AI, and we give the students credit for teaching. I’m half joking, but it’s not, in fact, a crazy idea. We need to experiment along a number of fronts. I’m quite convinced no one knows how to do this. It hasn’t been done before. So again, just one class.”

His framing inverts the traditional dynamic in which faculty introduce new tools to students — a gap he notes stems partly from student use of AI, including cheating.

Cowen acknowledged institutional resistance to the concept. “In general, schools hate this idea,” he said. “They see it as opening the door to rendering some professors obsolete.”

Room for no-AI schools

Carlson also asked what place students who are deeply opposed to AI would have in the kind of university Cowen envisions.

“I would love to have different schools with different policies,” Cowen replied. “If some universities try to ban AI altogether, that’s great. Let the competitive process operate. Personally, I would bet against those schools.”

“For a long time, I’ve been worried that within a given tier of school — big state school, community college, Ivy League — there’s not enough diversity,” he said. “AI policies will force a kind of diversity on us. So I’m all for no-AI schools, even though I would not go to one.”

In effect, he casts AI policy as a differentiator within each tier of higher education rather than a single standard, with institutions competing across differently configured approaches.

The proposals remain proposals for now — Cowen himself conceded, “I’m not sure how it will go.” Whether any school tests a single AI-only class, and how an instructor grades an AI workflow log in practice, are the near-term markers of whether his ideas move beyond the interview stage.

The full interview is available at the Chronicle of Higher Education, gated but free with registration.