Brace for the AI “tidal wave”
Jobs for the Future’s annual Horizons summit last week in New Orleans got me — along with 1,500 other attendees — thinking a lot about the convergence of education and work.
Three topics stood out. The biggie: the transformational potential of AI. Yes, it really is time for all of us to pay attention, especially now that the powerful and user-friendly ChatGPT tool has emerged. The combination portends “a bigger tidal wave than any other technology in the past 20 to 30 years,” according Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab, who spoke at Horizons.
I don’t usually get worked up about announcements but I see promise in JFF’s plans for a new Center for Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Work, in no small part because the organization bridges higher ed, K-12 education, employers, and policymakers.
Alex Swartsel, a JFFLabs leader who will head the center, told me that its researchers will be examining themes like how AI could improve skills-based hiring, how it could be used to develop better educational and workplace assessments, and how it could affect personalized career coaching and academic tutoring. (In that latter arena, I’ve already begun to see inroads from educational-technology companies like Class Technologies, with its AI assistant for its teaching platform, and from Coursera, which is using generative AI to translate thousands of its English-language courses into seven other languages and to power a new tutoring tool.)
Because ChatGPT has made AI so accessible, Swartsel said, growing employer demand for people skilled in using the tool is inevitable. That skill “will become a societal priority,” she said.
The center will also be focused on “making sure the explosion of generative AI does not deepen the digital divide,” Swartsel said. I’m glad that’s a priority but frankly I’m not optimistic. For one, the tool is likely to displace many workers. And while it may empower some of them, and others, I haven’t forgotten that in the United States, some 48 million people with few or no digital skills are already struggling to land jobs in today’s economy, according to the Skills Coalition. So even though ChatGPT is accessible enough for non-techies like me to play with (see below), it will take a big effort to ensure that millions aren’t left behind in its wake.
In partnership with the nonprofit Burning Glass Institute, JFF also previewed an early version of its plans for Education Quality Outcomes Standards to gauge the value of academic and training programs, which I’ve been following. To test the model, the institute looked at a sample of several actual credential-providing programs, gathered real data on the salary and career progressions of people who enrolled in them as well as market demand for that education, and then weighted the results to assign each program a letter grade.
Matt Sigelman, BGI’s president, said the preview was just a starting point but stressed the importance of using multiple sets of third-party data for the evaluation. “It can’t be something that depends on providers,” he said, and it needs to focus on the “real decisions” learners are making when choosing whether to enroll. “We can’t have an effective skill-based ecosystem,” said Sigelman, “without effective signals of those skills.”
It’s hard to know how much of this first cut will survive. Some of the reservations that I heard included concerns that a one-size-fits-all evaluation model might not reflect the purpose of particular credentials. Some credentials are designed to create pathways into careers and don’t necessarily generate salary bumps, said Roy Swift, executive director of Workcred, which promotes the advancement of industry-certified credentials. “Maybe it was never the purpose of that credential to do five things.”
Mildred Coyne, Broward College’s senior vice-president for work-force education and innovation, told me that she appreciated that the evaluation incorporated social-mobility measures like whether the credential advanced learners into jobs offering health insurance and other benefits, but that she remained wary of the reliability of the salary data now being used. Overall though, Coyne is eager for a tool that will help learners and others evaluate her college’s programs. “I desperately need that,” she said — including for funders whose grants help support some Broward programs.
The model previewed during Horizons “is not a done deal,” as Ellie Bertani, the president and chief executive of GitLab Foundation, noted. That foundation’s early funding has helped move the project from the theoretical to this test phase, so when I heard her also publicly describe the project as a way to “help others improve over time” and be “a tool to float all boats,” I did wonder if the project will face pressure to morph into something, uh, less judgy and more accreditor-like. So I asked her. “That’s not the intent,” Bertani told me. It’s supposed to be evaluative, she said. It will be interesting to see what the next version looks like, and to see whether the developers can thread the needle to produce an evaluation that reflects the diversity of credentials while also holding them to objective standards.
With so much focus over the past couple of years on enrollment declines, it’s easy to forget how much community colleges — with the right direction and intention — can also drive economic opportunity in their region. A few sessions at JFF were good remedies for that. One featured Marcia Ballinger, president of Lorain County Community College, where a mechatronics lab built 10 years ago is now serving as a magnet for partnerships with the semiconductor industry, and Lee Lambert, the chancellor of Pima Community College, where the college has redesigned its operating model so that the whole institution is better suited to the lives of older working learners.
The colleges are among five featured in a just-published book, America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges Can Drive Shared Prosperity, that describes the varying and common strategies the institutions have used to advance their regions. One of the common keys to success: the way these colleges leaders have made themselves ubiquitous presences among local economic-development groups, on work-force boards, and with community groups. “They are at the table,” Rachel Lipson, one of the editors of the book, said at the session.
I began reading it on the flight home from NOLA, and was also struck by Lipson’s reminder in the concluding chapter: In the cases highlighted, she writes, community colleges “do not face the same elitist stigma or out–of-touch stereotypes attached to prestigious institutions. Indeed they may be the only institutions that can restore trust in higher education for large swaths of the U.S. population.”
A final thought on AI: After returning from Horizons, I finally decided to begin experimenting with the ChatGPT app I had downloaded on my phone. I asked it to describe “ed tech” as I might. This is what it came up with. A bit more boosterish than I might like, but not bad, right?
The demise of the Interstate Passport
This month the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education announced that it was folding its 10-year-old Interstate Passport. I’m sorry to see the end of the vehicle to promote transfer, yet not all that surprised by the news. When I wrote about the project 15 months ago, its backers were full of ambitious plans, but also mindful that the project had yet to reach its potential.
“We had a pretty good sense of what the hurdles were going to be,” Olivia Tufo, member-services coordinator for Wiche, told me, “And they were hurdles.”
The biggest ambition for the 72 institutions from 21 states then in the project was to expand, by as many as 60 additional participants by the end of 2022. Ultimately, it added only three as of June, Tufo told me.
It’s probably no coincidence that the project’s leaders decided to fold it once a bunch of federal and foundation grant money began to run out. That money had been covering colleges’ passport-membership fees. Although I suspect that money wasn’t the only factor. The project required a lot of staff and faculty time and attention.
Considering that the project was built around faculty-driven academic principles — with participants agreeing to accept up to a year’s worth general-education credits based on agreed-upon ideas of learning outcomes, not just credit hours — it’s still disappointing to see the transfer passport go under. About 90,000 students have used it, according to the latest annual report. Wiche said it will produce materials documenting lessons on transfer that were learned from the project and maintain them on its website.
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