Artificial Intelligence

While the majority of college graduates say their education has readied them for success in the job market, more than half said their programs didn’t prepare them for the use of generative AI, according to a Cengage Group report released in July.

And employers may be confirming these suspicions, the report noted. Nearly 2 in 3 employers said candidates “should have foundational knowledge” of generative AI tools. More than half of employers said they were more likely to interview and hire applicants with AI experience.

However, research showed improvement in colleges and universities focusing on “employable skills,” Cengage Group said; nearly 3 in 5 recent graduates of 2- or 4-year degree programs said that they believed their program equipped them with needed skills for their first job, up from 41% in 2023. Two-thirds also said that their education “has positioned them for success in the current job market.”

“The increased satisfaction among graduates and their improved perception of education’s value are encouraging signs that educators are listening and responding to the needs of both students and employers,” Michael Hansen, CEO of Cengage Group, said in a statement.

A moving tech skill goal post

But the survey also signals that shifts in expectations may be coming yet again for higher education and employee development programs. Nearly 3 in 4 graduates said they needed more training on using newer technologies in their new roles, and more than half said they were second-guessing their career choices.

“The rapid adoption of GenAI in the workplace presents both a challenge and an opportunity,” Hansen said. “The data supports the growing need for institutions to integrate GenAI training and professional skills development. In doing so, institutions will not only enhance their value proposition but also play a critical role in shaping a workforce ready for the challenges of tomorrow.”

While Cengage’s report centers higher education’s approach, employers, too, may need to focus on AI upskilling to maintain talent demands. 

Two-thirds of companies surveyed by The Adecco Group said they plan to hire externally; this approach to talent may lead to pay for AI-related roles skyrocketing as well as disruption for current employees, Adecco said. These workers are likely reskillable and capable of being redeployed in high-demand positions, researchers added.

Employers also need to identify which skills their organizations need in the first place to better craft ways to develop current employees, an Info-Tech Research Group survey results from June said.

Demand for liberal arts education has declined in recent years as students increasingly eye college programs that directly prepare them for jobs. But according to many tech and college experts, as businesses launch advanced AI tools or integrate such technology into their operations, liberal arts majors will become more coveted. 

That’s because employers will need people to think through the ethical stakes and unintended consequences of new technologies. Companies may also need people to help improve the written commands given to chatbots or resolve challenging customer service disputes that AI can’t handle. 

College leaders therefore need to take action as AI changes the workforce, scholars say. 

While robotics in the 1990s replaced many blue-collar jobs, AI will replace jobs that require college degrees, or even graduate degrees like attorney positions, predicted Ray Schroeder, a senior fellow at UPCEA. Schroeder estimates big changes will occur over the next three to four years.

“This is really a significant factor in employment and of course, those of us in higher education are monitoring it closely because we want to be able to give our students the skills that will enable them to thrive in this emerging workplace environment,” Schroeder said. 

The need for the liberal arts

ChatGPT and the large language models are predictive based on existing knowledge, said Cecilia Gaposchkin, a history professor at Dartmouth College. 

One could train a computer about the ideas of ethics, human morality and a basic sense of human dignity, but that kind of reasoning is instinctual for humans, Gaposchkin said. And the tools and capacity of AI will be subordinate to the decisions people make and their priorities, Gaposchkin said. 

While AI makes past knowledge available at one’s fingertips, liberal arts education trains students to creatively think, problem-solve, synthesize information, manage ambiguity, ask questions and come up with new ideas, Gaposchkin said. 

“To outsource the higher-level orders to an object that doesn’t have that ethical grounding trained by human reason is a dead end,” she said. 

There are many settings where people would like to use AI but the cost of failure is high, said Rebecca Willett, professor of statistics and computer science at the University of Chicago. That includes certain AI tools for healthcare, real estate, finance and criminal justice, she said. 

