What's Good In Higher Education?

These days it seems everybody is rushing to protect the core function of higher education from encroachment by AI. 

I read a post from Anna Mills on preventing LLMs from autocompleting assignment answers in the LMS. Wendy Palmer is asking how we preserve the importance of credentials. On and on it goes, with new posts in this vein every day.

In my opinion, things like classes and assignments and credentials are the least valuable things about higher education. They're all relatively recent inventions and were developed in order to accommodate mass education. They didn't exist, really, when higher education was an activity reserved for the elite.

Rather than re-litigate that argument, however, I want to focus on what's good about higher education. What's worth preserving that will carry on even in the age of artificial intelligence? Here are a few thoughts.

Facilities - think of a college or university and the first thing you think of isn't the row on row of classrooms, it's the facilities that can only be found in a place like this. Labs, for example. Where else in the community are you likely to find a scanning electron microscope? Or stockpiles of dangerous chemicals? Or, for example from Ontario Tech, aquatic toxology labs and a 3D maker lab.

It's not just labs, of course. The University of Calgary as a speed skating oval. McGill University shares its football stadium with the Montreal Alouettes. Colleges and universities are also excellent meeting and convention venues. You get the idea. Higher education institutions are where we locate many public facilities none of us could afford on our own.

Clubs - I know clubs and societies are presented these days as extracurricular activities, but there was a time when they were the core of the university experience. A college or university brings a lot of people together in an environment where they're able to find other people who share their interests. The clubs receive funding and access to facilities to pursue their activities. 

My own education was informed by my studies in philosophy, but my real education happened at the student newspaper office I worked in for five years (yeah, I spent so much time there that my actual education was delayed by a year). A university is full of things like this, everything from student government to sports teams to geologists.

Professors - this might seem obvious, but it isn't really. After all, if we're not going to have people teach classes and mark assignments, what do we need them for? Quite a bit, actually (and in any case, more and more it's low-paid adjunct staff who are doing bulk of the teaching and grading). What they need, though, is more free time.

For one thing, professors are experts in their fields and know a lot about the subject. If professors weren't so busy, clubs and societies could convince them to offer a series (or 'course') of lectures on a topic. The meeting and conference facilities help with this. These lectures need not be anything formal, and they could be on different topics every time. Whatever people need or are interested in at the moment.

Professors can also play an important role in advising and mentoring people. Obviously this doesn't work if each professor is responsible for hundreds of people. But they wouldn't be - think of them as the top layer in a pyramid of peer mentors and advisors. At lower levels, more advanced students are mentoring less advanced students.

Research - if professors aren't teaching classes and grading papers, what are they doing? They're doing the thing they really want to do: research. 

I mean, I don't think any professor when through eight years or so of intensive study in a narrow field because they want to teach and mark assignments. They want to do work in that field. It's such a mismatch that people like Tony Bates spent a career arguing that professors aren't skilled and need to learn how to teach.

Imagine a college or university where professors have the opportunity to spend almost all of their time organizing research teams and pursuing projects at the highest level. Some of the research output can be commercialized, some of it contributes to the wider culture, and some of it advances the frontiers. 

Networking - I have argued in the past, and will argue again here, that the real value proposition at the elite universities is access to a network of like-minded peers. The universities know this, and make an effort to ensure that students and alumni are in a position to connect and support each others' careers.

There really is an old boys network, and the university is where it's fostered. These days, they allow some girls, and some people who don't look like them, but it's still very much an insider culture. You can see this play out in media, where they reference each other as experts, interview each other, and recommend each other for employment.

There is no real way to prevent this, and I'm not sure we would want to. It works really well for them. What we really should be doing is ensuring everyone else has the same advantage. Colleges and universities should focus on the networks they can create. In the end, this will play a much more important role in their students' future careers than good grades.

If everybody has access to the same networking advantage, then no one network can confer the sort of advantage over everyone else that elite universities confer today. Education is a necessary preconbdition for democracy only insofar as it creates democracy, rather than preserving existing structures of power. 

Funding - obviously most of this stuff doesn't happen without funding. Happily, we already have a lot of funding directed toward higher education institutions.  

If I may be so bold, we're throwing most of that money away. We've created this institutional churn where students are subjected to an organized curriculum and professors read from slides and notes and everybody pretends this isn't something that could be done better by a computer.

And what's worse, we make students pay for a good chunk of this. Students, who are probably the least able in society to afford any of this. And if the students don't actually learn what we want them to learn - which is a real danger when they're assisted by AI - then they've wasted their money and we've wasted ours.

We need to turn this around. We need to redesign the learning economy so that instead of paying, students are paid to participate in higher education. That would complete the picture, and help develop a system where everybody, and not just the wealthy, can participate.

Independence - by 'independence' I mean something like self-sovereignty, that is, the ability to make decisions and chart one's own course in like. Higher education provides that valuable bridge between the sheltered and managed life of a child and the more exposed and autonomous reality of an adult.

This is all the more important in a world of AI.This isn't a matter of ensuring there are 'humans in the loop' or creating 'harnesses' to create 'alignment'. This is about making sure there are people who are actually able to look at what an AI is doing independently and to determine whether it is good. We can't do that without knowledge, expertise and experience.

We're not going to get that for free. We're going to have to pay for it. We're going to have to make sure people are willing to take the time and make the effort in their youth and throughout their lives to attain the highest levels of expertise. 

Right now we pay for it by promising students we'll pay them later in the form of good jobs and higher salaries. But in a world where machines are more productive than humans, nobody believes that promise any more. Nor should they. We need to pay them now for the work they're doing now to ensure that there actually is human independence in the future. 

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There are probably more good things that could be listed. But you get the idea. We need to stop pretending that education is where you learn a whole bunch of stuff that will earn you a credential and qualify you for a job. None of that matters any more (or, at least, won't matter in the near future). Let's focus instead on preserving and promoting the really good things higher education provides.

Image: Manipal University