Solving the College AI Crisis
Summary
The episode explores the profound challenges artificial intelligence poses to higher education and the job market for recent graduates. Journalist Jeff Salingo, author of ‘Dream School’ and the article ‘The Campus AI Crisis,’ argues that colleges have largely buried their heads in the sand, treating AI as a cheating tool to be policed rather than a transformative technology to be integrated into teaching and career preparation. He details how AI is already affecting entry-level jobs and internships, particularly in fields like computer science, and how a mindset shift is required from faculty who often don’t see job preparation as their responsibility.
Salingo and host Henry Blodget discuss the disconnect between colleges and employers, emphasizing the need for much greater cooperation. The conversation highlights that students can no longer rely solely on their degree; they need to acquire tangible skills through internships, certificates (like project management or data visualization), and hands-on projects to differentiate themselves. The traditional model of education is ill-suited for an AI-driven economy where the ‘first rung’ jobs that taught critical skills are being automated or eliminated.
The discussion critiques the current uneven and often prohibitive approach to AI on campus, where policies vary wildly by professor, leaving students unprepared. Salingo points to potential solutions, such as integrating work experiences (co-ops, campus-run businesses) directly into the curriculum and fostering transparency about AI use between students and faculty. He concludes by looking forward, predicting a shakeout in higher education with fewer colleges, a pivot toward serving adult learners, and more flexible, integrated pathways that combine learning and earning—though he remains skeptical that traditional institutions can change fast enough without external pressure.
Recommendations
Articles
- The Campus AI Crisis — Jeff Salingo’s article in New York Magazine that forms the basis of this discussion, detailing how colleges are struggling to adapt to artificial intelligence.
Books
- Dream School, Finding a College That’s Right for You — Jeff Salingo’s book advising students and parents on how to choose a college based on personal goals and career preparation rather than just prestige and rankings.
Companies
- Carlyle Group — The private equity firm was used as an example of a company using AI to handle grunt work in analysis, with human analysts then summarizing and adding final insight.
- Saxby’s Coffee — A regional coffee chain with campus stores completely run by students, giving them real-world experience in management, P&L, and HR decisions.
Institutions
- Wake Forest University — Highlighted as an example of a university that does career services well, tailoring support to different majors and stages of a student’s academic journey.
- Northeastern University, Georgia Tech, University of Cincinnati — Noted for building co-op programs directly into the undergraduate experience, allowing students to work while they learn.
- Berry College — A small college in Georgia where students hold campus jobs that teach them enterprise software like Salesforce and Workday, and project management skills.
People
- Matt Singelman (Burning Glass Institute) — Cited for the idea that we must shift from thinking of ‘college with a job on the side’ to ‘a job with college on the side,’ advocating for fully integrated work and learning.
Topic Timeline
- 00:01:00 — AI’s impact on the job market for graduates — Jeff Salingo confirms AI is significantly affecting the job market, reducing entry-level positions and internships as companies invest in AI by cutting headcount. He notes computer science graduates now face high unemployment, and students are already reacting by dropping out of CS programs.
- 00:04:07 — How students can differentiate themselves — Salingo explains that beyond the degree, students need additional skills to stand out. Examples include a history student learning data visualization, business majors learning data analytics, and humanities students getting project management certificates. Internships and practical experience are critical differentiators.
- 00:05:46 — The modern purpose of college — Salingo argues that while college offers life benefits like civic engagement and health, the primary reason most students attend is to get a job, especially given soaring costs. He calls for a mindset shift among faculty and greater cooperation between colleges and employers to bridge the gap between education and the workforce.
- 00:10:03 — Choosing the right college and the ‘name’ fallacy — Discussing his book ‘Dream School,’ Salingo advises students and parents to think critically about what they want from college, considering location, career goals, and institutional focus rather than just prestige. He notes pressure to attend highly-ranked schools for perceived job insurance, but real skills and experiences matter more.
- 00:14:28 — How colleges are failing to handle AI — Salingo states colleges have handled AI poorly, initially treating it as a cheating tool to police rather than a learning aid. He cites uneven faculty approaches and lack of institutional guidance, using Ohio State’s vague ‘AI literacy by 2029’ goal as an example of announcements without concrete implementation plans.
- 00:18:36 — Examples of effective AI and work integration — Salingo highlights positive examples: an Ohio State business professor using AI to level the playing field between business and CS majors, and colleges like Northeastern and Berry College that integrate co-ops or campus jobs teaching real software and management skills. He advocates blending work and learning continuously.
- 00:22:50 — The potential comeback of liberal arts and human skills — Salingo suggests liberal arts could regain value if combined with proof of skills. Employers seek discernment, teamwork, and problem-solving—areas where AI still falls short. The challenge is that humanities graduates often can’t articulate these strengths or lack tangible project experience to demonstrate them.
- 00:27:04 — What employers want and the transparency problem — Companies seek graduates with AI experience and understanding, but often don’t know exactly what they need. Salingo worries that colleges’ ‘policing’ mentality prevents students from learning how to use AI tools effectively and transparently, which hurts their job readiness.
- 00:32:53 — The crisis of lost learning from automated entry-level work — The discussion turns to how automating ‘grunt work’ (like slide creation or report drafting) eliminates the traditional bridge where graduates gained deep knowledge. Salingo poses the critical question: if those first jobs disappear, who will provide that essential foundational training? Colleges are not equipped to fill this gap.
- 00:38:11 — The future of college in 5-10 years — Salingo predicts fewer colleges due to demographic changes, with some pivoting to serve adult learners. Surviving institutions will need more flexible pathways, integrating internships during the school year and online learning. He is skeptical about rapid, individualized AI-driven learning due to higher education’s inherent risk aversion and reluctance to change.
Episode Info
- Podcast: Solutions with Henry Blodget
- Author: Vox Media Podcast Network
- Category: Technology Business
- Published: 2026-02-09T09:00:00Z
- Duration: 00:46:33
References
- URL PocketCasts: https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/9c941ed0-56cc-013e-8b75-0e680d801ff9/episode/02859e56-73ba-429b-a32a-fab9d17a1216/
- Episode UUID: 02859e56-73ba-429b-a32a-fab9d17a1216
Podcast Info
- Name: Solutions with Henry Blodget
- Type: episodic
- UUID: 9c941ed0-56cc-013e-8b75-0e680d801ff9
Transcript
[00:00:01] How the heck should colleges handle AI?
[00:00:05] Should they face the fact that whether they like it or not, most students are already using it?
[00:00:10] Should they figure out how to best help their students prepare for jobs in the modern world?
[00:00:15] Or should they continue to ban AI, call it cheating, and stuff their heads in the sand?