A 2023 study from Stanford University’s medical school, for instance, showed that AI tools regenerated debunked medical ideas that were racist and could lead to worsened health disparities for Black patients.  

And in 2016, ProPublica found software used by courts disproportionately labeled Black defendants as being at a higher risk of commiting a crime compared to White defendants. ProPublica, in its analysis, compared groups of defendants who did not commit a crime — throwing into question the fairness of a tool used to help with sentencing and parole decisions. 

People with strong liberal arts backgrounds will contribute with “not only the technical development of these tools, but also to thinking about, how should we approach them? And what are the trade-offs associated with the choices we might make?” Willett said. 

Liberal arts versus technical degrees

Students who earn degrees in liberal arts and humanities may actually have an advantage in the job market over those who specialize in STEM-based programming, argued Robert Gibson, director of instructional design at Wichita State University Campus of Applied Sciences and Technology.

That’s because liberal arts students could provide a more humanistic perspective on the technology, with an eye to ethics, privacy and bias, for example, Gibson added. 

“They don’t sort of wildly go off and promote the use of this technology without sort of stepping back and saying, ‘Maybe this is how we can look at this a little bit differently,’” Gibson said. 

Noting that employers are now posting job ads seeking workers with AI skills, Gibson also said AI is being used in marketing campaigns or customer relationship management systems by small businesses nationwide. That includes businesses ranging from art stores and business retailers to production companies that want workers who can wear two hats, he said. 

They want workers who are not only adept with using those technologies, but also who have customer service experience, or other human experiences required for their businesses, said Gibson.

Liberal arts students could also be instrumental in developing and operating AI chatbots. “Prompt engineering,” which programs chatbots to converse with users, is an English writing capability and requires adaptability and continuous learning, Schroeder said. 

Now AI can actually write code faster, and in many cases, better than humans can, Schroeder said. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected the number of computer programming positions to decline 11% between 2022 and 2032. Companies will instead need a supervisor to troubleshoot what AI generates, Schroeder said.

“If you are in computer science and if you are coding, your job may be in jeopardy,” Schroeder said. 

Schroeder said he’s also seen an uptick in companies seeking applicants with interpersonal skills such as critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, communication, collaboration and ethics. 

“We see those more and more often in position descriptions,” Schroeder said. “While they don’t specifically say liberal arts degrees — because it’s possible to obtain some of these skills outside of college — those are skills that we emphasize in the liberal arts.”

Willett said she does not believe liberal arts will replace all technical workers. Rather the two need to work hand in hand, she said. 

But between two candidates with backgrounds in data science, many employers will find the one with a liberal arts education “extremely attractive" as that allows the employees to contextualize the technical work they might be doing, Willett said. 

What should colleges do?

Roanoke College is among the liberal arts institutions having discussions about where AI fits into its curriculum, said Brian Reed, vice president for student success and the Roanoke Experience. 

Reed said he would like to see the small Virginia-based college create a place in its general education requirements for students to work with AI in intentional ways.

The emergence of AI will provide “a real renaissance for the humanities,” Reed said. But higher ed institutions, including liberal arts colleges, are often not great at explaining how critical thinking skills that students learn can be applied to technology like AI, Reed said. 

“Institutions have to be much more clear about the skills and competencies that the students gleaned from liberal arts in really straightforward language,” he said. 

A lot of higher education institutions are already starting to aggressively introduce programs or entirely new colleges around artificial intelligence, said Gibson. Institutions that are larger “thought leaders,” in particular, are poised financially for leadership to build those conversations around AI across disciplines, he said. 

Earlier this year, Arizona State University announced it has been incorporating generative AI into many of its English Department courses, allowing students to use the technology to, among other things, brainstorm topics, assist with research, and help edit their papers. 

Some smaller colleges are starting to have those conversations, although not as fast as Gibson said he would like. 

“This is still on the periphery,” he said. It’s harder for small colleges to implement wholesale change, like cross-disciplinary courses on AI, due to bureaucratic procedures that can slow down that process.

