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Steve Covello's avatar

There are two main value propositions for a college education experience (well, there are more, but here are two): immersion in subject matter and proficiency in academic competencies. In the broadest sense, these are the characteristics that employers value in a graduate: the former as an objective measure of knowledge and the latter serving more as a punctuation to knowledge in the form of being able to actually think (which employers value most, IMO).

Higher education, as an institution, may capitulate to AI in the areas of being at the apex of subject matter expertise. However, even having been diminished in that sense, we still have value as the environment where competencies are practiced and refined. If HE were to embrace being the institution where AI competencies are integrated into thinking and producing something of value, then our legitimacy as educators would be sustained.

We should be focusing more on what makes an education legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders more so than focusing on whether AI is better or worse at something humans already do.

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Ryan M Allen's avatar

I appreciate the criticism. For me it is simply about this technology welding onto the rest of work, society, and pretty much everything. So we must adapt. But I think we can and there will be new jobs that mix tech with humanities: https://www.collegetowns.org/p/ai-wrangler-job-of-the-future-combines

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