A technological revolution’s impact on students of color
Technological breakthroughs in the ways humans communicate have in the past accelerated civil rights movements. The invention of photography humanized for the mainstream public the horrors of slavery. Television blasted into living rooms moving images of protesters being hosed down in Montgomery, Ala. And handheld cell phones posted on social media arresting footage of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer.
Now comes generative AI, a technology that, as our Taylor Swaak writes, has the potential to rapidly spread the benefits of higher education to historically disadvantaged students.
Students with special needs can utilize AI tools to make learning more accessible, generate practice questions and answers, or gain feedback on their work. And it could help make admissions more equitable: One staffer was researching an AI software that could reduce the friction of transferring from a two-year college to a four-year one.
Alternatively, she warns, GenAI has the potential to widen disparities between the have- and have-nots.
From her story:
Academics including Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who studies the effects of AI on education, see clear benefits. GenAI tools like ChatGPT-4 could make learning more equitable, he said, providing services such as personalized tutoring. Other academics, while not wholly opposed, are wary of unintended consequences. They noted that a lack of AI literacy and uneven adoption in the sector could instead worsen disparities in students’ learning experiences and widen knowledge gaps among graduates.
Swaak raises several issues that directly affect students of color who have struggled in centuries past to access the best that colleges have to offer:
Which professors will embrace the use of GenAI in the classroom? And which ones will suppress it?
Which colleges will ethically use AI to make services like financial aid, admissions, and marketing more efficient?
And which colleges will train tomorrow’s leaders in the AI field, which by 2030 is expected to reshape more than 11 million jobs?
From her story:
Without at least establishing “basic truths” at the institutional level about what uses are and aren’t appropriate, colleges risk creating “a vastly different educational experience” for different students, said Kofi Nyarko, director of the Center for Equitable AI and Machine Learning Systems, at Morgan State University.
Past civil rights movements were successful because people of color (like Peter, Ethel Payne, and Alicia Garza) managed to gain access to the microphone.
Colleges have the ability to help determine who has access to tools that will help influence our society.
Swaak’s story was part of this year’s Trends Report, our newsroom’s effort to capture, in five stories, the forces most shaping higher education this year. The entire series is worth reading in full.
What I’m reading...
- Local officials said they didn’t want this housing development built because of traffic concerns, but Facebook users said they didn’t want “lazy welfare lifers” living near them. Was it racism? Jason DeParle reports in The New York Times.
- A UC-Berkeley professor’s confession to not being Native American has caused uproar among Native American scholars, writes Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker.
- Is UT-Austin taking Texas’ new anti-DEI law too far? Kate McGee And Ikram Mohamed explore for Open Campus.
