The Edge

I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, I explore what I learned at a recent conference of art schools, and I share a recommendation for a podcast about big forces shaping our world.

From Art School to Career

My Hacking College co-author Ned Laff and I were in Providence, R.I., last week to speak at the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design’s conference on student success. It drew a crowd of advisers, career counselors, mental-health counselors, and various administrators focused on how students get through college to something somewhat secure on the other side. (These are art students, after all, and many go into their fields knowing what kind of nontraditional career path might be ahead of them.)

Art schools are in many ways professional schools: While some students want to become the next Kahlo or Monet, many students are preparing to work more commercially — in graphic design, illustration, animation, or another role. Artificial intelligence’s ability to create illustrations from simple prompts certainly threatens some of the entry-level roles that art students might try to land after college — but a number of artists already incorporate AI into their art. The technology’s impact on students isn’t clear, as Deborah Obalil, president and executive director of AICAD, pointed out in this column in April.

From casual conversations with attendees, it seemed that art schools grapple with many of the same challenges facing traditional colleges, but are in some ways further behind. Some art colleges had only recently established career-counseling centers and were just starting to figure out the college-to-career puzzle. In our talk, we emphasized that institutions should create an “asset map,” which describes the opportunities students can tap into on their campus and beyond. That work has to focus on thinking broadly about possible hidden jobs in art and design. And since art students are often called to art by some social issue or personal conviction — related to the environment, one’s sexuality, or a political position, for example — advising strategies could use those convictions to help students brainstorm under-noticed organizations where they can hunt for opportunities and experience.

Some attendees noted that change happens slowly at their institutions — that progress was locked up in the tug of war over curriculum between administrators and faculty members. One of the questions from Obalil: “Perhaps because BFAs are seen as professional degrees, we often hear of resistance from faculty of the need to even be concerned with career outcomes or how to make a life as an artist/designer, that their only responsibility is to developing the disciplinary skills of the student. What would you say in response to such a statement?”

My take: Being a tenured professor at any institution is a tremendous privilege — and in the case of art schools, that position is often a life raft that provides a steady salary and health benefits, allowing those professors to create art with some security in their lives. Part of the job should be to help students find that security for themselves on the other side of graduation.

‘Conversation is everything’

On the way to Providence, Ned and I listened to episodes of Nate Hagens’s podcast, The Great Simplification. Hagens, who once worked in finance on Wall Street, focuses on the converging crises in the environment, economy, and energy supply. The strength of his podcast rests on his guests, many of whom are scientists, academics, and activists with international reputations.

Consider, for example, this episode with Peter Turchin, an emeritus professor from the University of Connecticut who builds mathematical models to analyze and predict the resilience of societies. Or check out this episode with Andrew Millison, an instructor in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University who has turned his property in Corvallis into a living laboratory for permaculture, a form of agriculture and land management that incorporates natural cycles and processes. Hagens has also featured the technologist Audrey Tang, the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, the environmentalist Bill McKibben, and many others.

We listened to a new episode with Zachary Stein, a Harvard-trained education philosopher and futurist focused on the connection between education and civilization. Stein appeared in a past installment of The Edge, and we quote him in the last chapter of Hacking College. We discovered him, in fact, through his appearance on Hagens’s podcast last year, and he has also done a number of lectures and interviews with other outlets.

Hagens’s most recent interview with Stein focuses on AI. At one point, Hagens asks about the relationships humans are developing with bots and how it differs from real conversation.

“Conversation is everything,” Stein replies, adding that “human-to-human conversation is the lifeblood of socialization and education and growth of ideas.” Conversation allows us to take our interior ideas and emotions outside of us, to merge with the thoughts and feelings of others, and in the process create something bigger.

Much of the commercialized digital world is about capturing our attention. With the rise of chatbots that can interact with humans in ways that can feel like a relationship, the corporations behind AI have gone beyond the attention-grabbing methods of Instagram and TikTok “to capture the core of what we’re actually attending to, which is each other,” Stein says.

Stein is not a Luddite. But he would rather see technology used to “scaffold human-to-human interaction,” instead of isolating people at screens with AI tutors. One of the ideas described in his book, Education in a Time Between Worlds, would use technology to set up a kind of city-scale directory or clearinghouse that would allow a student to find an expert instructor of a needed skill or topic in a local market and help arrange instruction. You play piano and would be willing to teach it, for example, and the system helps connect you with an eager student who wants to learn piano.

“We could take apart the large educational systems as they exist and put together these distributed educational hubs, these distributed educational networks where the back end is artificial intelligence,” Stein explains on the podcast. “If we don’t do this, we’re going to end up creating with digital technology tutors and screen-based educational modalities that isolate students from each other and from teachers and from the world — rather than using the digital to actually free us from modern education, which is a huge problem, and do what Ivan Illich suggested, which was this process of deschooling the society back into a distributed responsibility for education.”

Hagens asks Stein how colleges and universities are thinking about the risks and benefits of AI. Stein acknowledges that the world of higher ed is vast, diverse, and difficult to generalize, but that he’s perceived some degree of uncritical acceptance.

“What I’ve seen is primarily an acquiescence to the presence of the technology and a sense that the future job market will require skills with AI, and so therefore AI must be embraced somehow in the college curriculum,” he says.

It may be true that college graduates will need some familiarity with AI to get a job, he says, but at the same time, no one is quite sure how AI will upend the job market in the next few years. Which raises a “real crisis of meaning” for higher ed: “What does higher education even mean in the context of mass AI-enabled automatization of white-collar jobs?” Stein asks. “I think one of the reasons that [colleges are] not sweating the cheating is because they’re like, Well, will kids have to write in the future? Will kids actually really have to think, or can they just all be cyborgs that just always have the co-presence of the technology? And I think that is, in a sense, what the default direction would be for a lot of technologists.”

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Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at scott.carlson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, register here. Follow me on LinkedIn.

Check out my book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does.