The placebo effect in higher education and technology

It is not cynicism but concern that drives this article – a concern for students, educators, and the increasingly brittle public faith in higher education. It examines a growing pattern across institutions: the deployment of symbolic reforms in place of structural change.

From online degrees to AI platforms and DEI dashboards (diversity, equity and inclusion), higher education has entered an era of political placebo – well-publicised, high-investment efforts that offer the appearance of innovation while leaving core challenges unaddressed.

In medicine, a placebo relieves symptoms without addressing the underlying condition. In higher education, it obscures institutional fragility, public disillusionment and the slow erosion of pedagogy. The result is a perilous illusion: reform without substance, change without consequence.

When institutions perform progress

The modern university is under pressure as enrolment declines, funding stagnates, and public trust erodes. In response, many institutions turn to symbolic innovations – online programmes, AI-driven classrooms, expanded DEI initiatives and strategic ‘future-ready’ plans.

These are not inherently bad. But in practice, they often serve as gestures of reassurance rather than engines of renewal.

What emerges is a familiar cycle: announce, automate, outsource. Beneath the polished surface, tenure disappears, faculty voices are marginalised, student-faculty interaction declines, and the university’s mission is quietly recast from public good to credential factory.

Case 1: Online degrees – Access without integrity

The University of Phoenix, once lauded for expanding access, now serves as a cautionary tale. In a recent partnership with ManpowerGroup, it offered no-cost educational upskilling for workers. But the programme relied on algorithmic grading, rapid course completion, and asynchronous delivery with minimal faculty contact.

The University of Arizona Global Campus, formerly Ashford University, faced a US$21 million judgment for deceptive recruitment practices, followed by over US$70 million in federal loan forgiveness for misled students.

At the centre of this ecosystem are online programme managers (OPMs) like 2U, Pearson and Academic Partnerships, which handle marketing, enrolment, and course design in exchange for up to 60% of tuition.

A 2022 US Government Accountability Office report warned that these opaque partnerships drive up costs and weaken educational accountability.

The result is access that often lacks academic rigour, mentorship or integrity – a digital credential system that rewards throughput, not transformation.

Case 2: Edtech – Innovation without pedagogy

Across global school systems, educational technology is often promoted as a remedy for stagnation. However, its implementation frequently overlooks pedagogical foundations.

In Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) in Maryland, a notable initiative is the launch of an artificial intelligence programme within its Career and Technical Education offerings.

Approved by the Maryland State Department of Education, the programme officially began in the 2023-2024 academic year and is currently active at George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology, Sollers Point Technical High School, and Western School of Technology and Environmental Science.

Designed to equip students with foundational knowledge and practical skills in AI – including coding, machine learning, and the societal implications of intelligent systems – the programme reflects BCPS’s broader commitment to integrating advanced technological education into its curriculum and preparing students for careers in a rapidly evolving digital economy.

While such programmes are well-intentioned, they illustrate a broader trend where educational technology is adopted more for its symbolic value than for demonstrable pedagogical effectiveness.

This pattern is not unique to BCPS; globally, ministries of education, under political and economic pressures, often enter into contracts with technology vendors. These decisions are frequently driven by the desire to appear modern and innovative, rather than by evidence-based assessments of educational value.

Consequently, the adoption of new platforms becomes a policy in itself, and innovation is reduced to a series of press releases, rather than substantive improvements in teaching and learning.

This phenomenon underscores the need for a more critical and pedagogically grounded approach to integrating technology in education, ensuring that such initiatives genuinely enhance learning outcomes rather than merely serving as symbols of progress.

The dilemma of investment and image

Over the past two decades, universities have invested billions in educational technologies, including hardware, software, infrastructure, analytics platforms, and AI-based learning systems.

These investments, often framed as necessary modernisation, have become a non-negotiable condition of institutional relevance.

But with every new contract, dashboard or predictive model, a deeper paradox emerges.

The dilemma is twofold: institutions must adopt technology to maintain credibility in the public eye, and yet the results rarely match the rhetoric. There is a growing sense – within faculty meetings, student forums and alumni circles – that these transformations often serve image more than substance.

When institutions allocate more resources to digital platforms than to faculty development, or when an AI-powered chatbot represents student support, it raises the question: Who is this truly benefiting?

Ironically, the pressure to demonstrate equity has become a driver of inequality. As media attention highlights the digital divide, universities scramble to appear proactive. Neglecting to invest in technology invites accusations of negligence.

However, investing in the wrong tools – costly, untested and frequently unexamined – results in performance without true transformation.

This creates a peculiar bind: universities must integrate technology or face public backlash. But the very act of integration, when done reactively or performatively, becomes a political placebo. It calms the public, satisfies media demands, and secures donor confidence.

Meanwhile, students still struggle with access, faculty remain underpaid, and core pedagogical questions are outsourced to algorithms and IT departments.

Edtech, in this sense, is no longer just a toolset; it has become a social performance. The promise of transformation is recited like a liturgy, but the outcomes remain shallow and uneven.

