The Cover

Amid the uncertainty of what the future of AI will look like, one element seems clear: a degree is no guarantee that your job won’t be automated. As Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said in his keynote address at the QS Reimagine Education Conference in December 2023, we are all in the same boat. While in 2016, the vulnerability of a job to automation was more clearly linked to education level, Maggioncalda explained that with the introduction of Chat GPT 4, the most exposed jobs are held by people who have a degree.

It’s only fair to be worried about the future of the labour market. However, it’s also good to remember that images of robots taking our jobs are not particularly helpful.

The way we imagine AI and its role in society matters. In a 2022 article, Teemu Roos, a professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki, complained that the images associated with artificial intelligence – especially those linked to Science Fiction – had “rubbed him the wrong way” for a long time. He argued that cliched images are detrimental and prevent people from seeing that AI is already pervasively used in our society.

A more useful way to imagine AI is important for the education sector, where job automation is not the only imminent problem.

There are dramatic demographic changes on the horizon. Patrick Brothers’s data-rich presentation captured the audience at the Reimagine conference in Abu Dhabi, and one point was particularly impressive: there will be two billion more learners by 2050, necessitating our education systems to change fast. “If you think our system is struggling today, add two billion more learners into that system,” Brothers, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of New York, Sydney and Colombo-based HolonIQ, commented.

And by the end of the century, he added, there will be as many 50-year-olds as there will be one-year-olds around the world. “This fundamentally changes how we think about learning and lifelong learning specifically.”

The combination of automation and an ageing population will mean a lot of us will need retraining, and lifelong learning will become the norm. Micro-credentials, already on the rise, will take on a significant role in this landscape.

To ensure that AI can be not only an enormous disruptor, but also an opportunity, as Brothers branded it, a better metaphor of its role is needed to guide universities, their students and society.

Co-pilots

One particularly useful image emerged from a panel discussion during the conference.

Describing how Spain’s IESE Business School created hyper-personalised learning journeys using AI, Maria Perillo, the school’s Lead Product Manager of Learning Innovation, explained that it is a human-centric technology which depends on human expertise. It’s a co-piloting relationship, but with a caveat: the human expertise remains in charge.

“We had the goal to use generative AI… as a co-pilot, a tool that could enhance our creativity and expertise. It’s not really about AI and humans, it’s about AI plus experts,” she said.

When an audience member asked whether AI will ever be able to replace leaders, Perillo insisted: “If you really want to co-pilot the technology, you need to understand you need to be the expert….There is no AI that can do anything alone.”

Expertise is arguably the basis of another exquisitely human element that will still be essential in the age of AI.

To the same question, Gabriel Rossi, Assistant Dean for Faculty and Curriculum at the Yale School of Management in the US, observed that while the set of skills the labour market requires changes regularly, one particular leadership skill means humans can’t be replaced by AI. “AI is a great analyst and a great advisor potentially, but judgement is a whole different thing…. Our leaders can’t be replaced by AI that easily and I think this comes back to judgement,” he said.

Leaders will appreciate hearing their job is safe; however, their plates won’t be getting any emptier. If anything, the moment calls on universities to step up and use their expertise to take a more proactive role at every level for their students’ and society’s benefit.

On one side, students and corporations are moving fast and adopting AI; on the other, governments and regulators are scrambling to catch up with change, leaving it up to the leaders in higher education to take action, Jessica Turner, QS Chief Executive explained in a conference session.

Universities and their leaders have a vital role to play, she said, working with students and technology providers and making evidence-based decisions whenever they can and data-informed decisions when the evidence is not yet available.

“As educators, innovators and researchers, we need to be very clear what it is that AI can be for,” she said.

AI is already transforming education, Turner pointed out, touching on personalised learning, gamification and assessment.

But there are other more existential questions – for example, Turner said, we need to decide what parts of our lives and jobs we are happy with AI taking on. Universities and their leaders need to envision how AI can really enrich the human experience and how the higher education sector can enable it to be a positive force in the world.

“For me, that’s the positive vision of AI, and it’s not just the robots who are coming to take our jobs,” she added.