 

To prepare, Gibson said institutions need to start building into their liberal arts curriculum some conversations around the moral and societal implications of AI.

Reed said higher ed leaders would be doing a disservice to their liberal arts students if they are not having conversations about how they can help them embrace AI technology — so they become comfortable with it and know how to harness it in responsible and ethical ways. 

Liberal arts students will need to gain competency on the technical side, said Reed. But the emergence of AI will also require people who are “really thoughtful about: How [do] we prompt? Should we prompt in certain instances? How do we sort of filter bias? How do we see through phantom responses?”

Employers are significantly more likely to offer job interviews and higher salaries to job candidates with experience related to artificial intelligence, according to a new study published in the journal Oxford Economics Papers.

Specifically, college graduates with “AI capital” or business-related AI studies listed on their resumes and cover letters were far more likely to receive an interview invitation and higher wage offers.

“In the UK, AI is causing dramatic shifts in the workforce, and firms need to respond to these demands by upgrading their workforces through enhancing their AI skills levels,” study author Nick Drydakis, a professor of economics at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, said in a statement.

As part of an experiment, researchers submitted fake applications to job vacancies, which included CVs from 21-year-old British college graduates with a degree. Some of the applicants had studied an “AI in business” module, which was mentioned in their cover letter for the job.

Researchers submitted a matched pair of male applicants — one with AI capital and one without — to 680 companies, resulting in 1,360 applications from men. In addition, he sent 1,316 similar applications from women to 658 companies.

Overall, men with AI capital received an interview invitation 54% of the time, while men without AI capital were asked to an interview 28% of the time. 

Similarly, women with AI capital received an interview invitation in half of cases, and those without AI capital were invited to an interview in 32% of cases.

At large firms, applicants with AI capital were 36 percentage points more likely to be invited to an interview than in small-to-medium firms.

Beyond that, men with AI capital were shortlisted for job offers with wages that were 12% higher, on average, and women with AI capital were offered interviews for jobs with wages that were 13% higher.

“Larger firms particularly valued AI capital, possibly because they tend to undergo more AI-based structural technological transformations and have greater capacity for innovation,” Drydakis said.

Many companies have an unbalanced “buy versus build” approach to AI and plan to recruit new talent to handle their AI adoption rather than upskill their existing workers, according to a report from The Adecco Group. Instead, leaders should use both approaches and train their workers in order to avoid skills gaps, the report explained.

As more companies look for AI-related talent, employers are struggling to find the right candidates and paying premiums to fill in-demand roles, according to a General Assembly report. Companies are using alternative ways to find and hire talent, with more than half of leaders reducing traditional educational requirements for open positions and hiring additional HR staff to acquire talent.

Among AI-savvy companies, leaders are moving past AI infatuation and making serious changes to their talent strategy, according to a Deloitte report. Most leaders who are now piloting or implementing AI at their organizations said they’re looking to change their talent strategies during the next two years, particularly around work processes and upskilling or reskilling employees.

CHICAGO — While instructors and administrators weigh if and how to incorporate artificial intelligence into coursework, the emerging technologies pose broader existential questions about the role of higher education. 

Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT are poised to disrupt white collar and professional work, according to Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King's College London, who has written a handful of books on tech’s impact on work. That, in turn, could have important ripple effects on colleges, which have long served as the training camps for those workers, he said.

Susskind spoke at a keynote event April 15 during the Higher Learning Commission’s annual conference in Chicago. He pointed to automation’s revolutionary impact on industries like agriculture and manufacturing — which has created huge gains in output with far fewer jobs — and to more recent advances in fields such as medical diagnostics. 

“We tend to think of the work that blue collar workers do as being relatively routine, relatively straightforward, relatively process-based, relatively easy,” Susskind said. “Conversely, we think of what white collar workers do as requiring subtler faculties — things like creativity, judgment, empathy.”

