Reinventing Higher Education For The AI Age
Sethuraman Panchanathan, University Professor at Arizona State University.
gettyOn 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.
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.
Higher education must immediately prioritize cultivating mindsets and capabilities that will position students not for a particular job, but for a career, a successful life and their responsibilities as citizens in a rapidly evolving world. That means nurturing mindsets that are curiosity-driven; embedded in practical environments; entrepreneurial and focused on solving problems across disciplines, sectors and cultures.
Every learner must have the opportunity to grow these mindsets, regardless of their path in college. And student success must be rigorously assessed.
What will students get out of an education focused on developing mindsets? Take, for example:
• Curiosity-Driven Research: Universities must require every learner to engage in discovery or applied research projects which encompasses the process of pursuing new ideas, creating new knowledge and solving challenging problems impacting society. Colleges have a special opportunity to allow students to participate in the research process, which energizes and shapes an intellect, develops a curiosity-driven mindset and builds the courage to explore new terrains.
• Working In Practical Environments: Every learner must seamlessly work on problems that bridge the academic and the professional world. The current model of internships for short durations is underutilized and not sufficient. Colleges need to scale and mandate continuous engagement with practical environments, even (perhaps especially) for students who do not yet know what they want to do when they graduate. The benefits include early exposure to professionalism and experiences interacting with a range of expertise.
• An Entrepreneurial Mindset: This is broader than just starting a business. It’s about getting attention and resources for something before there is proof that it will work. Students in all disciplines need to develop this mindset, and the curriculum must support every student in taking risks and understanding how to learn from failure.
• Global Engagement: Many of the global challenges require a mindset of working across continents, time zones and cultures. It is imperative to the success of the United States that our system of higher education nurtures a global mindset in our learners. The future demands, and will increasingly reward, the ability to collaborate with people who think differently than we do.
At Arizona State University, we incubated a pilot program that encompassed many of these mindsets in one place. Called the Luminosity Lab, students self-assembled from across disciplines to identify and propose solutions to actual challenges they sourced from campus, industry, researchers and our Arizona community.
Solving these problems required basic and applied research, close collaboration with existing and new industry partners and advancing prototypes into the world that sometimes became entrepreneurial ventures.
Over the last decade, Luminosity itself has become an entrepreneurial venture, still run by and for the students and serving clients in fields as diverse as aeronautics, biometrics and sustainability.
It is a model that sounds ambitious, but what makes this model work is that it runs on student initiative, which makes it a practical and scalable way for leadership at any university to empower and grow students’ mindsets.
Technology leaders will be at the forefront of this transition to cultivating mindsets. Edtech leaders, from inside and outside the university, in partnership with faculty and staff, will co-create, co-design and co-deliver AI and future technologies to nurture the development of learners as well-rounded people and citizens in the world. They will also be the first line of defense in identifying and rejecting technologies that devalue learners’ humanity.
And university, C-suite and community leaders must partner to establish increased symbiosis between higher education and the practitioner community, and to promote the idea that mindsets are the future of education.
To be clear, a successful learner will be one who has a rich blend of mindsets and skill sets. Colleges and universities will have to make technologies like artificial intelligence a partner in the learning process.
This will help faculty and experts to focus on the much more fulfilling task of inspiring, mentoring and assessing the development of students’ mindsets, the growth and knowledge of which cannot be dominated by AI tools.
Mindsets will be the new marker of success in a world where technological disruption is the norm, not the exception. By making them the primary focus of the learning process, colleges and universities can get us closer to Eisenhower’s notion of higher education as a “broad, liberating influence” on the minds of our students.
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