[00:00:22] Well, you can probably tell where I stand on that question.
[00:00:25] Today’s guest, Jeff Salingo, is a journalist with decades of experience covering higher education.
[00:00:30] He’s written many books, including Dream School, Finding a College That’s Right for You.
[00:00:35] Most recently, he wrote a great article in New York Magazine called The Campus AI Crisis.
[00:00:42] Jeff has smart ideas about how colleges should deal with AI.
[00:00:46] He also has a more, shall we say, modern view of the role colleges should play in today’s world.
[00:00:52] You traditionalists out there.
[00:00:54] Might want to cover your ears.
[00:00:55] Here’s Jeff on colleges and AI.
[00:00:59] Jeff, welcome.
[00:01:00] Great to have you.
[00:01:01] This is an incredibly important topic these days that everybody’s worried about.
[00:01:05] And in reading your excellent article in New York Magazine, it sounds like, first off,
[00:01:10] you seem relatively persuaded that AI is affecting the job market for recent college graduates.
[00:01:17] There’s no doubt about it that it definitely has a big influence.
[00:01:20] You’re seeing this in a number of areas.
[00:01:23] One is.
[00:01:24] Just in terms of the internships students are able to get while in college.
[00:01:27] A lot of those are kind of entry-level internships where work is now being done by AI.
[00:01:34] Same thing with those kind of first rungs of the career ladder after graduation.
[00:01:39] But I’m also hearing from company executives that I talk to, people who hire.
[00:01:44] It’s really about reducing headcount right now.
[00:01:46] And so to invest in AI.
[00:01:49] So it’s not necessarily AI replacing workers.
[00:01:52] But to have the capital.
[00:01:54] Right.
[00:01:54] To invest in AI, they’re reducing headcount.
[00:01:57] And the first headcount you usually reduce are those entry-level workers who, as many
[00:02:04] people who hire tell me, just take a while to pay off.
[00:02:08] And so it’s just easier to cut those rungs first.
[00:02:11] And you had an interview with one recent graduate who said something fascinating to me, which
[00:02:16] is basically, you know, hey, all this stuff I was trained to do actually is exactly what
[00:02:21] AI is for.
[00:02:22] And it does really well.
[00:02:23] And now they want to stick me in sales training and other people things.
[00:02:28] Like, I want to do the analysis.
[00:02:29] So are you seeing divisions there, too?
[00:02:31] Well, and that student was a computer science major, which, by the way, 10 years ago, we
[00:02:36] were telling students, major in computer science, major in computer science, because
[00:02:39] that’s the future.
[00:02:41] And now computer science graduates have some of the highest unemployment rates.
[00:02:45] And by the way, students are already starting to react to that.
[00:02:48] Last fall, some of the biggest drops in undergraduate enrollment were in CS programs.
[00:02:53] And to sort of flip it around, because we talk about unemployment, it is tough.
[00:02:59] I am not minimizing it at all.
[00:03:01] And when I read your descriptions and others of how different it is now that when I graduated,
[00:03:06] I would have been one of the folks who didn’t make it.
[00:03:09] I was just not organized enough.
[00:03:10] But to flip it around, even with the elevated unemployment rate for folks right out of school
[00:03:16] and certainly in computer science, as you mentioned, the vast majority of people are
[00:03:21] still getting jobs.
[00:03:22] So.
[00:03:23] So.
[00:03:23] So we are not in a situation that is approximating some of the worst rhetoric out of Silicon
[00:03:28] Valley, which is that all jobs are going to disappear and so forth.
[00:03:31] So it’s out there like you can still succeed.
[00:03:34] And so if there are any people you talk to who found a job, even though there’s AI and
[00:03:41] are now basically helping their employers because they have a leg up on it, it’d be
[00:03:45] great to hear about that.
[00:03:46] Yeah.
[00:03:47] So I think a couple of things that are really differentiating students, internships still
[00:03:51] matter.
[00:03:51] So the more that you could get.
[00:03:53] I mean, you could get an internship in college because that is a door in to a lot of companies.
[00:03:57] Many companies use it essentially as a long term interview to decide if this is somebody
[00:04:02] that they want to hire.
[00:04:03] But internships, as I said earlier, tough to get.
[00:04:05] So what else can you do?
[00:04:07] And part of it is like learning how to do the work, learning skills that others might
[00:04:11] not have.
[00:04:12] So, for example, in the interviews for the story, I met a history student who learned
[00:04:17] how to visualize data because he knew that, you know, visualizing data.
[00:04:23] But he also had the history background would be really useful to him or a business major
[00:04:28] who knew data analytics.
[00:04:29] I met a couple of people who had project, you know, no matter their major, most of them
[00:04:35] were in the humanities who got a project management certificate to learn how to manage
[00:04:40] big projects.
[00:04:41] So it’s not the degree itself still matters, matters more than anything else.
[00:04:45] But having some other sort of skill set that you either get through further education that
[00:04:51] you get to work on a project as an undergrad.
[00:04:53] Or get as an internship.
[00:04:55] Those are what really is the value add and kind of the differentiator that I’m seeing
[00:05:01] in the job market.
[00:05:02] You can’t just go to college, go to class, get the degree and hope for the job.
[00:05:06] Right.
[00:05:07] Which is exactly my approach.
[00:05:08] I’m glad it worked then.
[00:05:09] Probably wouldn’t work now.
[00:05:11] All right.
[00:05:12] Let’s back up.
[00:05:13] Your article is called The Campus AI Crisis about how colleges are dealing with the new
[00:05:18] technology.
[00:05:18] You also have a book called Dream School, Finding a College That’s Right for You.
[00:05:23] Which sounds very important.
[00:05:24] So what I’d love to do is just actually step back before we look at what’s happening on
[00:05:27] campus and ask you a question that I know is going to appall my friends and family who
[00:05:34] are professors and in academia and love liberal arts for liberal arts sake.
[00:05:38] And it has nothing to do with jobs and it’s supposed to be different.
[00:05:41] But let me ask you the question, which is today, what is college for?
[00:05:46] College, you know, most students go to college to get a job.
[00:05:49] And I’m sorry.
[00:05:50] I know that people who work in colleges.
[00:05:53] Well, there’s all these other life benefits.
[00:05:56] You know, we know that people who go to college are healthier.
[00:05:59] We know that they participate more in civic organizations.
[00:06:02] They vote more.
[00:06:04] They’re just more involved in their communities.
[00:06:07] We know that it’s a life changing moment at the age of 18.
[00:06:10] I know all that happens.
[00:06:11] But at the end of the day, with prices now approaching six figures at some private colleges,
[00:06:18] by the way, for one year, you know, parents.