 AI has yet to replicate those functions of the human mind. But it doesn’t necessarily need to when trying to solve some of the problems in professions such as medicine, accounting, architecture and law.

Blindness to this state of things amounts to what Susskind called the AI “fallacy.” That, he said, is “the mistaken assumption that the only way to develop systems that perform tasks at the level of human beings is to somehow copy, replicate or imitate the way the human beings perform that task.” 

AI doctors, lawyers and accountants

With massive increases in computing power and data storage, AI can perform some of the same tasks through the blunt forces of processing and analysis that higher ed has traditionally helped to hone in humans.

“So a whole realm of activity that, until very recently, we thought was out of reach of these technologies turns out not to be,” Susskind said. “And it's often concentrated in the world of white collar work.”

The best response to this potential disruption is training and education, according to Susskind. 

This could mean focusing education on preparing students for tasks that can’t yet be automated or to outperform AI systems. 

“There are large areas of human activity that lie beyond the reach of even the most capable technologies,” Susskind said, pointing to interpersonal communication, judgment and empathy, among other areas. 

Colleges could also focus on training students to build the AI systems that might take over more human activity. 

Higher ed responds to AI advances

Many higher education officials are anticipating AI’s potential to change the sector. HLC devoted multiple panels to the topic at its conference, and the accreditor placed AI — and the “promises, opportunities, and threats” it poses — at the top of its annual higher ed trends list for 2024.

For institutions, AI could be incorporated into teaching, learning and personalized instruction and in all the areas of the enterprise that other organizations are looking at deploying it, HLC noted in its forecast.

At one of the conference panels, officials with Grand Canyon University described how they developed an institution-wide AI strategy tied to its mission. 

The Arizona for-profit started its process with a committee, as so many colleges do. Its early stages focused on brainstorming and surveying stakeholders to see what their needs were. 

That process churned out ideas such as using AI to develop curriculum content and monitor real-time student feedback. The committee went on to build a strategic model for how AI might be used at Grand Canyon, as well as to help develop resources for staff and faculty.

“No matter what decisions we make around AI — and those will change — and no matter if our perspective shifts around AI, the core of who we are as an institution is not going to shift,” Meredith Critchfield, dean of Grand Canyons's college of education, said at the panel. 

When the AI-powered ChatGPT made its big debut, higher education leaders naturally questioned how their students would use high-tech tools like it to write essays and research papers for class.

Just a short time later, we know that’s only a microscopic way that AI is impacting higher education. There’s a bigger question that universities should answer: How can we help students succeed and lead in a complex, AI-powered world after graduation?

I believe the answer is life skills — the kind that outlast and extend beyond inevitable technological changes. We should stop fearing AI and instead teach students to be resilient, self-reliant, compassionate and capable of sound judgment.

We won’t shortchange students on technical skills, but this won’t be enough in the face of AI. AI will eliminate more traditional technical jobs and drive major disruption — some positive, some much less so — in the way we live and work.

Universities must ensure they’re teaching the following skills to students.

Judgment and problem solving

A fast-moving technology with a reputation for making significant errors requires oversight by people with strong critical thinking skills.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing famed theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. I asked him if it is possible for us to someday have artificial wisdom since we already have artificial intelligence. His answer was telling.

“Intelligence is more than just being smart. It’s being able to put the data together and come up with some conclusions,” Kaku said, “and then from the conclusions calculate the consequence of these conclusions. That gets us into wisdom, and artificial intelligence does not go that far. It simply allows you to compute.”

Experience is the best way to help students hone their judgment and problem-solving abilities. 

We need to deliver more experiences sooner for every major and every type of student pursuing a degree. When a student has opportunities to solve a real-world problem, implement a solution to a community issue or create something that betters the lives of others, they flex and build these abilities.

Campuses usually have laboratories and real-world studios where students conduct research, produce creative works, master new technologies, invent new ways of doing things and encounter scenarios that will occur time and time again in the workforce.

