Field Notes Vol. 6 no 5: As AI sweeps over us, higher education has an opportunity

I was saddened this week to read about the closure of Hampshire College, one of America’s most interesting and unique educational institutions. Hampshire’s curriculum favored projects over traditional classroom-based courses, written evaluations over letter or number grades, and granted considerable autonomy to students to shape their own educational journey. A four-year degree consisted of three “divisions”: Exploration and working across disciplines (1 year); Concentration (2 years); Creating knowledge (1 year). [Check out the Hampshire wiki page for more.] 

When I took my summer geology field course back in 1985 (in Red Lodge, Montana), my fellow geology majors from Franklin & Marshall College were joined by students from UMass, Princeton, Rutgers and Syracuse. There were also two students from Hampshire College. I’d never heard of the place, but these two quickly became some of my closest friends at camp: they were among the smartest, kindest, and most interesting people there, and they tended to have a more nuanced view on things (geological and otherwise) than most of my peers. However anarchic Hampshire College may have sounded, with its lack of grades or strict degree plans, I had to admit that if my friends were any indication then the place had to be pretty awesome. 

And now, it’s closed, fallen prey to the same forces that are challenging small, private colleges across the country: rising costs, dwindling endowments, and a public that increasingly sees a college education as nothing more than preparing students for the job market.

It’s that last item — the purpose of a college education — that concerns me the most when I hear about Hampshire and other colleges that have suffered the same fate. Viewing a college degree simply as a ticket to a job (lucrative or otherwise) is wrong in the short term and egregiously misguided in the long term. 

Short term: Entry-level jobs are becoming harder to come by (as any recent college graduate can attest): even as overall unemployment remains low, underemployment/unemployment among recent college grads is rising.  A report from the St. Louis Fed sums it up thusly: 

The concentration of unemployment increases among recent college graduates and white-collar workers suggests that traditional assumptions about education and career security may need significant revision.

The number of Americans earning a college degree has increased significantly in recent decades, too, which is great on the surface but leads to a flooded market where employers can be increasingly picky. (Just spend some time online and you’ll be shocked by the number of relatively low-paying jobs requiring a masters degree.) And lastly, the more narrow the training (particularly in the technical areas) the more likely it is to be obsolete almost as soon as it’s learned. Given all of these factors, the notion that providing an education that is designed primarily for the economy that exists today is going to get students jobs tomorrow is misguided (at best). 

Long term: Now, let’s project the problem out 10, 20, or 30 years. It’s literally impossible to predict what the job market is going to look like over the course of the career for a 22 year-old graduating from college in 2026. AI is only the current disruption; does anybody think it’s going to stop with that? Change is accelerating, both in terms of the pace of change and the depth of it. STEM knowledge that a student learns today is going to be laughably obsolete down the road, and probably sooner than any of us realize.

Despite these trends, universities are doubling down. The University of Colorado-Boulder, where I teach, is considering a pilot program to offer “reduced credit Bachelor’s degrees.” The argument is that electives and core requirements make college more expensive and get in the way of rapid completion of the degree. The fields mentioned as good fits for this program include IT, Cybersecurity, Paralegal, Healthcare Management, and Graphic Design. Does anybody think there will be as many humans working in these fields in 20 years as there are today? Still, the university forges ahead, not so much because anybody believes these abbreviated degrees are a superior educational tool but because of “market trends” and the rising tide of distrust in all the things that make a college education most valuable: the arts, humanities, core sciences, critical thinking, communication, and interdisciplinary understanding. The outcomes from studying these fields are too generalized, too non-specific, for their impact to be easily quantified. And so, they’re expendable; disruptive sand in the gears of an educational factory that must churn out more degrees more quickly to keep pace with our changing world. 

And while we’re here, let’s acknowledge that we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all if education were affordable in the U.S. like it is pretty much everywhere else in the world. But that’s a topic for another day. 

Still, many in the academy have seen a crisis for higher education looming on the horizon for a long time: rising costs, skyrocketing tuition, economic disruptions, troubling demographic trends, and an entrenched academy all combine for an unsustainable status quo. And now, most folks in higher ed realize the reckoning is not somewhere over the horizon; it’s Here.

So: how shall we respond? Sadly, most colleges and universities are in a reactive mode, chasing after the latest trend — which will have changed by the time a new program is launched or a building is built. What we need is a strategic approach, one that is designed to develop the core skills that will be required for a future filled with uncertainty and change. 

