What Happened
Future Campus editor Tim Winkler reported on 17 September 2026 that the course-selection advice generated by major AI platforms is running in a different direction to what Australian higher education leaders are saying publicly.
When asked whether a Bachelor of Arts was worth doing, Microsoft's Copilot replied: "A BA is worth it if you pair it with the right majors + practical experience. it is not worth it if you treat it as a general 'exploration' degree without building a clear skill pathway." ChatGPT, when asked whether degrees would be obsolete by 2036, said: "The biggest risk may actually be choosing a degree that's too generic."
In the same week those responses were being generated, Universities Australia CEO Luke Sheehy addressed a humanities deans conference with a contrasting position. Future Campus reported Sheehy as saying: "We say the future workforce needs people who can think critically, communicate, understand human behaviour, navigate cultural difference, interrogate information and exercise judgment in a world awash with AI-generated content."
The Future Campus investigation found that ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude each offered similar themes, telling prospective students that degrees are less important than they used to be and need to be combined with work experience or additional qualifications to make a graduate competitive in the job market.
Why It Matters
The scale of AI use in education decisions makes the content of that advice consequential. In the UK, 48 per cent of students consulted AI when choosing their university, according to a recent UCAS report. Of those, 58 per cent said AI provided helpful information, but only 10 per cent said they trusted AI to make their decisions.
The pattern extends to international students considering Australian institutions. IDP reported last year that more than 50 per cent of Chinese students it surveyed would use ChatGPT to help choose their course and study destination.
Domestically, 58 per cent of Australians aged 14 and over used AI during March 2026, according to a Roy Morgan poll. Research by academics at Western Sydney University, the University of Canberra and QUT found that more than a third of young Australians relied on generative AI as a source of news. Consumer research cited by Future Campus indicated 43 per cent of respondents consulted AI when shopping.
Australians consult platforms such as ChatGPT more than 19 million times per month, according to data from Visrank reported by Future Campus. That volume means AI-generated course guidance is reaching prospective students at a scale that rivals, and in some cases exceeds, traditional information channels such as open days and school career advisers.
Key Details
The Future Campus report does not attribute the AI responses to any named individual or institution; they are outputs from the platforms themselves. The three platforms tested were ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic's Claude.
Each platform's advice centred on the same concern: that a generalist arts degree, pursued without a defined vocational pathway, leaves graduates exposed in a competitive labour market. The framing treats degree choice primarily as a risk-management question rather than an intellectual or civic one.
Sheehy's remarks to the humanities deans conference framed the question differently, pointing to the skills of critical analysis, cultural understanding and judgement as the attributes most needed in workplaces where AI handles routine tasks.
Future Campus noted that AI advice is now headlining search responses in Google, placing it at the first point of contact for many students researching study options.
Background and Context
The tension between AI-generated career guidance and the positions of Australian universities is not new, but the scale of AI adoption has sharpened it. Australian universities have faced sustained pressure on humanities enrolments for several years, driven partly by government funding policy and partly by student perceptions of employment outcomes.
The advice generated by large language models reflects patterns in their training data, which skews toward online commentary about graduate employment. That commentary has, for years, questioned the return on investment of generalist degrees. Whether the AI outputs are reinforcing existing trends or accelerating them is not established by the Future Campus report.
No Australian regulator has issued guidance specifically on AI-generated education advice. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has published broader guidance on AI and consumer decision-making, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) oversees how personal data is handled by AI services, but neither body has addressed the accuracy of AI course recommendations directly.
What Comes Next
Future Campus posed the question of who is responsible for correcting AI advice that sector leaders consider inaccurate or incomplete. The report did not identify a clear answer. Universities Australia and individual institutions have the capacity to publish structured data that AI platforms can draw on, but whether that would change the outputs is not known.
The UCAS data from the UK suggests students are already treating AI as a starting point rather than a final authority, with only 10 per cent saying they trusted AI to make their decisions. How that scepticism translates into actual enrolment behaviour in Australia has not been measured in the sources available for this report.