We need to give all students access to these resources as well as the freedom they need to be intellectually curious. AI lacks the human element we look for in leaders. Our priority is to develop the entire student, making them well-rounded, global citizens.

Empathy and emotional intelligence

A society going through the type of disruption that AI will bring requires strong leaders who have the ability to put themselves in other people’s shoes and lend a hand to those in need. 

In 2022, our university’s Survey Research Center questioned 500 executives at organizations with 2,500 employees or more to examine what leaders are looking for when they hire candidates, as well as what qualities employees need to get promoted and continue to grow in their careers. 

The survey confirmed what I have always believed: People skills are in high demand and harder to develop than technical skills. If you consider what Kaku said, that’s even more true in an AI-driven world. AI can guide the technical aspects of something, but only humans can frame it with empathy and emotional wisdom.

A majority of executive leaders, 64%, said they would be more hesitant to hire a new college graduate who lacked emotional intelligence than a person who lacked technical skills. That isn’t surprising when you consider that an even larger majority of executives said it is much easier to develop an employee’s technical skills than their personal initiative and coachability.

Another way to look at the importance of having life skills, such as emotional intelligence, is to consider how you feel in your doctor’s office. 

Even though doctors are highly trained, they know that bedside manners are still an important tool. When you visit a doctor, their ability to listen and communicate with you matters as much as their technical skills, if not more. You might not return to a doctor who ignores your concerns and fails to answer your questions when you seek clarity about a medical issue. 

We are failing our students if we teach them that life skills are no longer valued in the AI age.

Resilience and openness to change

We need to equip students with confidence to trust their own ability to embrace positive change and adapt to negative implications. Technology isn’t going to stand still, and neither can our students. 

Disruptive innovation expert Daniel Burrus recently gave a presentation to our faculty about the future. He gave the example of two physicians — one who uses a medical AI platform to help serve patients and another who does not. He noted that most of us would have a lot more confidence in a doctor who is willing to learn and adopt new healthcare tools and technologies in pursuit of better care, as opposed to one stuck in their ways and scoffing about change.

New technologies might mean new routines, new economic realities, the rise of new opportunities and the sunset of others. College graduates need the ability to embrace the positive and ride out the difficulties that come with disruption.

We’ve entered difficult times, and our institutions must be able to strategically adapt in a way that benefits our students for the rest of their lives. Prioritizing their critical life skills is actually our most important mission. 

As workers continue to navigate an evolving workplace environment, they’re looking for skills and learning opportunities in areas such as AI, IT and leadership, according to a Feb. 22 report from Udemy.

While demand has increased for tech categories such as generative AI, there’s also interest in soft skills that AI can’t replicate, such as active listening.

“2023 was a year where trends around generative AI (gen AI), hybrid work, building inclusive global workplaces and macroeconomic uncertainty drove the consistent need to upskill across both technological and leadership capabilities,” Greg Brown, president and CEO at Udemy, said in a statement.

“Workers today need tech skills as much as they need soft, or power skills,” he said. “Our Q4 Workplace Learning Index highlights how professionals are responding to, and meeting these demands, with surging interest in skills like chatbot development, listening, and customer service.”

Based on activity data from nearly 16,000 Udemy Business customers worldwide, demand for generative AI skills continues to surge, though there appears to be an evolution in how workers are using it. With growth in LangChain (109%) and chatbot development skills (56%), workers are shifting from trying to understand what generative AI is to learning how to apply it at work, Udemy said.

By the final quarter of 2023, 3.2 million learners had enrolled in more than 1,700 generative AI courses on the Udemy platform, according to the report. ChatGPT was the fastest-growing skill in 2023, with a surge of 4,419%. In addition, workers learned how to build their own AI models with their own data, rather than only rely on external chatbots.

Beyond that, workers seemed eager to build on their “human” or “soft” skills as they continue to work with colleagues in hybrid settings. Globally, courses in active listening skills grew by 52%, customer service skills increased by 51%, and work-life balance skills increased by 42%.

