13 Quotes worth reading about AI’s impact on College Administrators & Faculty
/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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