> At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.

I think this is mostly accurate. Schools have been able to say "We will test your memory on 3 specific Shakespeares, samples from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc" - the students who were able to perform on these with some creative dance, violin, piano or cello thrown in had very good chances at a scholarship from an elite college.

This has been working extremely well except now you have AI agents that can do the same at a fraction of the cost.

There will be a lot of arguments, handwringing and excuse making as students go through the flywheel already in motion with the current approach.

However, my bet is it's going to be apparent that this approach no longer works for a large population. It never really did but there were inefficiencies in the market that kept this game going for a while. For one, college has become extremely expensive. Second, globalization has made it pretty hard for someone paying tuition in the U.S. to compete against someone getting a similar education in Asia when they get paid the same salary. Big companies have been able to enjoy this arbitrage for a long time.

> Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies

Now that everyone has access to labor cheaper than the cheapest English speaking country in the world, humanity will be forced to adapt, forcing us to rethink what has seemed to work in the past