[00:06:23] Want to be able to send their kids to college so that they actually have an economic return
[00:06:26] at the end of the day.
[00:06:28] So I agree that there’s all these other benefits to college.
[00:06:31] But getting a job is critically important.
[00:06:35] And probably it’s the most important thing in that in that element.
[00:06:40] And I think to generalize, as you suggested, a lot of people in the academic community
[00:06:45] would behind closed doors want to revolt against that and say, no, no, no, it’s the value.
[00:06:50] It’s the study for itself and so forth.
[00:06:52] And it’s not our job.
[00:06:54] And this is the this is the time that you’re out of the world.
[00:06:57] We shouldn’t be training you to learn that stuff on the job.
[00:06:59] But it sounds like your view is colleges should at least work a little bit harder to
[00:07:06] prepare people for the working world.
[00:07:09] I think there’s a couple of things.
[00:07:10] There’s a mindset shift among faculty.
[00:07:12] I have met too many faculty, not everywhere and not at every institution, not in every
[00:07:16] discipline who don’t think it’s their job to help students get a job.
[00:07:20] So I think that mindset shift has to change.
[00:07:23] But I don’t want to put take employers off the hook here, because I think that employers
[00:07:27] and colleges need to work together a lot more.
[00:07:31] I think that colleges, you know, they tend to send their students into certain sectors.
[00:07:37] Most colleges, you know, most of the job market is regional, as I found out in the
[00:07:41] research for Dream School, you know, with the exception of a few national universities.
[00:07:46] Most students are going to end up going within a couple hundred miles of their home campus
[00:07:51] to get their first job.
[00:07:52] Well, colleges need to work with those employers about like, what do you need?
[00:07:55] What are the skills that you’re missing?
[00:07:57] Could you help us work on projects that you have where our students can get real experience?
[00:08:02] Could they get internships?
[00:08:03] So I think there needs to be much more of a cooperative agreement between colleges and
[00:08:08] employers, because right now what we do is we end up sending students kind of into the
[00:08:13] void between graduation and the job market.
[00:08:16] And we say as colleges, job market’s not our responsibility.
[00:08:19] And employers say, well, you know, colleges are not training.
[00:08:22] Students for us.
[00:08:23] And so they’re kind of like talking past each other.
[00:08:26] And I think that this moment, especially around AI, really requires employers and colleges
[00:08:33] to work much more in concert for training those students for the future.
[00:08:38] And you talk about in your article, some folks who even have the idea that colleges
[00:08:42] might want to have students actually get paid jobs while they’re in college that count toward
[00:08:48] college credit.
[00:08:49] You talk about how the career services office.
[00:08:52] This is usually off on the side.
[00:08:54] I mean, I remember this.
[00:08:54] It’s like the responsible, forward-looking students visited the career services office
[00:09:00] and interviewed for real jobs.
[00:09:01] And people like me, who just hoped the future would turn out somehow, ignored everything
[00:09:05] until we were way past college.
[00:09:07] But so it sounds like you really think for most colleges, much more integrated.
[00:09:12] We are preparing you.
[00:09:13] We will even help you into the working world.
[00:09:16] There’s no doubt about it.
[00:09:17] Most students actually never visit the career center because they don’t think it’s really
[00:09:21] going to be helpful.
[00:09:22] Or they think, by the way, it’s something that seniors do before they graduate.
[00:09:26] And they’re not doing it early on.
[00:09:28] And most career centers, to be honest with you, are, you know, colleges give lip service
[00:09:32] to that.
[00:09:33] They don’t really invest much in it.
[00:09:35] So they’re not really helpful.
[00:09:36] If you’re a STEM major, your needs are very different than if you’re an English major
[00:09:40] or a philosophy major.
[00:09:41] So I’m really impressed with colleges.
[00:09:43] You know, Wake Forest does this really well, where they’re focused on career services for
[00:09:48] different majors and what different majors need at different points.
[00:09:52] In their career, because that’s the other point, a freshman in college has very different
[00:09:55] needs than a senior in college.
[00:09:57] And so because you’ve written a book about choosing the right school, is that you’re
[00:10:03] basically putting this on students and parents and saying, look, the first thing you need
[00:10:07] to do is say, well, actually, what do you want out of a college education?
[00:10:10] And are there schools you can choose that do what you’re saying, where it’s much more
[00:10:15] integrated?
[00:10:15] Oh, there’s definitely schools.
[00:10:16] But unfortunately, many of them are not at the very top of the rankings.
[00:10:20] And I often talk in my.
[00:10:22] My newest book, Dream School, that students start the college search kind of midstream.
[00:10:27] They just start putting names on a list often that they hear in their surrounding community.
[00:10:32] You know, stickers they see on the back of cars, Instagram, you know, every senior class
[00:10:38] in America has an Instagram page telling you where their seniors are going to college.
[00:10:41] And so there’s these same names you hear over and over again.
[00:10:43] And students just start putting those names on a list without really understanding what
[00:10:47] they want out of the college experience.
[00:10:49] Do you want to live far from home, close to home?
[00:10:52] A rural or city?
[00:10:54] What kind of career do you want?
[00:10:56] So if you want to work in the music industry, should you really be in the middle of Maine
[00:11:00] or should you be in Nashville or L.A.
[00:11:02] or New York or closer so you could do internships during college?
[00:11:05] Right. There’s all these things that I don’t think students and families think about because
[00:11:10] they’re just often so enamored with the name.
[00:11:13] In fact, we saw that we did a survey of three thousand plus parents for this book, and
[00:11:17] there’s so much pressure to feel like I’m going to the most selective, highly ranked,
[00:11:22] highly ranked college I can get into because in this job market, parents think the name
[00:11:27] on the degree provides insurance in this job market.
[00:11:32] And that’s true if you get, by the way, all these other experiences in college, if you do
[00:11:36] internships and get real skills.
[00:11:38] But you could get those skills and internships by going to other places where the faculty
[00:11:43] might be less concerned about doing their own research or working with graduate students
[00:11:47] and might be more focused on your success as a student.
[00:11:49] And I often found that at colleges.
[00:11:51] Colleges that were kind of outside of the top 25 or top 50, where their success was
[00:11:57] really dependent on their student success.
[00:12:00] And I think to give parents a little bit of a break and students, it did used to be much
[00:12:06] more insurance than it is now, I think.
[00:12:08] I mean, certainly again, when I graduated from college, the only impressive thing on
[00:12:13] my resume was the name of the college.
[00:12:15] And it did a lot of work for me for a long time.
[00:12:17] And it still does.
[00:12:19] It still does.
