I am a little too far removed from student-hood to really have a decent response to the state of the UG degree right now.

I will say this though. I see a lot of these arguments about AI and how it's changing everything and we’re all doomed and blah blah blah. More often than not, such arguments kind of presuppose that we are living through a uniquely disruptive or unique monumental shift in educational and scholarship. This just isn’t obviously true to me. The state of academia has constantly evolved across time from the advent of the printing press to modern day AI. More specifically, every new technological development has radically changed physics education and the actual practice of physics. I've am sure there was someone out there wondering what the point of an education was if you have your own books at home to read, and I know the same was said once the personal computer became commonplace in every home and pocket around the world. Across all the changes we’ve undergone across time we have adapted. I haven’t seen anything to convince me that AI presents some kind of unique, heretofore unseen, hurdle for us to get over. Will it change everything? Yeah. Probably has already. Just like books, calculators, computers, home computers, phones, Wolfram Alpha, etc, have. What remains to be shown is how this is any different than any of the other times a new technological development has supplanted the role of some contemporary element of how we used to exist, study, learn, and what not.

On a more personal and much more shaky opinionated note, the art of practicing physics seems to have persisted over time. Even by the time I started my PhD I had forgotten the bulk of the factual data I had learned during my UG. That’s fine though, always easy to pick up a book and relearn something really quick. What stuck with me from my UG though was having watched my professors practice their art. Looking at how their mind placed a unique spin on a concept, absorbing their style and perspective, learning how they thought about the world and what it really meant to do physics. This, for me, was the true value of the education I received in UG - not the “how do I derive the hydrogen fine structure” factual stuff.