As interest continues to grow around AI, employers are willing to pay a premium for workers with relevant skills, according to an Amazon Web Services survey. While 73% of employers said hiring workers with AI skills is a priority, most say they’re struggling to find qualified candidates.

Although workers have voiced optimism about generative AI at work, most say they don’t have the skills to “effectively and safely” use the tools, according to a Salesforce report. To do so, they expect employers to provide training to fill the gap.

In fact, learning and development initiatives could help ease skill threat concerns among workers, particularly among software developers, according to a Pluralsight report. Training could also help with equity issues and fears that workers’ competencies will become obsolete due to AI-assisted tools.

A bill introduced in Congress — the Artificial Intelligence Literacy Act — aims to build AI skills and workforce preparedness as the emerging technology continues to change workplace dynamics.

The legislation, introduced Dec. 15, 2023, has drawn bipartisan support and endorsements from major universities, education associations and workforce partners, including the Society for Human Resource Management.

“At SHRM, we wholeheartedly applaud initiatives to increase AI literacy within the workforce. We firmly believe that combining human intelligence’s unique strengths with artificial intelligence’s power is the key to unlocking unparalleled returns on investment in today’s dynamic business landscape,” Emily Dickens, SHRM chief of staff and head of public affairs, said in a statement.

“Investing in AI literacy is not just a technology imperative; it’s a strategic investment in work, workers and workplaces,” she said. “By empowering our people to understand and leverage AI, we unlock its potential to drive efficiency, innovation and sustainable success.”

Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., and Rep. Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., introduced the bill. They noted that AI adoption has more than doubled since 2017, and the average number of AI capabilities that organizations use doubled between 2018 and 2022. 

The AI Literacy Act would amend the Digital Equity Act of 2021 to include AI literacy and training opportunities, focusing on not only the basic principles and applications of AI but also the limitations and ethical considerations.

The legislation would also highlight the importance of AI literacy for national competitiveness, workforce preparedness and the well-being and digital safety of Americans. In addition, it would open grant eligibility for K-12 schools, colleges, nonprofits and libraries to support AI literacy.

The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which includes both Blunt Rochester and Bucshon as members.

“It’s no secret that the use of artificial intelligence has skyrocketed over the past few years, playing a key role in the ways we learn, work and interact with one another,” Blunt Rochester said in a statement. “Like any emerging technology, AI presents us with incredible opportunities along with unique challenges.”

AI curiosity among employees opens the door for employers to offer learning and development opportunities around AI, according to an Adecco Group report from October 2023. Although many employees reported using AI in the workplace, less than half said they received guidance on it from their employers.

Training opportunities could also ease concerns about AI skill threat among employees, according to a Pluralsight report released the same month. Workers who have fear or anxiety about their skill sets becoming obsolete due to AI — including software developers — could benefit from upskilling and reskilling programs, it concluded.

The proliferation of new technologies like generative artificial intelligence is making recent graduates uneasy, a new study released Thursday found. A third of the 1,000 people who graduated in the past year said they are second-guessing their career choice, while roughly half reported questioning their workforce preparedness and feeling threatened by AI, according to the 2023 Employability Report by Cengage Group, a global education technology company. 

Their fears aren’t entirely unfounded. More than half of the 1,000 hiring managers surveyed said some entry-level jobs, teams and skills could be replaced by AI, and more than two-thirds said many workers will need to learn new skills in the next three to five years to keep up with emerging technology.

"The workplace has changed rapidly in the last few years, and now we are witnessing a new shift as AI begins to reshape worker productivity, job requirements, hiring habits and even entire industries," Michael Hansen, Cengage Group CEO, said in a news release. 

As AI becomes more integrated into the workplace, legislators are scrambling to catch up. All told, more than 160 bills and regulations related to AI were in the works as of mid-June, a management-side lawyer said in June, warning of “a huge tsunami coming of state regulation.” 

