If AI takes over more work of college graduates, where does that leave higher ed?

Higher Ed Dive

Ben Unglesbee

April 18, 2024

CHICAGO — While instructors and administrators weigh if and how to incorporate artificial intelligence into coursework, the emerging technologies pose broader existential questions about the role of higher education.

Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT are poised to disrupt white collar and professional work, according to Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London, who has written a handful of books on tech’s impact on work. That, in turn, could have important ripple effects on colleges, which have long served as the training camps for those workers, he said.

Susskind spoke at a keynote event Monday during the Higher Learning Commission’s annual conference in Chicago. He pointed to automation’s revolutionary impact on industries like agriculture and manufacturing — which has created huge gains in output with far fewer jobs — and to more recent advances in fields such as medical diagnostics.

“We tend to think of the work that blue collar workers do as being relatively routine, relatively straightforward, relatively process-based, relatively easy,” Susskind said. “Conversely, we think of what white collar workers do as requiring subtler faculties — things like creativity, judgment, empathy.”

 AI has yet to replicate those functions of the human mind. But it doesn’t necessarily need to when trying to solve some of the problems in professions such as medicine, accounting, architecture and law.

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