Professor Adelyn Wilson, Head of Strathclyde Law School and a Professor of Law at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, explained how her department is tackling AI from a humanities and social sciences perspective, by ensuring that students in the law, technology and innovation master’s degree have a clear understanding of how the tech works – studying, for example, machine learning and coding.

Ensuring students are familiar with the technology is a responsibility that universities have towards their students, first of all: those who are able to understand emerging technologies, communicate the additional value they bring to us humans, and apply it in an ethical way which will win the graduate employment race in the future, she argued. However, universities also have wider social responsibilities.

“My law students of today are going to be the regulators, the government ministers, the legislators of tomorrow, and clearly they have quite the challenge in front of them. They won’t inherit a perfect world, but it’s our responsibility, our privilege, to help them make it more perfect,” Professor Wilson said.

The first steps

While the relentless pace of change means action for universities is urgently needed, it’s important to frame the process realistically. As Dr Shadi Hijazi, Principal Consultant at QS, said presenting the panel The Future of AI in Higher Education, success stories sometimes can hide failure, blood and sweat, and it’s essential to focus on the practical steps universities can take to evolve in the age of AI.

Participants in the panel discussion, including Professor Wilson and Perillo, shared examples showing that universities and their staff are spearheading transformation in a proactive, sometimes enthusiastic way.

For this to happen in every institution around the world, staff must have time and space to engage in the process – this is another responsibility for leaders, who can incentivise or disincentivise staff with their decision-making, Professor Wilson explained.

“Academics are tired,” Professor Wilson said. “They have had more students with more diverse needs. They have flipped classes online for the pandemic, then back, and then now they are in hybrid…. If we want to ensure that they have the space for this, it's our responsibility to create that space for them.”

However, with all the existential questions and responsibilities facing universities, perhaps it’s fair to ponder whether we are asking too much of them, as Leila Guerra, Associate Provost for Digital Lifelong Learning at Imperial College London, asked while chairing the What is your 2030 education agenda? panel.

Brothers said in response: “For all the beating up we do with universities, when you get a president or a vice chancellor behind closed doors, the conversation with me is something like ‘I am trying, I really am, I promise’.”

He remarked that while we should ask a lot from universities, we should also be careful not to send universities into a “flurry of change” unlikely to achieve very much. A better way to approach this is to focus on the essential.

“I think something we all need to be really thoughtful of is that we are at risk of just saying “you must change now, go”, and not being more thoughtful about the specific impact we hope these institutions have,” he explained.

Experimenting together

Impact was a central theme discussed by speakers in a panel discussion on the 2030 agenda for the education sector. With only six years to go, the agenda is quite full. Beyond AI, there are issues to face around accessibility, the climate emergency, sustainability, employability, declining trust in universities in some parts of society and many other challenges.

For Dr Hijazi, the way to reach a solution to these problems lies in one word: partnership. Partnering with alumni to keep degrees relevant and foster lifelong learning, investing in partnerships to drive research forward, and sharing expertise and solutions are all ways in which institutions can tackle the problems they face. Top universities should also engage with diverse research partners, as encouraged by QS’ International Research Network index, he explained.

“You don’t have to focus your partnerships on the top universities in the advanced world only. If you are advanced enough to look to the top, you have a duty to the world to collaborate,” he urged.

The appetite for collaboration was clear among attendees as well. In the closing session, attendees were invited to note and share takeaways from the conference.

In their groups, attendees shared several takeaways, such as insight on how AI can support neurodivergent students, integrating AI into the flow of career services and reflecting on how to partner with students on the AI issue.

One key takeaway shared by several groups was the importance of collaboration, both between faculty of different areas and universities in different parts of the globe, to ensure that work doesn’t happen in silos. As one of the attendees commented, we have shared problems and shared goals.

Professor Jerry Wind, emeritus professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, encouraged conference attendees to design an experiment to test an idea they wanted to take away from the conference and implement at their institutions.

He also encouraged them to take risks. He commented: “The only way to get things done in universities is to realise that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. So just do it.”