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May issued guidance on how to audit AI for discrimination to remain in compliance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the EEOC, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission in April outlined to businesses how existing laws can apply to emerging technologies like AI. 

Meanwhile, New York City started enforcing a new law requiring employers to perform bias audits on automated employment decision tools and to notify candidates of the use of those tools in their hiring process.

Amid the changing AI landscape, employers are trying to figure out how the new technology affects their hiring needs. “Human” cognitive skills like problem solving, creativity, originality, imagination and the ability to learn will remain in demand, even as automated tools transform the workplace, according to a July 13 report from TalentLMS. Similarly, in the Cengage Group report, 59% of employers said AI has led them to prioritize different skills in the hiring process, including “uniquely human” skills.

In 2013, the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin started using a homemade machine learning algorithm to help faculty make graduate admissions decisions. Seven years later the system was abandoned, attracting criticism that it shouldn’t have been used. 

The algorithm was based on previous admissions decisions and saved faculty members’ time. It used things like attendance at an “elite” university or letters of recommendation with the word “best” in them as predictive of admission. 

The university said the system never made admissions decisions on its own, as at least one faculty member would look over the recommendations. But detractors said that it encoded and legitimized any bias present in admissions decisions. 

Today, artificial intelligence is in the limelight. ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that generates human-like dialogue, has created significant buzz and renewed a conversation about what parts of human life and labor might be easily automated. 

Despite the criticism lobbied at systems like the one used previously by UT Austin, some universities and admissions officers are still clamoring to use AI to streamline the acceptance process. And companies are eager to help them.

“It’s picked up drastically,” said Abhinand Chincholi, CEO of OneOrigin, an artificial intelligence company. “The announcement of GPT — ChatGPT’s kind of technology — now has made everyone wanting AI.” 

But the colleges interested in AI don’t always have an idea of what they want to use it for, he said. 

Chincholi’s company offers a product called Sia, which provides speedy college transcript processing by extracting information like courses and credits. Once trained, it can determine what courses an incoming or transfer student may be eligible for, pushing the data to an institution’s information system. That can save time for admissions officers, and potentially cut university personnel costs, the company said.

Chincholi said the company is working with 35 university clients this year and is in the implementation process with eight others. It’s fielding about 60 information requests monthly from other colleges. Despite the ongoing questions some have about new uses of AI, Chincholi believes Sia’s work is firmly on the right side of ethical concerns. 

“Sia gives clues on whether to proceed with the applicant or not,” he said. “We would never allow an AI to make such decisions because it is very dangerous. You are now playing with the careers of students, the lives of students.”

Other AI companies go a little further in what they’re willing to offer. 

Student Select is a company that offers algorithms to predict admissions decisions for universities. 

Will Rose, chief technology officer at Student Select, said the company typically begins by looking at a university’s admissions rubric and its historical admissions data. Its technology then sorts applicants into three tiers based on their likelihood of admission. 

Applicants in the top tier can be approved by admissions officers more quickly, he said, and they get acceptance decisions sooner. Students in other tiers are still reviewed by college staff. 

Student Select also offers colleges what Rose described as insights about applicants. The technology analyzes essays and even recorded interviews to find evidence of critical thinking skills or specific personality traits. 

For example, an applicant who uses the word “flexibility” in response to a specific interview question may be expressing an “openness to experience,” one of the personality traits that Student Select measures. 

“Our company started back over a decade ago as a digital job interviewing platform so we really understand how to analyze job interviews and understand traits from these job interviews,” Rose said. “And over the years we’ve learned we can make the same kind of analysis in the higher ed realm.”

Student Select has contracts with about a dozen universities to use its tools, Rose said. Though he declined to name them, citing contract terms, Government Technology reported in April that Rutgers University and Rocky Mountain University are among the company’s clients. Neither university responded to comment requests.

A black box?

