Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
Even for those students committed to doing their own work, AI poses a threat that is quieter and harder to measure: that they will go off to college and find the experience of learning far more solitary, far lonelier, than ever before. That is the threat that AI increasingly poses to higher education today: not that it will steal our words, but that it will steal our ability to think and work together. - Chronicle of Higher Ed
Can Colleges Be Run Using AI? – Chronicle of Higher Ed
Dozens of fake college websites built with or supplemented by gen AI – Inside Higher Ed
The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started – The Atlantic
Student Loan Defaults Threaten Federal Aid At 1,100 Colleges – Forbes
African universities risk being left behind in AI era - Semafor
A gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for – Popular Information
In California, Colleges Pay a Steep Price for Faulty AI Detectors – Undark
Universities are rethinking computer science curriculum in response to AI tools – Tech Spot
How Do You Teach Computer Science in the A.I. Era? - The New York Times
California colleges spend millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is the faulty tech worth it? – Cal Matters
AI usage in jobs could lead to AI ‘trade schools,’ expert says - Semafor
How One College Library Plans to Cut Through the AI Hype - Inside Higher Ed
The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa – Nature
Universities in the UL ‘At Risk of Overassessing’ in Response to AI - Inside Higher Ed
AI in education's potential privacy nightmare - Axios
When AI rejects your grant proposal: algorithms are helping to make funding decisions – Nature
Faculty Latest Targets of Big Tech’s AI-ification of Higher Ed - Inside Higher Ed
Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds. You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life. Of course, when faced with enormous uncertainty, many young people take the opposite approach and pursue something with a sure path to immediate employment. The question of the day is how many of those paths AI will soon foreclose. -The Atlantic
"Recent history grads have a lower unemployment rate (4.6 percent) than recent computer science grads (6.1 percent), according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. History is one of the most popular college majors among congressional staff members, and historians find work in some surprising places, such as the National Security Agency and the American Girl doll company." -Washington Post
Attainment with AI: A Compendium of Practical Applications for Generative AI in Higher Ed – Complete College America
Why Educators Should Lean in to AI to Better Support Students - EdSurge News
The sheer growth in computing power behind generative AI raises the question of whether this technology could be the turning point – Chronicle of Higher Ed
Why I chose OpenAI over academia: reflections on the CS academic and industry job markets – Rown Zellers
Teaching Philosophy in a World with ChatGPT – Daily Nous
ChatGPT could eventually cause powers-that-be to think that writing is less of a university-wide essential skill down the road - Chronicle of Higher Ed
Top Law School Welcomes The Use Of ChatGPT In Its Admissions Process – Above the Law
Ban or Embrace? Colleges Wrestle With A.I.-Generated Admissions Essays – New York Times
AI writing tools will not fix HE's language discrimination – Times Higher Education
Using artificial intelligence to assess personal qualities in college admissions – Science
The capacity to entertain different views is vital not only on a college campus but also in a pluralistic and democratic society. With shouting matches replacing thoughtful debate everywhere, from the halls of Congress to school-board meetings, a college campus might be the last, best place where students can learn to converse, cooperate, and coexist with people who see the world differently.
