In this episode recorded live at Google’s Higher Education Leader Summit in New York, Michael Horn and Jeff Selingo discuss how colleges and universities need to move past fragmented AI implementations and toward a more coherent, campus-wide strategy. With the panelists, they analyze trade-offs between centralized oversight and academic freedom, the concern of removing productive friction from the learning process, and the financial pressures of AI integration.
A panelist, Andrea Goldsmith, president of Stony Brook University, argues that schools need to prepare students to contribute skills that AI cannot easily replicate, rather than allowing AI to replace key parts of the learning process. “That’s the incentive for our students, that if they’re using AI to shortcut finding their voice, finding their ability to communicate, finding their domain knowledge, finding how to work with their human skills, then they will not have a job in the AI era,” she explains. “And if we can convince them of that and then develop the right educational tools and assessments to help them learn what they need to learn to be AI-proof in whatever job they aspire to, that’s the solution.”