How Generative AI Fixes What Higher Education Broke

Generative AI (GenAI) has not broken higher education. It has revealed that much of it was already broken.This paper argues that the dominant educational paradigm, rooted in formalist models of cognition, no longer serves the needs of a world filled with thinking machines. Learning, long reduced to internal recall and reproduction, must be recalibrated as the capacity to act meaningfully, critically, and creatively with tools in real-world contexts. This is not technological determinism. It’s an attempt to reconcile epistemic insolvency accruing compounding interest.Blending epistemological insight with systems-level critique and practical strategies, the paper exposes the reactive militarization between student evasion and faculty surveillance, and it challenges educators to transform traditional classroom activities with authentic, tool-mediated practice. Drawing from the fields of Learning Sciences and Instructional Design, it explores how GenAI can serve not as a threat to integrity, but as a compounding cognitive artifact: a “thought prosthesis,” a support system that amplifies creativity, an accessibility tool, and an enabler of personalized, real-time learning at scale.The paper proposes a Critical AI Literacy agenda grounded in epistemic awareness. This extends to include practical implementation of RAG tutors, Custom GPTs, interactive generators, student-led content production, and code-based learning; all deployed with an honest reckoning of GenAI’s deficits: semiotic fallacy, fabrication, bias, and ethical opacity. The result is a roadmap not only for responsible integration of GenAI in college classrooms, but for reimagining what education can become when human discernment, creativity, and tool fluency are placed at the center.The ideas within do not present GenAI as a savior or a scourge, but as a mirror allowing us to confront what education has become and inviting us to rebuild something better.