The University of Chicago famously enshrined this principle in a 2014 report by a faculty committee charged with articulating the university’s commitment to uninhibited debate. “It is not the proper role of the university,” the Chicago Principles read, “to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”
Daniel Diermeier writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
What about us humble professors? Those of us with tenure have nothing to worry about. Taxpayers and donors will keep funding us no matter how useless we become. If you don’t have tenure, students will keep coming and your job will go on — unless you’re at a mediocre private college with a small endowment. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Colleges need to learn how to rely on technology. While much of the discussion has focused on what generative AI means for teaching, learning, and research, its immediate impact will likely be felt on functions outside of the academic core. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Most colleges accept most students who apply using a selection process that is routine and predictable. AI could be trained to make decisions about who gets accepted — or at least make the first cut of applicants. Yes, colleges will still need humans for recruiting, but even there, AI is increasingly capable of finding and marketing to prospective students. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Colleges have already started to deploy AI-powered chatbots to answer students’ everyday questions and help them show up for classes. Saint Louis University, for instance, added smart devices to dorm rooms that have been programmed to answer more than 600 questions from “What time does the library close tonight?” to “Where is the registrar’s office?” The next iteration of these chatbots is to personalize them to answer questions that are specific to a student (“When is my history exam?”) and bring them into the classroom. Chronicle of Higher Ed
AI can be used to tackle administrative functions from financial aid to the registrar’s office. At Arizona State University, AI is rewriting course descriptions to make them more informative for prospective students and improve search performance on the web. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Officials at companies that provide AI services to higher education tell me that colleges are sometimes reluctant to buy the products because they don’t want them to be seen as replacing people. But until campuses use AI in that way — to take over for people in jobs that involve processing information or doing repeatable tasks — then we won’t reverse or slow down the upward-cost trajectory of higher education, where most tuition dollars are now spent on functions outside of the classroom. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Rolling out AI software that can map prior admissions decisions, assess the performance of current students with similar profiles, and make preliminary recommendations will allow admissions officers to spend far less time reading essays and combing through student activities. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Vanderbilt University's Peabody School has apologized to students for using artificial intelligence to write an email about a mass shooting at another university, saying the distribution of the note did not follow the school's usual processes. CNN
That the same entrepreneurs marketing text generators for writing papers market the same systems for grading papers suggests a bizarre software-to-software relay, with hardly a human in the loop. Who would benefit from such “education”? Public Books
The AI-in-education market is expected to grow from approximately $2 billion in 2022 to more than $25 billion in 2030, with North America accounting for the largest share. Inside Higher Ed
What if we rearranged our universities around departments of critical thinking rather than departments of chemistry? Create a school of applied ethics rather than a school of business? We can create certificates for innovation and creative thinking that challenge our students to think like humans, not computers. We also need to ensure part of higher education is the development of human relationships. Businesses have been clamoring for this for years, but higher education still treats soft skills as a condiment, not the main course. Inside Higher Ed
If those in charge of the institutions of learning — the ones who are supposed to set an example and lay out the rules — can’t bring themselves to even talk about a major issue, let alone establish clear and reasonable guidelines for those facing it, how can students be expected to know what to do? Chronicle of Higher Ed
Institutions will need to have their needs and priorities clear … before buying marking machines or teaching robots or any other such thing. EdSurge
For science and the process of grant writing to be improved, two things have to happen: first, the pointless sections (those that might as well have been written by a computer, and could just as easily be answered by one) need to be removed; and second, the sections that remain need to be changed in scope, to be shorter and action-centred. Nature
Are we going to fill the time saved by AI with other low-value tasks, or will it free us to be more disruptive in our thinking and doing? I have some unrealistically high hopes of what AI can deliver. I want low-engagement tasks to take up less of my working day, allowing me to do more of what I need to do to thrive (thinking, writing, discussing science with colleagues). And then, because I won’t have a Sisyphean to-do list, I’ll be able to go home earlier — because I’ll have got more of the thinking, writing and discussing done during working hours, rather than having to fit them around the edges. Nature
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College classes are an artificial bubble. Students emerge from that bubble upon graduation—often without realizing it. After a few months, they feel frustrated at not making progress.
In college, they had clear tasks, clear deadlines, and a clear payoff—grades and new classes. That’s all gone outside of academia. As new employees, graduates are likely to start at the bottom of the ladder, be assigned tasks lacking clear instructions, and produce inferior work.
Here’s the good news: Knowing this is coming will blunt the repetitive grind. Knowing this depressing condition is only for a time will make it easier to keep going. By letting go of former expectations, graduates can fully embrace the new way of life.
Stephen Goforth
The best predictor of who will do well in college is not how smart the student is but their understanding of intelligence: Is it something the student puts on display or is it something that changes with learning?
Many first-year college students are settling into their dorms and getting ready for classes this week. I like to show my students a news story I wrote in graduate school covered in red marks. When that paper was returned to me, I could have said to myself, "I can't do this" or I could adjust, trying different strategies and working out what I needed to do to improve. The first attitude assumes either I can do it or I can't. If you can, you do it immediately. You show your intellegence. The second attitude assumes success is a matter of approach and persistence. You have to ask what might be perceived as dumb questions until you figure it out. When I wrote that paper covered in red marks (and there were many of them) I had no idea I was just a few years away from working at a national news network where writing would be a central part of my job.
Stephen Goforth
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