[00:12:20] But but you know.
[00:12:21] You need you need plus and right.
[00:12:24] Yes.
[00:12:24] And so it but also to put it sounds like what you’re saying is you got to take agency earlier
[00:12:31] on in the process, starting in high school, figuring out maybe what you want to do, what
[00:12:36] college serves that make an active choice, which is great training.
[00:12:40] I’ve talked to Bill Gurley, a venture, the venture capitalist last week.
[00:12:43] And he said, you know, one of the reasons career decision making is so difficult is
[00:12:47] we don’t really actually have to make any decisions until we graduate from college because
[00:12:51] you go to school and you go to a decent college and you think that somebody else is driving
[00:12:56] the train and then suddenly you’re out and you have to choose your entire life, which
[00:13:00] is incredibly difficult.
[00:13:01] So you’re basically giving great general advice, which is take agency earlier.
[00:13:07] Yes, and I understand I have a 16 year old at home who has no idea what she wants to
[00:13:12] do, and a lot of students don’t, even if they think they do.
[00:13:15] A third of students change their major in college anyway, and most kids don’t necessarily
[00:13:19] work in majors that they have.
[00:13:21] So I think the key is also like, what interests you, even if you don’t pick that major right
[00:13:27] off the bat, but how do you get experience to see what those jobs are?
[00:13:32] So Henry, I never forget, I interviewed this architecture major at UVA a couple of years
[00:13:37] ago and he was telling me that, you know, he had an internship his junior year between
[00:13:41] his junior and senior year at UVA.
[00:13:43] And he said, oh, this is what the job is like.
[00:13:45] I never knew what an architect really did on a day to day basis, and he hated it.
[00:13:50] And he realized he was.
[00:13:51] He was already a senior, essentially, in college and it was like too late to change
[00:13:53] his mind.
[00:13:54] Like, I think we should do even, by the way, in high school, a lot more job shadowing,
[00:13:59] a lot more really understanding what most jobs are, because to an 18 year old or a 22
[00:14:06] year old, when they look at job titles, they feel like a foreign language because they
[00:14:10] really don’t know what most of these people do.
[00:14:13] All right.
[00:14:20] Let’s get to it.
[00:14:21] Let’s get to what we’re actually here to talk about, AI and campus.
[00:14:24] How are colleges handling AI right now?
[00:14:28] Not very well.
[00:14:30] They have essentially buried their head in the sand.
[00:14:33] Going back to the introduction of ChatGPT, they first didn’t take it seriously.
[00:14:37] They were there was a little bit of sense of wonderment about it.
[00:14:40] And then there was a sense of what I would call compliance and policing, right?
[00:14:44] They saw AI as a cheating tool that needed to be controlled.
[00:14:49] Instead of.
[00:14:50] How do we figure out how to use this as a teaching and learning tool?
[00:14:55] And how do we prepare our students for the world after college?
[00:14:58] And we’re starting to see that change now, a couple of years later, where colleges realize
[00:15:03] it’s here to stay.
[00:15:05] It’s going to change the world in ways we still probably don’t understand.
[00:15:08] And we need to kind of get on board.
[00:15:11] The problem now is like, what do we do?
[00:15:13] Right.
[00:15:14] So I mentioned in the article, Ohio State announced with big fanfare last year that,
[00:15:18] you know, every student is going to be AI literate.
[00:15:20] And by the way, by 2029.
[00:15:24] So they have a couple of years of a runway to do that.
[00:15:27] But then I talked to the provost for the article and I said, well, how are you going to do
[00:15:30] that?
[00:15:31] And he said, well, it’s really up to the faculty.
[00:15:32] It’s really up to the schools.
[00:15:33] And I get it.
[00:15:34] Every discipline is different.
[00:15:36] Again, a STEM major is different than a philosophy major.
[00:15:39] But when you let it up to the faculty, you end up having a very uneven experience for
[00:15:45] students.
[00:15:46] And there was a student early on in that article who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh,
[00:15:50] who said that some faculty were experimenting with AI.
[00:15:53] Others like basically turned it off and wouldn’t let you use it.
[00:15:56] Others accused you of cheating if you used it.
[00:15:58] And when it’s up to the faculty and there’s not a lot of guidance from the top or there’s
[00:16:02] not a lot of education.
[00:16:03] You know, most faculty have been teaching for years.
[00:16:06] They don’t really know how to best use this.
[00:16:09] There’s a loss about what to do.
[00:16:11] And so some students are going to have a great experience in some of their classes.
[00:16:14] They’re going to have a terrible experience in other their classes, and they’re not really
[00:16:17] going to come out.
[00:16:19] As.
[00:16:20] Ohio State now, Purdue, by the way, has followed this to say, you’re really a literate.
[00:16:25] And I you make another great point, which is the more broader point that education for
[00:16:30] those of us who have been in technology for a while is remarkably seemingly resistant
[00:16:37] to change.
[00:16:38] We generally teach the way we taught 150 years ago.
[00:16:40] And again, I will get pounded by my family and friends for observing that and so forth.
[00:16:45] But is it you know, why is that?
[00:16:48] Why?
[00:16:49] Why are the universities so high bound?
[00:16:50] Well, they hate to be compared to business, by the way, their their contention is like
[00:16:55] all these institutions have been around for hundreds, hundreds of years.
[00:16:59] And if you look at the Fortune 50, you know, a lot of those companies have changed over
[00:17:03] the years.
[00:17:04] Right.
[00:17:05] So if we follow the business world and we’re worried more about, you know, quarterly goals
[00:17:08] or yearly annual goals, we kind of miss that forest for the trees about the long tail of
[00:17:14] education and and technology.
[00:17:17] So I think that’s one of the reasons they’re resistant to change is because they want to
[00:17:20] sit back and wait to see what really is happening.
[00:17:25] But the problem is, is that you only get to go to college once.
[00:17:29] And I mentioned at the top of my article, I went to college in 1991.
[00:17:34] By the time I graduated in 1995, the Internet was a thing.
[00:17:37] So I went to college pre Internet, graduated into a post Internet world and college itself
[00:17:42] didn’t prepare me for that world because everybody was like kind of waiting around.
[00:17:45] They thought, oh, the Internet is this cool encyclopedia thing, right?
[00:17:49] It’s this cool like communication email thing.
[00:17:52] Well, I wanted to be a journalist.
[00:17:54] Nobody talked about what was going to happen to journalism.
[00:17:56] I mean, nobody really knew.
[00:17:57] I understood.
[00:17:58] But nobody really talked about how we’re now going to have these creators and video
[00:18:02] and audio and all these other things are going to happen and kind of start to prepare
[00:18:05] students for that world.
