The second of two items from a neo-liberal…  This one is an item from a business professor with little direct experience in education, but who believes free market economic principles are the answer to education’s (and pretty much all other society’s social) problems.

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Students Concerned about Schools and AI

MICHAEL B. HORN FEB 16

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The popular narrative is that students love AI (it helps them with their homework and papers!), and teachers are nervous about it. But the statistics and vignettes from talking with students suggest something different.

Students don’t appear to like or use AI more than parents and teachers. A 2023 survey by the Walton Family Foundation found that 61 percent of parents and 58 percent of K–12 teachers report favorable views of ChatGPT compared to 54 percent of students aged 12–17. Teachers are more likely to use ChatGPT than students, at 63 percent compared to 42 percent.

Recent graduates report feeling threatened and worried by the rise of AI, according to the 2023 edition of the Cengage Group’s annual “Employability Report.” Among 1,000 graduates who had finished a degree or non-degree program in the past month, roughly 46 percent said they felt threatened by AI, and 52 percent said it made them question their preparedness for the workforce.

While students worry about tomorrow, their teachers are applying AI in the classroom today (even if that’s just to check for cheating or plagiarism). But schools have not yet grappled with the broader issue of whether or how curriculum should change.

That’s the topic of my latest piece for Education Next, “Artificial Intelligence, Real Anxiety.”

In it, I grapple with the debate around how much curriculum really should change—and what should be the underlying principles of any such alterations. I encourage you to read the piece and talk to students about their thoughts. And then I’d love to hear what you learn.

College Unbound

One of the few new accredited U.S. colleges to accept Title IV dollars is called College Unbound. It was an innovative learning program that initially partnered with other colleges before becoming one itself. In the words of its current president, Adam Bush, it started as “an institutional agitator.”

The college offers only one degree, a Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Leadership and Change, and has a very different organizational structure that enables it to serve adult learners and those overlooked by traditional higher education.

Included in that group? Individuals who are incarcerated. College Unbound graduated the first student who was incarcerated in Rhode Island since the U.S. government once again allowed Pell Grants for prisoners last year—and is on the verge of graduating another “five or six.”

That’s what led me and Jeff Selingo to sit down with Bush and Jose Rodriguez, the assistant vice president for community and belonging at College Unbound, and explore its unique model on the latest episode of Future U.

One question Jeff posed to me was why other institutions can’t copy College Unbound and better serve adult learners. My thoughts:

The departmental structure within higher ed really gets in the way of this. And what I mean is we tend to think of universities as very proprietary—we-do-everything-and-therefore-we-can-rethink-anything sorts of places. But as you know, departments are actually very modular. Sort of fixed units within a campus that are largely designed for the purpose of the faculty inside of those departments for them to publish on the things that they’re interested in, for them to get tenure, for them to converse with other scholars at their areas, on and on and on. And the older an institution is, right, the more calcified or stuck in place, if you will, those departments are, and when you look at what College Unbound has done, it basically doesn’t have any departments. By just having one major and everything built around the student, it isn’t optimized for the faculty. It’s optimized literally for what the student wants to do.

That’s a total flip in orientation, structure, intent of a faculty even joining a university. And so my guess is, Jeff, that that’s a big flip. That’s a little bit too far for most institutions. Even you might say, well, why can’t a business school do this? Right? They’re just offering a business degree. But even within business schools, they have org behavior and leadership, they have marketing, they have technical operations management, they have all these departments that calcify what they’re able to rethink about the fundamental operation itself. And I think it goes to the second thing, which is universities are very faculty focused around the purpose. It’s what Len Cassuto told us [for an upcoming] episode, I teach you about my book that I’m about to write or that I wrote a few years ago. And what College Unbound again does is flip that narrative around one of your favorite topics—purpose—and they center a student’s purpose right in the course design and the program itself.

So this isn’t, I think a lot of times when universities think about purpose and belonging, they’re like, okay, we’re going to stand up a student success team, right, that thinks about this. But this is actually interwoven into the faculty design itself and everything emanates from that point. And I guess I just wonder, maybe it’s a bridge too far for a college or university to start with that really blank slate structure that is so built around the student at College Unbound.

A bit later Jeff wondered why more colleges aren’t seizing the massive opportunity to serve adults hungry for more education. In short, I think entities are, just not traditional, accredited colleges. Here was our exchange:

Jeff: And it really seems to me in any other market, this would’ve been solved by now. If an airline saw that demand for leisure travelers who don’t want to pay a lot of money to go to Florida in the winter, if they saw that demand for that market, somebody would fill it. Right. Insurance, cell phones, groceries, dining out, retail, all these markets are segmented. There is somebody or multiple people serving all of those markets because they see market demand. But in higher ed, we have all these segments. We have thousands of institutions serving one of them, and we have very few institutions serving all the other segments which are much larger. Why doesn’t higher ed follow these other industries?

