Four years after the debut of ChatGPT, the first class to have the powerful tool of generative AI throughout their entire college career will soon graduate. At the current pace of change, it’s worth asking: Are these students among the last to work with an all-human faculty?
In an age when artificial intelligence can drive cars, perform surgery, and generate video clones, it’s a provocative, no-longer-theoretical question to wonder how much of the college experience can be automated.
While AI can’t fully replace humans in higher education, the idea of expanding access to personalized instruction, including remedial help and student support, is driving experimentation across the world.
The allure of AI facilitating learning tells us some important takeaways about how higher education needs to address the needs of modern society: Students want options, including faster, cheaper, more flexible ways to learn tangible skills that clearly help them advance in the workforce.
In today’s information era, colleges and universities are not the only keepers of knowledge. The nature of work is rapidly changing, and higher education is under intense pressure to meet a higher bar. Beyond worrying whether students will over-rely on AI to write papers and complete coursework, there’s a bigger question at heart about how technology can lead to innovative approaches to higher education—and what robots can’t replace.
How higher ed is integrating AI
As AI capabilities are getting stronger every day, it’s easy to imagine how an “AI-first” university will no doubt soon come together. Bots can handle long conversations, create video avatars and voice synthesis, provide adaptive tutoring, and track learning outcomes through advanced analytics.
We’re already seeing this take shape at colleges and universities across the country:
- Morgan State Universitybuilt its own secure AI system for tasks like grading assignments and advising, aiming to free up time and let the university “learn from itself,” as the chief information officer said in a recent news article.
- Texas A&M University and four other institutions are using virtual reality simulations for teacher preparation, to help students practice teaching to AI-generated student avatars.
- Georgia Tech’s long-running “Jill Watson” virtual teaching assistant can handle Q&A in real classes, drawing from course materials to enhance teaching.
- The Hybrid Advising Co-op explored using AI to improve advising with a focus on Black and Latino student outcomes.
As with most advanced AI tasks, early adopters in higher education are already seeing that you can’t just leave it to the bots. As researchers at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington have found, GPT-class models can help build entire online courses but need heavy prompting from experts and updates to ensure quality.
AI is a tool, not a human—which can be easy to forget in the AI era of “human-like” language. In today’s age, when we can expect answers at our fingertips, the immediacy of support for students whenever they need it is an attractive feature of AI. AI learning assistants could be most prevalent in online programs, large introductory courses, and workforce-ready credential programs.
But humans will remain essential to the learning process. The faculty role is changing, certainly, as we move on from the traditional idea of teaching as pure information transfer and recognize its critical role in human formation: modeling judgment, inspiring creativity, and building trust.
Where humans are stronger than machines
It’s long been the case that the true value of instructors is not in lecturing. The best professors bring material to life, draw connections, and share from their lived experiences to show the purpose of learning. Often, they find ways for students to apply their learning in real-life settings. They invest in students’ success and mentor rising generations.
Teaching and learning, after all, are creative processes.
While AI can flag a student who is struggling, it’s a trusted professor or advisor who can best support them and help navigate challenges.
Classic classroom dynamics, such as discussion, debate, peer critique, social learning, will remain the domain of people. AI can facilitate those, but the interpersonal skills we prize in higher education emerge from human-to-human interaction.
The key is deploying this in targeted ways. Think of gateway courses with large class sizes, such as introductory math, biology, economics, and coding. Here, AI tutors can give instant, 24/7 feedback, cutting costs and improving student success. In fields with faculty shortages such as nursing and computer science, AI can cover foundational concepts and free up expert faculty for supervision and assessment.
The challenge, as Brookings researchers Rebecca Winthrop and Mary Burns laid out in a recent piece about how “AI’s future for students is in our hands,” will be to ensure that technology enhances learning, without cheapening or even harming it.
What we can learn from the idea of an ‘AI University’
If we want an “AI University” that is functional and fair, intention must rule, not inevitability. We need human-designed courses with clear learning goals, faculty oversight of assessment and academic integrity, and continuous evaluation. We must track outcomes such as learning improvements, fewer students who fail or withdraw, lower cost per successful credit, and equitable results across race, income, age, and disability.
There’s a danger of false economies: Over-automating without valid assessments and faculty oversight could lower quality and create programs that serve students inequitably.
We’ll also need governance: policies that clarify where automation ends and human judgment begins; labor market alignment to connect learning with real wage value, internships, and apprenticeships; and careful considerations of cost and what students receive in return.
And we can’t lose sight of the true goal of education: not just to make more money, but to put our human abilities to work building a stronger society for everyone.
If diligent planning stays front and center, AI can help expand and extend human teaching rather than replace it. It can deliver more timely feedback and help more students find their way into high-demand fields. Just as important: It can do this without sacrificing the community, mentorship, and meaning that have always made higher education worthwhile.
This article was originally published in Forbes.