[00:18:07] And so that’s the problem with colleges, is that they kind of wait and they wait too long
[00:18:13] to try to figure out what the use case is.
[00:18:15] And meanwhile, every year they’re graduating students into an economy.
[00:18:19] Not really prepared.
[00:18:22] And so you’ve studied today’s universities.
[00:18:25] You have a daughter who’s preparing for college.
[00:18:28] If you could draw up a perfect college or even a perfect professor, given AI, given
[00:18:34] the approach, what would it be?
[00:18:36] And if you’ve talked to professors in colleges that are using AI in a great way, let’s hear
[00:18:42] it.
[00:18:43] Well, so I interviewed an Ohio State professor in the business school there who is using
[00:18:48] it around.
[00:18:49] A logistics course that he teaches, as he said, it used to be that the business majors
[00:18:54] were always at a disadvantage with the CS majors who knew how to program.
[00:18:58] And now they’re more even, right?
[00:19:00] As we know, in a lot of our lives, I use AI to do things that I either need to do faster
[00:19:06] or I don’t know how to do.
[00:19:08] And increasingly, I think that professors who have figured that out, like to basically
[00:19:12] bring students up to an even level for something that they may have to do on the job, I think
[00:19:17] is a really good idea.
[00:19:18] And again, we’re seeing professors do this.
[00:19:23] But where I think what’s happening now is that what we most need is to just give students
[00:19:28] more exposure to the employment market.
[00:19:31] And so colleges like Northeastern, for example, or Georgia Tech or the University of Cincinnati,
[00:19:36] where they build a co-op right into the undergraduate experience so that you’re working at the same
[00:19:41] time that you’re going to school, or there’s a small little college in Georgia called Berry
[00:19:47] College.
[00:19:48] Students have campus jobs where they’re learning things like Salesforce or Workday, right?
[00:19:53] They’re learning software, or they’re managing projects.
[00:19:56] I wrote an article for Fast Company recently about Saxby’s Coffee, which is a coffee,
[00:20:03] a regional coffee chain that has stores on campus that are completely run by students,
[00:20:09] including everybody from the manager on down, they’re responsible for P&L even, and responsible
[00:20:13] for hiring and firing and human resources decisions, right?
[00:20:16] So those things that really integrate the workforce.
[00:20:17] I think that’s a really good point.
[00:20:18] The workforce more into the educational mission of the university, because right now, we see
[00:20:26] it as a binary world, right?
[00:20:28] We see, okay, you’re going to get educated, and then you’re going to work.
[00:20:31] And even when you get into the workforce, as we know, education doesn’t stop.
[00:20:37] Especially in this world, you’re going to constantly need to be upskilling and reskilling.
[00:20:41] And we need to get students kind of into that mindset that there is work and learning
[00:20:47] happening at the same time.
[00:20:48] That they’re not separate.
[00:20:49] And you also talk about how when you really look into the details of employment
[00:20:56] of recent college graduates, it’s actually striated between the top universities and
[00:21:01] the less expensive universities, and then the big middle, and it’s the middle that’s
[00:21:05] getting hammered.
[00:21:06] Why is that?
[00:21:07] It’s a fascinating research study out of Harvard, and the researchers didn’t actually
[00:21:12] study that.
[00:21:13] But when I asked the researchers, kind of their theories was that if you go to a highly
[00:21:17] selective university.
[00:21:18] Obviously, they’re worth it, and you’re going to still pay for those students.
[00:21:23] At the bottom rung, you’re going to get kind of workers who just can get the work done.
[00:21:31] They may not be the most talented, but they’re going to get the work done.
[00:21:34] And then you kind of have this murky middle where students are neither kind of highly
[00:21:39] talented or they didn’t do a lot in college.
[00:21:44] And so that’s where you’re kind of missing out on that middle.
[00:21:47] By the way, most colleges and universities sit in that middle ground.
[00:21:51] And so my concern, if I’m a student right now looking at college and I can’t get into
[00:21:56] one of those highly selective places, is that even if I end up in that murky middle, again,
[00:22:01] going back to what we talked about earlier, get real skills.
[00:22:04] Try to figure out, should I get certificates on the side?
[00:22:07] Should I try to get more jobs, internships, things like that?
[00:22:11] The more that you could do while you’re in college, the better off you’re going to be
[00:22:14] after.
[00:22:15] And what is it?
[00:22:16] You talk about that.
[00:22:17] And you refer to, at the top tier, for example, they have the highest skill.
[00:22:21] And you just said talent.
[00:22:24] In the modern world, what is talent?
[00:22:27] And what is skill?
[00:22:28] What should they be learning?
[00:22:31] So I think some of it is actual job skills, whether it’s project management or data visualization
[00:22:39] and things like that.
[00:22:40] So I was talking earlier about some of these students in majors that we think of as humanities,
[00:22:46] trying to get a real skill.
[00:22:47] That is something that employers are looking for.
[00:22:50] But more than that, and this is where I think the liberal arts could potentially start to
[00:22:55] make a comeback if we design it in the right way.
[00:22:59] I often heard from employers that they want students who have some discernment.
[00:23:04] They want students who can work in teams.
[00:23:06] They want students who could problem solve.
[00:23:09] They want students who could just, by the way, get the job done.
[00:23:13] And that often comes from…
[00:23:16] The ambiguity of a liberal arts degree where everybody says, well, what are you going to
[00:23:21] do with that degree?
[00:23:23] A lot of that work, deep reading, deep writing, deep thinking, deep conversation really helps
[00:23:30] you with those skills that employers want.
[00:23:32] The problem is, is that most students graduate with a psychology degree or they graduate
[00:23:37] with a English degree.
[00:23:39] They don’t know how to talk about that in a job interview.
[00:23:42] And they don’t have any proof that they can actually do those things.
[00:23:45] Because many of them haven’t done anything in college to show that.
[00:23:48] They haven’t done a job.
[00:23:49] They haven’t worked on big projects.
[00:23:51] So if you could show that along with your degree, I think this is where the liberal
[00:23:56] arts can actually start to make a little bit of a comeback.
[00:23:59] And so it is different.
[00:24:01] When I went to school, I do think I was helped, again, mainly by the name of the university
[00:24:06] that I went to.
[00:24:07] But I could write.
[00:24:08] I mean, that’s something that had been drummed into me.
[00:24:10] Read something, analyze it, write.
[00:24:12] I was able to use that.
[00:24:14] It sounds like that is changed.
[00:24:15] ChatGPT is pretty good at that.
[00:24:17] It’s pretty good.
