In October 2024 U21 will bring together leaders in International Education to discuss the role of world-leading universities in ‘Preparing Students for a Global Future’. Ahead of the event, Professor Simon Chesterman (National University of Singapore), the event’s keynote speaker, shares a preview of his view that AI forces us to rethink everything about universities, including delivering global competencies, opportunities and learning across the campus.
When ChatGPT was released into the wild, less than two years ago, suggesting that the promise of human-level artificial intelligence might soon be within reach, Academic Twitter was abuzz with discussion about how this transformative technology that approximated human reasoning and communication might… be used by our students to cheat in their papers.
There was handwringing and head scratching; many cycled through the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression — before finally starting to find acceptance.
Two years on, it’s clear that there is a lot of hype about AI, with some suggesting the bubble might soon burst. Yet it seems equally clear that our relationship to information is transformed forever. I’m looking forward to discussing with colleagues from around the world the extent to which that transformation will alter not merely what universities do, but what they are.
Understandably, most of the focus has been on short-term questions like updating plagiarism policies, coming up with guidelines for faculty on the use (or not) of generative AI in classrooms, and so on.
I’d like to take a slightly longer horizon — ten or twenty years, say — and consider how the shifting forces at work might alter the role of universities, both for our students and for society.
It requires some soul searching about what we do and why.
So, what is the purpose of a university? Is it to provide opportunities for young adults to explore and find themselves? Or is it to offer a pipeline of workers, especially knowledge workers, to service the economy?
Put bluntly, are students our customers? Or are they our products?
Most universities embody aspects of both, but more vocational institutions lean more towards the latter; more “elite” institutions toward the former. All, however, are judged on the employability of their graduates.
The impact of AI will exacerbate the contradictions in what universities do, between our vocational and aspirational functions, by commoditising one of our key outputs: knowledge workers.
This was the term introduced in 1959 by management consultant Peter Drucker for non-routine problem solvers. People who “think for a living” earn through their ability to analyse and write — something that ChatGPT can replicate in almost no time and at almost no cost.
Much of undergraduate education, as it presently exists, prepares students for jobs in which they move words or numbers around on a screen. If those jobs no longer exist, what will students — and employers — want from a university education?
If disinterested learning fell into decline with the rise of the university as “factory”, might it return when the throughline between graduation and employability becomes less certain?
Against that, to the extent that state funding depends on the factory model, would a return to the idea of the university as a place at which one “improves oneself” mean a reduction in financial support?
And, from the perspective of our students, in a future awash with AI, might the three- or four-year bachelor's degree start to look less attractive than certificate programs offered by the technology companies employing large swathes of our “graduates” — assuming anyone is getting employed at all?
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- Prof Simon Chesterman