Let’s start by thinking about some of the challenges disrupting our society today: transformation of the workforce due to AI; the increasingly pressing problem of distinguishing fact from fiction; fraying of the social fabric; and a planet on the knife’s edge of disaster due to human activity. And then there’s the kicker: all of these things are happening at once and at a speed that we can hardly grasp, much less respond to. So, what skills are going to be the most valuable ones to have as we face a future shaped by these issues? If you talk to employers they’ll tell you: they don’t need technical knowledge—they can teach that; what they need are good communicators and interpersonal acumen; they need critical thinkers; they need creative thinkers to tackle problems from a fresh perspective; they need ‘generalists’ without disciplinary or ideological limitations, who can see connections between disparate areas of knowledge and envision novel connections between them; and they need people with the ability to adapt to a constantly changing world. And our society generally? We need all these things, along with an understanding of history and an appreciation of the arts; knowledge of our political system and how it works; some basic economic literacy; embracing diversity in all its forms; and, perhaps most of all, a respect for knowledge and expertise over blind dogma. Taken together, these qualities produce a populace with the capacity to embrace change, to look ahead, and to lead with empathy for each other and our planet.

Hmmm…this sounds familiar to me… Ah, yes: I have just described a liberal arts degree! 

When I was in high school and thinking about college, my Uncle Peter (himself a pioneering Dean in the hospitality industry [he actually coined the term]) gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received: “Go to a small liberal arts college for your undergrad. Then if you want to specialize in something you can go to a big university for grad school. But don’t do that as an undergrad.” 

He was right. Since graduating from Franklin & Marshall College, I’ve been a working musician; run a small business; served on or led multiple non-profit boards; been the Executive Director of a performing arts organization; worked as a collegiate and non-profit consultant; served 17 years in academic administration and as a college professor; and I’ve undertaken numerous entrepreneurial ventures in support my own artistic projects—from conceiving, funding, marketing, and public relations, to production, performance, documentation, and follow-up. No single major or area of study could have possibly prepared me for the career I’ve had so far. While I draw on my music education when I’m in the studio or the classroom, it’s my liberal arts education that drives and informs everything else, and it’s the glue that holds it all together. My career path isn’t particularly unusual, either: the days of staying with a single company, or even the same field, for the duration of one’s working life are long past. Yet, the overwhelming majority of our educational system is still designed as if that’s the norm.  

So, why aren’t liberal arts thriving? Why aren’t there so many students wanting to attend these institutions that there’s not enough capacity to handle them? Lots of reasons, of course: cost (liberal arts institutions tend to be private and/or small, which means they are often more expensive than a public university); high selectivity (there’s a terrible assumption that those who underperform in high school are either not fit for college or should stick to a trade-centered education); and, perhaps most of all, we live in an instant-gratification culture that values transactions over process. I call it the “vending machine” mentality: put in the proper payment, push a button, and voila: You get a snack! Or a job! Success! But an education that prepares you in some non-specific way for an uncertain future? One that doesn’t have an “A+B=C” simplicity? Well, that’s just plain suspect. Our culture wants to know what it’s going to get (as if such certainty were even possible).

Which leads me to my last point: the liberal arts needs better marketing—and when I say “marketing” I mean connecting the market’s need with the educational product. AI provides us with a golden opportunity to do just that: the public is aware of the challenges and uncertainties that AI brings to our collective future, and nobody has really articulated how we, as the public, should respond. While a liberal education is hardly a magic bullet, no other educational framework is better suited to educating the next generation of workers and citizens. 

And I’m not talking about folks like me shouting in the wilderness (though we’ll keep shouting); I’m talking about something like a major campaign on the scope of something that kicks off with a Super Bowl ad, followed by a sustained national engagement operation and lobbyists advocating for better funding and access; a coordinated full press. The problem, of course, is that most liberal arts colleges are small and resources are scarce; there are minor, regional consortia of schools but not a big, national heavyweight to marshal the kinds of funds needed for something like that. Most of them don’t even have Division I sports to help pay the bills! But that’s what’s needed. We’re in a moment crying out for new approaches to how we face the world. We need to seize that moment. 

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In a recent edition of the 1440 (which describes itself as providing “fact-driven news and knowledge for the insatiably curious”-- check it out), the anniversary of Albert Einstein’s passing was noted with this quote: 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.”

Imagination is what this present moment requires of us. And a liberal arts education is the only one where developing curiosity and imagination are even talked about. The web of liberal arts colleges that spans the country is unique to the United States, and it’s fraying at the precise time we need it more than ever. It’s not just AI we need to be thinking about; it’s a complex world with increasingly complex (and interconnected) problems to address; failure is not an option. 

R.I.P., Hampshire College: we still need you, and all those like you. May we wake up to what we’re losing before it’s too late.