[00:24:18] In fact, way faster than a lot of us, even now, but certainly when you’re really learning
[00:24:23] to do professional writing and that kind of thing.
[00:24:26] But teamwork, taking a project from start to finish, hiring and inspiring people, those
[00:24:33] are all things that AI is not going to be allowed.
[00:24:35] And problem solving, like how do I, I have a naughty problem here that I have to figure
[00:24:40] out.
[00:24:41] Like, you know, ChatGPT probably can help you a little bit by, you know, you interrogate
[00:24:44] it a little bit.
[00:24:45] This problem I have to solve.
[00:24:46] How do I do it?
[00:24:47] And you go through the different steps, but eventually you’re going to have to figure
[00:24:51] that out as a human.
[00:24:52] And Henry, you know, ChatGPT could do a lot of the work.
[00:24:56] It could write the first draft, second drafts of a lot of things.
[00:24:59] You’re right about that.
[00:25:00] But there is this ability to just get stuff done.
[00:25:03] And this is one thing that I’m hearing, not only from college professors.
[00:25:06] We saw this post-pandemic, students not showing up for class, not handing in assignments,
[00:25:12] asking for extra time.
[00:25:14] And then that leads into the workplace where their ability to kind of manage projects and
[00:25:21] just get stuff done is a real skill now that employers actually want because they’re not
[00:25:27] seeing it enough in enough college graduates.
[00:25:30] And I have to say from my own AI experiments in different aspects of creating a publication,
[00:25:38] that is the piece that actually makes it not an incredible time saver.
[00:25:43] There.
[00:25:44] And I think that’s one of the aspects of it.
[00:25:44] And you talk about this in your article too, where it’s great at taking notes.
[00:25:48] It’s great at summarizing.
[00:25:49] It’s great at bullet points.
[00:25:50] It’s great at drilling me on different topics to prepare for things.
[00:25:53] So it does a lot of things that used to I have to do or would have somebody to do.
[00:25:59] But I can’t just press a button and suddenly have something that is worth a human being’s
[00:26:04] time immediately, especially when anybody can go and look it up.
[00:26:09] So it’s that getting stuff done and producing it that’s still the hard part.
[00:26:13] And I know folks in Silicon Valley.
[00:26:14] I say, oh, just wait another month to be able to do everything.
[00:26:17] But it doesn’t seem to be going that fast.
[00:26:18] It doesn’t.
[00:26:19] And I think there is a little bit of discernment.
[00:26:21] I think we all have had experience with AI where things are just a little bit off and
[00:26:26] you have to kind of really take it with a little skeptical eye.
[00:26:30] So there’s a little bit of expertise and knowledge that still count.
[00:26:33] And in fact, there was another study that’s been highly cited out of Stanford that looks
[00:26:38] at this idea of how people with more experience are actually more likely to be able to do
[00:26:42] something.
[00:26:43] They are actually not losing their jobs because that experience helps them with that discernment
[00:26:48] about what’s right and what’s wrong with AI.
[00:26:51] And so you’ve also looked at this from the entry-level hiring point of view and you have
[00:26:57] some companies.
[00:26:58] So what are companies ideally looking for in students right out of school with respect
[00:27:03] to AI?
[00:27:04] Well, part of the problem is they’re looking for students with essentially a couple of
[00:27:08] years experience.
[00:27:09] It’s that whole catch 22, right?
[00:27:11] How do I get experience if nobody will hire me?
[00:27:13] And so around AI, first of all, I think most companies don’t really know what they’re looking
[00:27:19] for from what I can tell in talking to a number of not only chief HR people, but the
[00:27:26] actual people who hire.
[00:27:27] I mean, that’s part of the problem, as you know, with most larger organizations is you
[00:27:33] have the CEO who wants one thing, you have like chief HR who wants another thing, and
[00:27:38] then you have the actual people on the ground who do the hiring day to day who need a job
[00:27:41] done tomorrow.
[00:27:42] And that’s what they’re hiring for.
[00:27:44] So there’s not a lot of alignment in a lot of these companies’ clarity about what they
[00:27:48] really want.
[00:27:50] But they do want students with experience just using it, using it and understanding
[00:27:56] how to use it, what tools they can use, show their work.
[00:28:00] And this is where I do worry that this kind of policing mentality of higher ed, where
[00:28:07] we don’t use it or we don’t use it in certain classes, that students come out and they really
[00:28:12] don’t know how the tools can be used, when they can be used, when they work, when they
[00:28:18] don’t work.
[00:28:19] That’s the piece that I think when I talk to employers that they want is just a greater
[00:28:24] understanding and colleges and universities, unfortunately, are not producing that right
[00:28:30] now.
[00:28:31] I have said multiple times in other venues that if I were leading a college right now,
[00:28:35] I would just press pause on a lot of things, run like a really fast sprint project on a
[00:28:42] strategy around AI, both from running the institution, by the way, on the business
[00:28:47] side, but also on the learning and teaching side, and just really come up with ideas.
[00:28:50] Because right now what’s happening is there’s all these incremental steps, or they’re doing
[00:28:55] what Ohio State did, making a big announcement, but there’s not a lot underneath that to
[00:29:00] understand how this is actually going to be put in place.
[00:29:03] Yeah.
[00:29:04] And I would say there are a lot of reasons for that, in addition to the fact that education
[00:29:07] is not an industry that’s known for its innovation, which is, I have sort of discovered recently,
[00:29:12] talking to my friends who are professors, professors don’t really think they work
[00:29:15] for their dean.
[00:29:18] It’s not a direct relationship like it is in business, which was very startling to me.
[00:29:22] I mean, the dean can’t tell them what to do?
[00:29:24] No, they can’t.
[00:29:26] So it’s a very fraught situation.
[00:29:28] Well, and they also don’t really cooperate across the institution, because they think,
[00:29:33] as long as my department is okay, there’s very much of a zero-sum game right now in
[00:29:36] higher ed, because we’re in a moment of scarcity.
[00:29:39] And so what ends up happening is you kind of like, I’m in my department.
[00:29:42] My department is okay, and I’m going to protect it at all costs.
[00:29:44] So there’s no incentive for me to work with somebody in another school, in another department
[00:29:49] to kind of figure this thing out, because I don’t really want to help them.
[00:29:52] If they go away, who cares?
[00:29:53] I’m still here.
[00:29:54] So there’s not an institutional mentality around this.
[00:29:58] There’s much more of a, my discipline, my department.
[00:30:02] And you had a very interesting example from Carlyle, I think, which is a huge private
[00:30:06] equity firm that almost anyone interested in finance would be thrilled to be in.
[00:30:11] Yeah.
[00:30:11] To be considered to work for or get a job at, and they were using AI in a very proactive
[00:30:17] way.