Until institutions reckon with the deeper structural commitments – funding, pedagogy, labour and purpose – technology will remain less a solution than a stage.

The societal cost: Inflation, inequality, incoherence

The placebo effect is not confined to the campus. Its consequences ripple outward, shaping how society experiences education, debt, and democratic possibility.

When universities charge six-figure sums for online degrees, they normalise debt as a precondition for progress. Student loan debt in the United States now exceeds US$1.77 trillion. According to the Federal Reserve, nearly one in five borrowers is behind on payments or in default.

This debt burden delays home ownership, family formation and social mobility. It erodes the very promise education is meant to offer.

The effect is regressive. Students from lower-income backgrounds borrow more, default more often, and face greater long-term consequences – all in pursuit of credentials that increasingly fail to deliver economic stability.

The College Board reports that average tuition and fees at private four-year institutions have more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1993.

Meanwhile, the push toward innovation, absent pedagogical coherence, has produced an epistemic drift. Students are promised agile skills for dynamic economies but graduate into job markets that neither need nor recognise their credentials. Disillusionment grows. The commodification of learning weakens its legitimacy.

At the same time, universities expand programmes on the backs of precarious labour. Adjunct faculty, the backbone of instructional delivery in many institutions, juggle multiple gigs, earn subsistence wages, and are denied health benefits or academic freedom. The illusion of digital progress is often built atop invisible exploitation.

Trust in higher education declines, not because of anti-intellectualism, but because institutions have sold transformation and delivered transaction. This is the deeper cost of the political placebo: not just symbolic failure but the degradation of higher education as a public good.

The landscape of symbols and silences

Not all institutions experience the political placebo effect in the same way, but all are shaped by it. Whether elite or under-resourced, private or public, research-intensive or teaching-focused, universities now operate within an ecosystem in which symbolism substitutes for substance.

The pressure to conform – to appear innovative, inclusive, efficient and future-ready – transcends institutional mission or identity.

This results in a peculiar kind of symbolic convergence. The elite university cloaks its power in tradition and neutral expertise, while the struggling college adopts the language of digital transformation to survive austerity.

Both reach for dashboards, slogans and rankings to assert credibility. And both displace the deeper work of education – relationships, reflection, intellectual risk – with polished representations.

This is more than branding. It is a culture of simulation. Logos replace legacies. Curriculum flexibility becomes a euphemism for incoherence. Student satisfaction surveys stand in for deep learning. Metrics dominate because they are legible, not because they are meaningful.

Even differences between institutions – community colleges and Ivy Leagues, rural campuses and urban research hubs – are flattened by this performance logic.

The former, once engines of democratic access, are now judged by the same productivity metrics as the latter. Diversity of purpose is lost to homogeneity of image.

This uniformity conceals inequality. The tools of prestige are deployed across vastly unequal conditions, creating the illusion of parity where structural gaps persist. When every institution claims transformation, none are required to prove it.

To move beyond this, we must stop asking who is doing it better and start asking: better for what? Better for whom? Only then can we begin to recover the plurality of educational purposes – and resist the flattening force of comparison that sustains the placebo effect.

Toward purpose-driven reform

What higher education needs is not another platform, initiative or rebranding campaign – but a return to its deeper commitments: critical inquiry, public service and human development. That will require not just new tools but new ethics – grounded in transparency, relational pedagogy and epistemic justice.

There are signs of hope. Some institutions are reevaluating their contracts with OPMs. Faculty unions are challenging algorithmic management. Open-source, community-driven platforms are gaining ground. Educators worldwide are asking whether true learning can ever be scalable – or whether scale itself is the illusion.

Breaking the spell

Placebos persist not because they deceive, but because they soothe. Political placebos endure because they offer reassurance without rupture. But real education begins with rupture – with the refusal to confuse activity with purpose, metrics with meaning, or visibility with value.

To break the spell, universities must recover the moral and civic dimensions of their work. They must centre relationships over rankings, care over compliance, and presence over platform. They must fund the humanities not for their return on investment but because they ask what investment is for.

Students must no longer be treated as consumers of content but as co-creators of knowledge. They must be invited into the generational task of reclaiming education from its instrumentalisation and returning it to its ethical and democratic roots.

Policymakers must stop treating education as a marketplace and start treating it as social infrastructure. Like bridges or hospitals, universities cannot be built on branding alone. They require public investment, labour protections and accountability – not to growth, but to justice.

And as a society, we must resist the lie that progress is always sleek, scalable and digital. Sometimes, true transformation looks like an adjunct receiving a living wage, a student seeing themselves in the curriculum, or a teacher granted the time to listen deeply.

The university cannot be saved by simulation. It must be reconstituted as a space of truth-telling, intellectual humility and presence. This work is slow. It is difficult. But it is the only future worth building.

James Yoonil Auh is the chair of computing and communications engineering at KyungHee Cyber University in South Korea. He has worked across the United States, Asia and Latin America on projects linking ethics, technology and education policy.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.