Reinventing Higher Education For The AI Age

Sethuraman Panchanathan, University Professor at Arizona State University.

​On June 11, 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered a warning to new graduates of Penn State University that was remarkably prescient: American higher education was becoming too specialized.

That morning, Eisenhower had toured Penn State’s newly installed nuclear reactor, the first at a university, witnessing for himself how a new technology was reshaping the country. But in his commencement address, he cautioned against an education too focused on narrow expertise. Education, he said, should be “a broad, liberating influence on the mind, the attitude, the character of all students.”

More than seven decades later, as a new school year begins, higher education has moved further in the direction Eisenhower feared. As the cost of college has soared, colleges and universities have faced mounting pressure to demonstrate that their graduates possess specific, marketable skills that they can use in future jobs. ​

Teaching employable skills is a worthy goal. But as that has become the coin of the academic realm, it has come to dominate the value proposition of a college education.​

Now, the new technology reshaping the country is artificial intelligence. And it has turned higher education’s seemingly innocuous evolution into a trap.​

How Higher Education Can Respond To AI​

If AI can perform many of the tasks—and, perhaps soon, many of the jobs—for which universities have trained students, then simply teaching students to do those tasks better is no longer enough. More consequentially, it is rapidly changing what employers will expect humans to contribute. ​

The response cannot only be a return to the liberal arts, as some have proposed. And it’s unimaginative to say that colleges don’t need to exist at all. This is a broad challenge, and the solution, if appropriately bold, is a tremendous opportunity for transformation.​