[00:30:18] Yeah.
[00:30:19] They were using it to essentially do a lot of the grunt work.
[00:30:21] But then at the end, a analyst or somebody else would come in and end up basically summarizing
[00:30:30] the work.
[00:30:31] And so this is where I think, again, where colleges can really show students, there’s
[00:30:38] a set of work that you have to do to get a project done.
[00:30:41] What can AI do?
[00:30:43] What needs to be checked?
[00:30:44] What needs to be summarized?
[00:30:45] And what do you need to have knowledge about?
[00:30:48] And that’s the part that I don’t think when colleges say, we’re just shutting it off
[00:30:51] in this class, or we’re not being transparent, this is another thing, Henry, that I hear
[00:30:57] often from professors.
[00:30:59] By the way, a couple of professors have been like caught or somebody’s even suing a professor
[00:31:04] for using AI to grade or to write a syllabus, right?
[00:31:07] Like professors are using it, but they’re not telling their students and students are
[00:31:11] using it.
[00:31:11] And they’re not telling their professors.
[00:31:13] And if we had more of a transparent relationship, so a professor comes in and says, you could
[00:31:17] use it for this assignment, and here’s how I think we should use it for the assignment.
[00:31:20] Or students come in and say, here’s how I used it for this assignment, and it was
[00:31:24] really useful.
[00:31:25] Or another student says, it wasn’t very useful at all for this reason.
[00:31:28] That’s how people learn.
[00:31:29] But when you make it a, again, a cheating tool, people are afraid to talk about it.
[00:31:36] And that really worries me because that’s how we learn coming into the workforce.
[00:31:41] On the research report, which was the Carlisle example that you had where the analyst has
[00:31:47] to write a paragraph afterwards, that is one area in my experiments where I used to be
[00:31:53] paid to write research reports.
[00:31:55] That was the product that would then be sent out.
[00:31:58] It would take weeks.
[00:31:59] Now it takes minutes, and it’s good.
[00:32:03] It’s not, in the ones that I’ve seen, a staggering work of analytical genius, but it’s very good.
[00:32:09] And my question for you on that is.
[00:32:10] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:11] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] Yeah.
[00:32:12] The human’s job is just to write the summary.
[00:32:15] One of the things that was positive about taking weeks to write a research report and
[00:32:19] study a company and an industry and everything else is I knew a lot that did not go into the
[00:32:24] research.
[00:32:25] And I had tested a lot of theories and what have you, and in fact, one of the pieces of
[00:32:29] advice after I wrote my first one that I got from my boss was, yeah, that’s fine.
[00:32:32] Just throw out, it’s 51 pages.
[00:32:34] Throw out the 50 pages.
[00:32:35] The only thing that matters is those bullets on the front because that’s all anybody is
[00:32:38] going to read anyway, which fair, everybody’s busy. But so how do we as humans, how do we still
[00:32:46] learn? And how do we gather the judgment to be able to put that decision paragraph on there?
[00:32:53] Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a great question that I haven’t quite figured out yet, because I think
[00:32:57] what colleges are going to have to do, you know, you mentioned your early work, a lot of friends
[00:33:01] who worked for McKinsey said, you know, my first job at McKinsey was like putting together slides
[00:33:06] and other things like all by the way, all the things that chat GPT can do now or AI can do.
[00:33:11] And then by the way, but that taught me what I needed to get the second job and the third job
[00:33:15] and eventually, you know, leave and do other things. And when you take out that bottom rung,
[00:33:20] who’s going to do that? That’s where, as you said, most of the knowledge is created.
[00:33:25] Our college is going to have to take that on in some way. And they’re not very good at that,
[00:33:30] as we discussed, right? They don’t think it’s their job to prepare students for those first jobs.
[00:33:36] And now we’re asking them almost to help them do those first jobs while they’re in college.
[00:33:40] And Henry, that’s a part that I haven’t quite figured out whose role that’s going to be,
[00:33:44] but we can’t have, we have to have some bridge to get students from college to career. And if
[00:33:52] those first jobs used to be that bridge, and they don’t longer exist, or they don’t longer exist in
[00:33:57] the same way, who fills that role? I don’t know the answer to that yet. I hope maybe one of your
[00:34:02] listeners has a smart answer to that. Great. If you do, please let us know.
[00:34:06] Listeners, we’d love to hear it. Yeah, you also had another statistic that I hadn’t seen before,
[00:34:10] which was very startling to me about the percentage of expertise that we learn from
[00:34:17] studying versus doing versus peers. Tell us about that.
[00:34:22] Yeah, very little we learn from actually in the classroom. And I think this goes back to
[00:34:27] what I said earlier, where we used to think there’s classroom learning, and then there’s like
[00:34:33] on the job, hands-on learning.
[00:34:36] If I were to radically redesign college, it would be something that Matt Singelman from
[00:34:42] Burning Glass Institute said in the story. He said, we used to think of college with job on
[00:34:47] the side. Now we think of job with college on the side, right? We have to think of these as much
[00:34:52] more integrated. I would be putting students constantly in a work environment, or even on
[00:34:58] the college side, there’s a lot of companies that will have colleges work on, college classes work
[00:35:03] on projects for them. Like I would constantly be putting students in a work environment,
[00:35:06] a workplace environment while they’re learning because that work, this is somebody from the
[00:35:14] chief learning officer at Workday who mentioned this, like 80 to 85% of your learning is either
[00:35:20] going to come from actually doing it or by your peers, not by a professor at the front of the
[00:35:26] room.
[00:35:26] So you’ve talked to everybody. You have a daughter who’s getting there, who presumably,
[00:35:32] if it’s at all like my relationship with my daughters back then,
[00:35:36] was they were not going to listen to a word I said.
[00:35:37] Never do.
[00:35:38] I was better off not saying anything. But you probably get advice or ask questions from other
[00:35:43] parents or other people. What do you advise today’s high school students to do as they’re
[00:35:48] thinking about college and AI and all of that? Well, I think first of all, use the tools,
[00:35:54] right? Like I’m constantly looking at how other people, again, peer learning, how other people
[00:35:59] are using these tools. I think we still have to go to college. I mean, I know there’s a whole
[00:36:04] narrative out there right now.
[00:36:06] It’s about don’t go to college. But I, you know, looking at all the data from the past, I understand
[00:36:11] past is no necessarily a precursor to the future. But we know that students who go to college not
[00:36:18] only make more economically over time, although that’s slowing down, they have more optionality.
[00:36:24] They have more choices. They could move up and out. There’s just a lot more flexibility that
[00:36:29] they have with the degree. So that’s one thing I’m telling my daughter is don’t worry about what
[00:36:34] you’re going to major in.