Not everyone thinks the use of this technology by admissions offices is a good idea. 

Julia Stoyanovich, a computer science and engineering professor at New York University, advised colleges to steer clear of AI tools that claim to make predictions about social outcomes.

“I don’t think the use of AI is worth it, truly,” said Stoyanovich, who is the co-founder and director of the Center for Responsible AI. “There’s no reason for us to believe that their pattern of speech or whether or not they look at the camera has anything to do with how good a student they are.”

Part of the issue with AI is its inscrutability, Stoyanovich said. In medicine, doctors can double check AI's work when it flags things like potential cancers in medical images. But there's little to no accountability when it's used in college admissions.

Officers may think the software is selecting for a specific trait, when it is actually for something spurious or irrelevant. 

“Even if somehow we believe that there was a way to do this, we can’t check whether these machines work. We don’t know how somebody would have done who you didn’t admit,” she said.

When the algorithms are trained on past admissions data, they repeat any biases that were already present. But they also go a step further by sanctioning those unequal decisions, Stoyanovich said. 

Moreover, errors in algorithms can disproportionately affect people from marginalized groups. For example, Stoyanovich pointed to Facebook’s method for determining whether names were legitimate, which got the company into hot water in 2015 for kicking American Indian users off the platform. 

Finally, admissions staff may not have the training to understand how the algorithms work and what sort of determinations it’s safe to make from them. 

“You need to have some background at least to say, ‘I am the decision-maker here, and I am going to decide whether to take this recommendation or to contest it,’” Stoyanovich said.

With the rapid growth of generative AI systems like ChatGPT, some researchers worry about a future where applicants use machines to write essays that will be read and graded by algorithms. 

Having essays read by machines is going to provide “even more impetus to have students generate them by machine,” said Les Perelman, a former associate dean at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology who has studied automated writing assessment. “It won’t be able to identify if it was original or just generated by ChatGPT. The whole issue of writing evaluation has really been turned on its head.”

Being careful

Benjamin Lira Luttges, a doctoral student in the University of Pennsylvania’s psychology department who is doing research on AI in college admissions, said human shortcomings foster some of the issues related to the technology. 

“Part of the reason admissions is complicated is because it is not clear that as a society we know exactly what we want to maximize for when we’re making admissions decisions,” Lira said via email. “If we are not careful, we might build AI systems that maximize something that doesn’t match what we as a society want to maximize.”

The use of the technology has its risks, he said, but it also has its benefits. Machines, unlike humans, can make decisions without “noise,” meaning they aren’t influenced by things admissions staff might be, like their mood or the weather. 

“We don’t have really good data on what is the status quo,” Lira said. “There might be potential for bias in algorithms and there might be things we don’t like about them, but if they perform better than the human system, then it could be a good idea to start progressively deploying algorithms in admissions.” 

Rose, at Student Select, acknowledges that there are risks to using AI in admissions and hiring. Amazon, he noted, scrapped its own algorithm to help with hiring after discovering the tool discriminated against women. 

But Student Select avoids those negative outcomes, he said. The company starts the process with a bias audit of a client’s previous admissions outcomes and regularly examines its own technology. Its algorithms are fairly transparent, Rose said, and can explain what they are basing decisions on. 

The analysis produces equal average scores across subgroups, is validated by external academics and is not wholly new, Rose said. 

“We use both internal and external researchers to develop this tool, and all these experts are experts in selection,” he said. “Our machine learning models have been trained on a data set that includes millions of records.”

Beyond the ethical questions that come with using AI in admissions, Stoyanovich said there are also practical ones. 

When mistakes are made, who will be responsible? Students may want to know why they were rejected and how candidates were selected. 

“I would be very careful as an admissions officer, as the director of admissions at a university or elsewhere, when I decide to use an algorithmic tool,” she said. “I would be very careful to understand how the tool works, what it does, how it was validated. And I would keep a very, very close eye on how it performs over time.”