I Just Told My Students to Burn Their Diplomas and use AI Instead
In this dispatch, the Chalkboard Traitor hands you the exact 6-step betrayal to ditch the credential cult and start cashing in on prompt engineering, automation gigs, and Midjourney hustles while your classmates are still polishing their LinkedIn profiles. No permission. No entrance exams. Just money and freedom. Read it before your professor does. #ChalkboardTraitor #AISideHustle #BurnTheTranscript #TRAITOR
5/8/20242 min read
Traitor’s First Step: Ditch Your Degree for AI Side Hustles By a Chalkboard Traitor
I’ve watched too many of you parade out of here clutching a piece of paper that cost you four years and half a million yen, only to discover the marketplace treats it like a cocktail napkin with your name scribbled on it.
You were told it was an investment. It was a ransom.
Meanwhile, any seventeen-year-old with a laptop and a pirated copy of ChatGPT is clearing ¥300,000 a month writing SEO slop, building Notion dashboards for American startups, and automating spreadsheets for people too lazy to learn VLOOKUP. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t sit through my lectures on the Meiji Restoration. They just started.
That sound you hear? That’s the future laughing at your transcript.
So here is the first act of treason, simple, immediate, and guaranteed to enrage every guidance counsellor in the prefecture:
Delete LinkedIn.
Open Midjourney, Claude, or whatever free tier still works this week.
Spend one weekend copying the top ten Upwork gigs in “AI Automation” or “Prompt Engineer.”
Copy their gig description, undercut their price by 30 %, and post it.
Deliver the first job in two hours instead of two weeks.
Collect dollars while your old classmates collect rejection emails.
That’s it. No certificate. No entrance exam. No professor pretending 1985 textbooks are relevant.
You already speak English better than half the freelancers in Manila, and you live in a time zone that lets you work while the West sleeps. The only thing standing between you and ¥500,000 extra this year is the superstitious belief that someone has to give you permission to earn.
They don’t. They never did.
I spent fifteen years on the wrong side of the desk, helping the system extract obedience in exchange for a credential now worth less than a decent GPU. I’m not proud of it. But I’m done with it.
Your degree is a museum piece. AI is the new factory, and the owners haven’t installed the gates yet.
Walk in. Take what’s yours. And when someone asks for your qualifications, tell them the truth:
“I’m self-taught. The old way was a scam.”
Then watch their face.
That look right there? That’s the sound of the system realising it just lost another soldier.
Welcome to the treason.
— A Chalkboard Traitor Keyboard humming, degree in the bin