Among the hats I wear at the University of Texas is that I serve as vice provost for academic affairs. In that capacity, I have worked closely with a number of teams across the university to think about ways to incorporate generative AI into the teaching and learning experience.
As we have progressed on that journey, many people have asked me whether generative AI will ultimately make college education less relevant. These tools provide support for a number of tasks that knowledge workers perform routinely. While the technology underlying large language models leads to hallucinations and biases, it’s likely that the next decade will see incorporation of other AI techniques that will make these systems more powerful reasoners and better able to detect inconsistencies.
My response is that bachelors and advanced degree programs become more important as AI technology develops.
The question about the value of degree programs has emerged with the rise of bootcamps and microcredentialing programs that teach skills. These programs are wonderful (and we offer many of them at the University of Texas), but they are no replacement for full degree programs.
The importance of a college degree comes from the concept of a discipline. You may get a degree in mechanical engineering, chemistry, history, philosophy, or accounting. Often, people rate the value of a degree by its proximity to a career that relates directly to the area of study. So, a mechanical engineering major can go to a firm and do mechanical engineering work. An accounting major can take a job as an accountant. But, few history or philosophy majors ultimately go on to become historians or philosophers.
But, each of these majors is organized around a discipline. That discipline helps people to develop two core skills that are crucial for long-term success—particularly in the age of AI. The first is the ability to learn difficult material. Changes in technology are undoubtedly going to require people to adapt their skills to stay relevant in the workplace. Those individuals who are good at continuing to build core skills will stay a step ahead of technology.
The second core skill is the ability to take a complex situation and turn it into a manageable set of problems to solve. Each discipline does this in a different way. Historians learn to trace the human, societal, political, and economic forces over time that led to a current situation. They are also good at gleaning key insights about these situations from documents, interviews, and artifacts.
Philosophers develop a capacity to ferret out the assumptions underlying a situation and to bring them to light. They draw out the implications of a current situation in ways that can uncover potential problems before they happen. They bring together a variety of sources of material to map out a systematic view of what is happening in an organization.
The ability to manage complexity is crucial for career success and it requires depth of study to acquire. Bootcamps and shorter microcredentialing programs are wonderful for helping people to develop a specific skill. If you want to learn basic coding skills, a bootcamp can be fantastic. If you want to improve your ability to use macros in a spreadsheet program, a microcredential can be an excellent investment of your time.
But, it takes time to internalize a discipline. It requires guided practice on assignments that help you to apply your knowledge and basic skills to thinking about bigger systems. It requires getting feedback from individuals already knowledgeable in the discipline to guide your thinking. Finally, it requires immersing yourself in the fine details of an area of study and not just the 50,000-foot view of things.
There are two key takeaways here. First, a lot of discussion about the value of college degrees focuses on ROI measured by the first job that someone gets (and often the direct relationship between the content of what people studied and that first job). But, the real value of a degree program is in its ability to enable graduates to continue to be relevant in their work over the long-term, regardless of whether the job they take matches their major.
Second, the durable skills that a college education provides are hard to make more efficient. You need a lot of domain knowledge before you can begin to understand complex systems. A college curriculum has heavy doses of expert knowledge, a generous helping of domain skills, and then it ties it all together with experience thinking about, understanding, and working with complex systems. That’s not something that can be distilled into an hour, or even into an intensive 10-week program. The investment of time and money in a college education pays its dividends for a lifetime. And it will become even more critical as technology advances.
Apply to the Most Innovative Companies Awards and be recognized as an organization driving the world forward through innovation. Early-rate deadline: Friday, August 23.
