AI Goes to College

?? Making sense of AI when it's everywhere and does anyone get all those private scholarships for college??These are excerpts from my newsletter, Next. To get the full version in the future, sign up here .

?? Financial Fitness Test: As the college search season moves into the dog days of the fall, be sure to check out the latest edition of the Buyers and Sellers list .

• This was a framework I developed for my last book, Who Gets In and Why , about how we need to think about financial fit of a college early on in the search in order to maximize merit aid. We updated the list earlier this year.

EVENT

?? Admissions webinar TONIGHT. I’ll be hosting a free webcast for Huntington Learning Center tonight, Thursday, September 26 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on the role grades, high school courses, and test scores play in admissions and as well as looking at the latest trends.

• I’ll be joined by Matt McLendon, executive director of enrollment management at the University of Alabama for part of it.

?? Register for free here .

THE LEAD

In May 1995, a few weeks after graduating from Ithaca College and followed by a cross-country drive to Phoenix, I started a summer fellowship at the Arizona Republic. I was assigned to the business desk and the first day the editor looked at me and said, “You’re young, you must know something about technology.” Their tech reporter was on leave for the summer. I was now their de-facto tech reporter.

The summer of 1995 was a pivotal moment in the development of the commercial internet. Netscape Navigator, the web browser that first caught the public’s attention, was released the previous fall. As I drove around Phoenix, on every billboard I’d see the letters WWW at the bottom announcing the move to the web. That summer I wrote articles on what those letters even meant, internet cafes, the first airline on the internet (Southwest), and the hype over the introduction of Windows ’95.

In many ways, 1995 for the internet is what 2024 is for artificial intelligence. There was a lot of hype and promise back then, but we also weren't sure what this thing would become.

In one article I wrote that summer, Peter Krivkovich, who is now chairman and CEO of Cramer-Krasselt, a large advertising and PR agency, told me this:?

“The internet will stay around, but whether it will become a significant commercial force is questionable. I don't picture the web replacing television or newspaper advertising in the next decade.”

Of course, reading that quote now probably makes you laugh. But Krivkovich wasn’t that wrong—by 2005, the end of the decade he was talking about, Facebook was just arriving on the scene and Google was still in its infancy in developing its ad business.

Much like in the early 1990s when higher ed was trying to figure out this thing called the internet, colleges and universities are now trying to figure out AI. Much of the discussion thus far has been on its impact in the classroom—and mostly that’s been negative, focused on cheating.?

To start the season on the Future U. podcast , we wanted to zoom out a bit and a get a better sense of not only how we should be thinking about AI and higher ed broadly, but just like I tried to do in 1995, where perhaps is it being tried out and applied.

The result is a two-part series on Future U. that dropped this past week (thanks to CollegeVine for their support of this idea and be sure to listen to my conversation in the episodes with their AI recruiter). The news about AI is dizzying right now, so we asked Cal Newport to join us in the first episode to slow us down and give a big-picture view.

Newport is a bestselling author, New Yorker writer, and Georgetown computer science professor. He laid out what my co-host Michael Horn termed a “third way for AI” in higher ed. He was neither a promoter nor a skeptic.

Three big takeaways from our conversation with Newport:

1. AI is still missing the “product market fit.” ChatBots are helpful. ChatGPT is a nice to have. But comparing this moment to the development of the internet, we haven’t had our email moment, our Facebook moment, or even our big blow-up yet, like the Time Warner/AOL merger that went up in flames. “I just think it's going to take a few more years than we thought to start to get the real disruption,” Newport told us. 2. The Turing test. That will be a sign of the true disruption. AI can do a lot, but the real Turing test – its ability to exhibit intelligent behavior – is when it can empty our in-box. Oh, yes, I can’t wait for that day! 3. More efficient or better? Newport made a fascinating distinction between the impact the internet had on writing vs. computer coding (see clip above). The internet made for better coders, but not better writers (maybe more efficient researchers). There’s much discussion now about AI making us better writers, but will it?

?? One last thought from this episode: The week we interviewed Newport, there was a thread on a local parent messaging board I sometimes follow with this title: “AI and What the Heck to Major In, If At All."?

Newport told us he thinks universities see AI as the shiny new object to attract students. The truth is a “prompt engineering” major will probably be outdated in a few years.

“The university shouldn’t get out ahead and say, ‘We could imagine it would be useful in the future, in this type of job, to be good at ChatGPT, so we're going to teach you how to do it,’” Newport told us. Colleges need “to actually see how this tool is being used in this job,” he added. Once they do, then they need to “move fast…and actually teach about it.”

?? Listen to this episode and subscribe to Future U.

?? This season you can also watch some episodes and clips on our YouTube channel .?

Higher Ed's Early Bets on AI

With Newport’s 50,000-foot view as context, how is AI being used on campuses already?

For part two of our series, we took a deeper dive with Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Arizona State University, and Ashley Budd, a senior marketing director at Cornell University and co-author of a new book, Mailed It! A Guide to Crafting Emails That Build Relationships and Get Results .

Three takeaways from these conversations:

1. Higher ed needs parameters. Arizona State was one of the first universities to develop a partnership with OpenAI because as Gonick told us, everyone on campuses everywhere were using ChatGPT without realizing it was “basically a public bulletin board.” Now faculty, staff, and students at ASU can play in “sandboxes” developed with OpenAI so their work, for now, is walled off from the rest of the world. “It's still the extremely early days,” Gonick said. “It's still just the bottom of the first inning, and so we have to be very careful where we place bets.” (see full clip above)
2. One early bet: research. For all the talk about classroom and administrative uses, Gonick said that the research function of the university is where AI is having the biggest impact in the near term. “Both in its application for discovery and the ways in which researchers…are submitting grants and applications already,” Gonick said. “No matter where you are, in a liberal arts college or at a research-intensive institution, the moment is not too soon to be really leveraging the technology for research.”

?—Gonick also told us about some of the AI projects in development at ASU, which you can read about more here and here .

1. Better communication. So much of the college admissions process, and then navigating college, is a mystery to students, especially first-generation students who don’t have a lot of experience in the language of higher ed. “GPTs are really good at simplifying language,” Budd told us. Emails and websites should be written at a “7th to 9th grade reading level, and this is really hard for academia.” Now AI can be used to simplify language. “Either we learn to communicate better, or students will use AI assistants to translate our complexities for them,” Budd said.

?? Take a deeper dive yourself by listening or watching to this episode.

SUPPLEMENTS

?? What a $140 million Bet on Higher Ed Bought? “Billionaire?Michael Bloomberg?has spent more than $140 million over the past decade to get tens of thousands more talented, lower-income students into top-flight colleges. Those big ambitions have so far fallen short,” write Melissa Korn and Matt Barnum. “While college presidents signed on to a joint effort to increase socioeconomic diversity on their campuses, they didn’t initially commit to making specific changes to their admissions or financial-aid practices.” (Wall Street Journal , gift link)

?? The Hunt for Money. “Every year, high school students and their parents are told that hunting for private scholarships should be part of the process of applying to college,” James Murphy writes. “I wanted to find out how often the hunt strikes gold (tl;dr not too often).” (Business Insider , sub required | Read Murphy’s free X thread on his findings here )

?? Where the Buck Stops. “The U.S. Department of Education failed to oversee vendors, follow its own procedures, and properly communicate with students and colleges when launching the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid form. That’s according to a pair of scathing reports issued this week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The GAO found, for example, that 4 million calls to the Education Department’s call centers — 74% of the total received — went unanswered from January to May, the first five months of the FAFSA application cycle." (Higher Ed Dive )

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff??

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