Michael: Great questions. I love the point, Scott Pulsipher and Paul Leblanc always say, right, we don’t see competition. There’s millions of people we are not serving because those—just take Arizona State, Western Governors, and Southern New Hampshire—I think they’re serving just a little over 500,000 students. So it’s not small. Let’s not…

Jeff: Yeah, but it’s millions.

Michael: But it’s not the 39 million plus. Right. And so I love the point. I think it raises the question that you may not want to hear, which is that capital that enables scale is capital that is seeking a return on investment. And that means for-profits. And as we know, for-profits have not been loved or welcomed and are being stamped out in higher education. I think not because they’re inherently bad, but because we haven’t aligned incentives around outcomes. We’ve aligned incentives around enrollments and got a lot of crummy behavior because that capital, all it cares about, Jeff, is growth. Great if you want scale and fill the problem. Not great if you actually want outcomes for students [at the moment]. And so we have to line those things up. But I think it’s interesting. The reason why all the capital has gone to MOOCs and bootcamps and all these other things is because people do see the opportunity. They just don’t see it through traditional higher ed given the way that sector works.

Listen to the full episode sponsored by Ascendium Education Group here.

Reporters Roundtable

Last month also saw the return of one of our favorite features at Future U., the reporters roundtable. On this episode Jeff and I welcomed Jon Marcus of the Hechinger Report and the USA Today’s Chris Quintana. We talked the impact of lower birth rates in Japan on universities and what the United States can learn; student debt cancellation; FAFSA delays (one note—we recorded this before the latest delays!); the value of higher ed; and how the culture wars are beginning to impact where people go to college.

Check out the episode, “Reporters Roundtable: Enrollment, Loan Forgiveness, & FAFSA Simplified,” here.

Class Disrupted Tackles DEI

As you’ll hear in the latest episode of Class Disrupted, for the first time since we began recording, I missed an episode. That left Diane Tavenner to have a conversation with Kriseles co-founder Antonio Saunders about a very different path for diversity, equity, and inclusion than its current one. Diane and Antonio have been having their own conversation about these topics for several years, so I was pleased to learn from them. For those who have strong views about DEI on either side, my recommendation is to listen to the entire conversation before jumping to any conclusions. You can do so here, at “A Humanity, Freedom and Dreams-Based Approach to DEI.”

Here are three of Antonio’s quotes:

Before my mom made me a man, before she made me black, she really made me a human being. And it was in the humanity of my existence that I had to show up with my family first, not in all of these politicized identities that can be ascribed to me.

I lost my younger brother at the age of 30. And carrying your family through the darkest valley after they’d lived a life of suffering was almost too much for me. It was the thing in life that would say, you might as well pack it up and believe that there is no way that your role of moving your family from generational curses to generational blessings would be able to play out. It was a moment to succumb. And then I was changing careers to become an entrepreneur. Everything was bearing down. And then I sat there and I said, “But wait a minute, Antonio, because let’s have conversations with ourselves about what we truly want and what we’re going to truly live by. My grandmother told me all things were possible. You can do anything, and that’s what I expect of you.” So what the confrontation of my life and my personal values was is, am I going to be the person who sits on the side as the bystander and says, this is what’s wrong with society and it’s never going to change? Or was I going to become the person who said, I get to decide what happens?

I think that we have to really understand that we are in a moment where we’re deciding if we’re going to be in conflict or connection with each other. I think it’s unfortunate. A key role of some of our leaders is to lead us as a society into conflict instead of connection, that when we are in conflict, we begin to stoke a core fear of human existence. If I exist, you can’t. You think about it this way. When we talk more about the work of humanity giving us a competitive edge versus the real purpose of it. The real purpose of this is, as humans, we all need to be included and accepted for who we are and given space to be each other’s neighbors and to show up for each other.

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Lastly, after Diane’s emotional introduction at the beginning of the Class Disrupted podcast, many of you reached out to ask if everything was OK. Thank you.

My father-in-law passed away a couple weeks ago. Here is his obituary. As early as 1977, Joonki Kim dreamed about a world in which all children would go to school with an encyclopedia-sized computer that would contain books and communicate with other computers. An expert with six patents on gesture and digital handwriting recognition, Joonki helped create that future. His group’s work led to the creation of the Thinkpad tablet computer in 1992. For me, it’s always been an amazing connection given my work.

You can watch the celebration of his life here:

My eulogy begins at 54:10. As futuristic and creative as he was, Joonki was an even better human, father, and grandfather. His memory is a blessing, comfort, and inspiration.

As always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.

© 2024 Michael Horn