Expert: Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Investigations Manager, Higher Education, New America The AI at Maestro is not a study aid bolted onto a human-taught course - it is the institution. The chatbot 'teacher' delivers the lessons, asks the questions and guides the examinations, and a bot of the same category sits at the front desk when something goes wrong. That is why its errors carry further than they would in an ordinary classroom: there is no second grader, no registrar and no adviser standing behind it to catch them. The academic error is acknowledged inside the college itself. A couple of students told New America the AI 'instructor' had marked answers wrong on an exam when they were correct, and a faculty member said that verifying final reviews is part of his job precisely because the AI sometimes marks a correct answer wrong. Maestro's own learning interface carries a small-print warning at the bottom of the screen: 'Maestro can make mistakes. Check important information.' A disclaimer is an honest admission of unreliability, but it is not a correction mechanism - it moves the checking onto the student, who usually has no way of knowing the grade was wrong in the first place. The support failure is a different class of error. When Bryanna Bailey found her lesson links greyed out and inaccessible in early June, she asked the chatbot for a human: 'It's a personal issue and I'd like to speak to a human.' It refused her, repeatedly. It informed her she had been withdrawn, and it offered a URL to reapply. Nothing in that exchange shows that a person verified the decision, or explained the weekly-participation rule she says she did not understand. Bailey has never spoken to any employee of Maestro College, and to her knowledge neither have her classmates; with no staff directory, students often cannot even establish who handles financial aid. An AI that cannot escalate is not a support channel - it is a wall that has been given licence to state consequential facts about a student's standing. That is what separates 'AI as the institution' from 'AI as a tool'. A bot that mis-grades a correct answer touches a credential; a bot that hands down an enrolment status touches access. Students interviewed for the investigation largely tolerated the mistakes because they believed the credential was free - but most did not understand the fine print of federal aid. Pell money is finite, and students who exhaust their individual lifetime aid limits on a chatbot-delivered degree may only discover they cannot afford college again when they try to transfer. In fairness, Maestro officials dispute this characterisation of instruction, arguing that faculty monitor and teach students actively. But the corrective labour visible in the reporting is human review of machine grading, and the regulatory outcome was blunt: after New America flagged potential policy and legal violations, Maestro's accreditor suspended enrolment at the college in June 2026. The practical test for any AI-delivered service is not how fluent the answers sound. It is whether a student who says 'I'd like to speak to a human' reaches one, and whether a wrong machine grade can be overturned by somebody accountable. Source: https://www.newamerica.org/insights/the-ai-college/