So who are the customers for universities? Before I go there, let's look at newspapers. Until the early 2000s, newspapers were primarily driven by advertising revenue. Readers were the product. While newspapers needed readers to sell, they could get them by offering cheap subscriptions by focusing on quality coverage that focused on news and analysis from a broad range of views. But since then, the few newspapers that thrive now do so mostly on subscription revenue, print and digital, and the readers have become the customers. They also have more competition from other sources like social media. So newspapers now tailor their coverage and their brand for the paying subscriber, and while most still focus on accuracy, they'll stick to narrower views in their analysis which often overshadows the pure news.
Universities have a mission beyond just serving students, providing them with knowledge in exchange for tuition. They have a societal mission. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which helped establish and grow a number of public universities, wanted to educate students to improve the productivity of American agriculture and industry. The GI Bill in 1944 brought the masses of returning soldiers into higher education. The Higher Education Act of 1965, brought in resources for students through Pell Grants and federally-guaranteed student Loans to further the competitiveness of America through the Cold War. Most universities have non-profit status because of their broader mission.
In other words, society as a whole was our customer. Our role is to educate and prepare students to help push our society forward. Many universities also have a research mission, also mostly government funded, both to recruit expert professors to educate our students, but also to produce important knowledge to manage the complexities of the world. Students participated willingly for future intellectual and financial gain and our role was to ensure the students got a strong education, for the betterment of not just themselves but the workforce and society they would later join.
Our viewpoint has changed as college costs increased and universities became more dependent on tuition and governmental financial aid. Institutions started treating the students as the customer, to ensure they came to the university and stayed there. More amenities, grade inflation, much more student support and tolerance. The relationship became transactional, a student comes, pays their tuition and their time, gets a degree and gets a job. The focus becomes more on degrees that prepare you for the workplace, a focus more on immediate skill and credential building than producing students who have the critical thinking skills to build a strong career.
And now in a time of changing demographics, less government support and AI heading towards performing many of the skills universities teach, how does the story continue? How do universities focus back on producing students who can not just live in our society but improve it? How do they focus on the right customers while ensuring educational quality? Universities need to get it right, or they won't have customers at all.
We still need to train problem solvers.
ReplyDeleteThe world is still full of problems. AI ain't gonna really solve them despite the hype. It might actually make the real problems we have worse.
Add long as there are real problems that we as society are interested in solving, and I don't see us entering into a period of heaven like world any time soon from what I see, we will need humans.
What AI is doing is automating jobs, so companies can pay off people, and have fewer workers. That is going to create when more wealth inequality, and more problems.
We need to train more people who can solve real problems, not just perform jobs.
The impact of AI is similar to the impact of digital media on art and sports.
ReplyDeleteThe top people in each area will get exponentially larger share of the market.
You can also look at the impact of online retail on retail.
We are going to see companies who make software engineer agents as a service competing with humans and each other. The generalists will likely lose as the AI will be able to do things better than average person. But that is likely 10 years away at least. The current AI coders are not good enough to even replace Junior engineers. They are more augmentation of skills, like Stack Overflow and Internet forums were.