[00:36:35] Majors are going to change. Just go and use the tools. Learn as much as you can. And then at some
[00:36:42] point, you are going to have to specialize. And that’s when you’re going to get either this on
[00:36:46] the ground, on the job training. You’re going to go and get a certificate in something that will
[00:36:51] teach you a specific skill. But you’re going to kind of be this triple threat graduate in some
[00:36:57] way, right? You’re going to have the background knowledge. You’re going to have very specific
[00:37:00] domain knowledge. And you’re going to have like the hands-on learning.
[00:37:05] Unfortunately, what I think ends up happening is that many students leave college with maybe one or
[00:37:09] two of those things. But they don’t often leave with the complete package, often because they
[00:37:14] trust colleges to, you know, the degree is going to do it for me. And that’s not the case anymore.
[00:37:20] And whose fault is that? I don’t want to put this all on parents and students. Because when
[00:37:24] you’re paying $100,000 for a product, you should trust that product to educate you in the right
[00:37:29] way. I think it’s kind of a combination of parents, students, employers, and colleges.
[00:37:35] But we don’t have these systems really work together right now.
[00:37:38] Yeah. I think the sooner everybody realizes that the dean of the college is not driving the bus
[00:37:45] that you are riding on to your future career, and in fact, you have to be the driver,
[00:37:50] the better in life and everything else. All right. So to close, let’s look forward.
[00:37:56] So given what you know about universities and how slow the industry is to change and so forth,
[00:38:02] but how much pressure there is on it from multiple fronts,
[00:38:05] not just AI and so forth, let’s go out five to 10 years. What does college look like?
[00:38:11] So first of all, I think we’ll have fewer colleges. We are in a demographic cliff now
[00:38:15] with 18-year-olds. And I think some colleges will close. I think other colleges will pivot
[00:38:21] and start to serve adult students. Because one of the things we didn’t talk about
[00:38:24] is how do we train, you know, millions and tens of millions of adults now who are in the workforce
[00:38:30] and need to learn these skills as well. And I think colleges can play a role. I don’t think
[00:38:35] employers are obviously the player, our player as well. So I think that some colleges will pivot
[00:38:40] to that. I also think that the colleges that are going to survive beyond, by the way, the biggest
[00:38:46] brand names, I think they’re safe, is those colleges that come up with different pathways
[00:38:53] from high school into college and through college. So for example, you know, two-year degrees that
[00:38:59] you build an apprenticeship around, you know, online and in person. So that’s,
[00:39:05] you know, one of the things that I think is really important is how do you get more students to
[00:39:09] intern during the year? One of the things that didn’t make the article, but Simon Coe, who used
[00:39:10] to head up early career recruiting at Raymond James told me is that, you know, the summer
[00:39:16] internship, it’s kind of dead in some ways because it’s not the best time. You know, the middle of
[00:39:22] August is not the best time to have somebody in the office. So how do you get more students to
[00:39:26] intern, for example, during the school year, especially if they’re not in a big city? Well,
[00:39:31] could they take online courses while they’re interning? So I think there’s,
[00:39:35] there has to be the traditional four-year full-time residential model is definitely
[00:39:41] going to be in place at, you know, the top schools, but for everyone else, we’re going to
[00:39:46] have to think about a model that is a lot more flexible and different and allows people to get
[00:39:52] that experience as they’re learning. And do we ever get to the point, and it can be even broader
[00:39:58] than college, certainly in high school or primary school or post-grad, where for lack of a better
[00:40:05] reason, if you see the first most recent series of Star Trek movies, when young Spock is on Vulcan,
[00:40:12] he and all of his peers are in these little sort of half bowls and they each have their own
[00:40:16] AI professor who’s teaching them everything. And there’s a, there’s a human wanderer,
[00:40:21] I’m sorry, a Vulcan wandering around sort of supervising everybody.
[00:40:24] It seems with these tools that we should ultimately work towards something like that,
[00:40:29] which is, yes, they’re more individualized learning. Exactly. Much more because that is
[00:40:33] the way you learn is when somebody,
[00:40:35] is right there with you and you’re being forced to demonstrate that you’ve learned everything
[00:40:39] before you move on. It’s incredibly powerful. We’re all different. We all learn best in
[00:40:44] different ways. So it seems like that’s an opportunity. Do you think we get there in the
[00:40:49] near, not, not to that, not to Vulcan. I realized that that sounds like a horrible dystopia to a
[00:40:53] lot of people. I don’t mean that, but just much more individualized learning.
[00:40:58] I’m skeptical. I’m hopeful, but I’m also skeptical because of something you’ve mentioned a couple of
[00:41:02] times. Higher education, education in general.
[00:41:05] Not only higher ed, but K through 12 as well is incredibly reluctant to change. It’s incredibly
[00:41:11] risk averse. And I, you know, for example, you know, one of the reasons education costs so much
[00:41:17] is because it requires a lot of people. There’s a lot of work now that can be done on college
[00:41:21] campuses by AI, especially kind of in the administrative and staff class. And whenever
[00:41:26] I asked professor, whenever I asked college leaders about this, they’re like, yeah, but
[00:41:30] you know, we don’t want to, you know, lay people off. We don’t want to fire them. We’ll wait till
[00:41:35] they retire. We don’t want to fire them. We don’t want to fire them. We don’t want to fire them.
[00:41:35] And then we’ll get those cost savings. I mean, that is not the way almost any other industry
[00:41:41] works. And so I, the reason I’m skeptical is because they will hold on to tradition as long
[00:41:49] as they can. And by the time they’re ready to let go, I fear for some places, it will just be too
[00:41:55] late. And I, so then maybe the place we really start to see it is in corporate training, which
[00:42:01] is a massive industry that nobody hears about and is very difficult. And,
[00:42:05] having been a CEO, it’s incredibly important. You want to help your folks get as competent as
[00:42:11] possible, as fast as possible. And yet the variation in the teacher, what they happen to
[00:42:16] like, that you want a way to standardize it without it and have it be individualized and
[00:42:21] have it be a single message, very difficult. But that seems to me would be exactly what you could
[00:42:27] design with the new tools. Well, as we know, through the history of innovation, it’s always
[00:42:32] external players that push the, you know, the incumbents.
[00:42:35] Either out or to change. Again, the incumbents in higher ed, they just are so reluctant. And
[00:42:43] I’m hopeful, but I’m also just skeptical that they will.
[00:42:48] Jeff, Campus AI Crisis is a great article. It’s a privilege to talk to you. So thank you so much
[00:42:52] for joining us. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.