Wherever I go, everyone asks a version of this question: Do people still need to go to college when artificial intelligence seems able to do more and more of our jobs?
I get why this keeps coming up. The scary-fast advancement of AI has whipped up a frenzy of uncertainty over how AI will replace and reshape jobs, particularly white-collar ones, at a time when college has become increasingly unaffordable and slow to change.
Across the board, Americans worry about AI leading to job losses, but negativity has grown the fastest among young adults—who also use AI at the highest rates and used to be the most excited about AI, according to the Pew Research Center.
Virtually no job or career is “AI-proof.” We all know it is creeping into all parts of life and work in some way or another. This means that while increasingly sophisticated tech will enable greater productivity and more possibilities, we need education that will help us adapt.
In other words, we all need education and workforce training that supercharges our human skills. Otherwise, we risk being on uneven footing to face monumental change.
Consider that over the past decade, the nation’s reading and math skills have fallen, according to the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills, widening the divide between the highest-performing and lowest-performing American adults. Nearly one-third of American adults surveyed showed low proficiency in adaptive problem-solving.
If deployed thoughtfully, AI has the potential to help close those gaps. What we can’t afford is to allow the tech revolution to concentrate skills, wealth, and power among few while others are further forced to the margins of society.
How will colleges need to shift to prepare people for AI-integrated jobs?
Higher education has spent decades expanding access and providing a stepping stone to better jobs and a better life. It’s never been a guarantee, but it has given most graduates an enormous advantage. Families have long aspired to send their children to college to give them greater opportunities in life—as my working-class parents wanted for me and my brothers.
But the world is only growing more complex. And college has gotten more expensive.
For college to be worth it in the future of AI, it must not render itself obsolete. For starters, it can’t be so expensive that the value proposition swings wildly out of reach. Equally important, every education and training program needs to pivot quickly to prepare people for rapidly evolving jobs integrating new technologies.
Antonio Delgado, founder of the National Applied AI Consortium, posits that the defining divide will be between workers who are trained to work with AI and those who are not. That’s why the consortium is supporting community colleges to fill in the “missing middle” of the workforce—workers who are applying the use of AI in everyday jobs, as Delgado wrote in an op-ed for The Hechinger Report. Houston City College, for example, is focusing on what students need to use AI and robotics in the city’s energy and manufacturing industries.
What advantages will college graduates have in an AI economy?
All degrees, certificates, certifications, and credentials should show two things: that students have learned both specific skills, such as chemistry, graphic design, or plumbing, and that they have honed generalizable skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and interpersonal communication.
These durable skills provide more than a short-term payoff—more than knowledge from a textbook. Education develops a foundation to help people succeed throughout their careers and lives, building our abilities to work together, solve problems, make ethical choices, advance society, and make the world a better place.
Some colleges and universities are rethinking how to integrate these human skills within learning. At the University of North Carolina Asheville, for example, a new pathway focuses on foundational learning in low-tech environments, complementing tech-integrated teaching practices and an emphasis on digital literacy.
While staying true to its roots as a liberal arts university, UNC Asheville is also partnering with the Mark Cuban Foundation to host an artificial intelligence bootcamp for high school students to dive into the technology embedded in fields such as health care, arts, and business.
How can people work alongside AI?
It takes many kinds of people in many kinds of roles to make society work. Tech may continue to transform jobs, taking on more tasks like crunching numbers and writing code, but our world will still need human talent: teachers, problem-solvers, inventors, communicators, creatives, team players.
Too often, questions around AI are framed as people versus machines, positioning one or the other as the victor. Think of it instead as a future of people with machines—where people wield technology that enables more than we’ve been able to do before.
For people to flourish through whatever the AI future holds, we must lean into our human skills and better show how human value stands out amid automation. Higher education plays an essential role in exactly that, by cultivating talent that will thrive amid the ever-changing predictions about which jobs will be replaced and which will survive.
As the nature of work continues to evolve, developing talent is increasingly critical for the nation’s success. Talent gives knowledge meaning, and by definition, it is impossible for machines to replicate. In fast-advancing times, the opportunity to reach your full human potential is well worth investing in.
This article was originally published in Forbes.