ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & HIGHER EDUCATION The Empty Classroom When students outsource learning to AI and companies cut the engineers who know better, both ends of the talent pipeline fray at once. India is not watching from a safe distance. Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan At the University of California, Berkeley, something unremarkable happened in spring 2026: a professor held office hours. The unremarkable part was that nobody came. Dan Garcia, who teaches CS 10, a broad introductory computing course popularly called “The Beauty and Joy of Computing,” found his calendar conspicuously clear at the very moment his gradebook became conspicuously alarming. Of the students who sat CS 10’s final examination, 35.3% received an F—five times the historical norm of roughly 7%. Two other courses in Berkeley’s elite Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department suffered similarly: 10.6% of CS 61A students failed, and 16.8% of those in EECS 127, an upper-division optimi...