Could Uncertainty in Higher Ed Be a Catalyst for Change?

As colleges navigate major disruption—from a loss of federal funding to AI advancements—they’re also being forced to grapple with persistent questions around their role in skills training, trust in their institutions and how to keep pace with digital learning innovations.

At Digital Universities, a convening of more than 150 faculty, teaching and learning administrators, and education-technology experts, attendees came away with a sense of urgency to meet this moment of unpredictability and uncertainty.

“It’s revealing the tensions between different goals, aspirations and larger challenges that may be implicit but are still there,” said Trey Conatser, assistant provost for teaching and learning at the University of Kentucky and director of UK’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching.

“Some of those things are what it means to adapt to enrollment challenges and how we negotiate our identities as institutions of higher education, as stewards of a storied, scholarly mission in light of changing business models, as well as negotiating our relationships with industry partners, the public and public officials.”

Glenda Morgan, an education-technology market analyst, told Inside Higher Ed that she was reassured that “people are actually talking about this stuff—this moment of uncertainty” throughout the conference’s programming.

“AI is making clear some of the issues and fractures and making all of these problems that have probably been there for a long time more apparent, visible and urgent,” she said.

For example, “AI brings questions about cheating to the forefront, but it really highlights that our assessment systems are so outdated … Testing factual information has never been the point; it’s always been application. But AI is making that more urgent now.”

Trust in Higher Ed

In a panel discussion on privacy, AI and cybersecurity, speakers highlighted another long-standing issue that AI is pushing to the surface: trust. Morgan said that while today’s students seem generally comfortable sharing their data with outside entities, they may be increasingly skeptical about how their own institutions are using or even “surveilling” their data.

Panelist Josh Callahan, chief information security officer for the California State University system, later told Inside Higher Ed that cybersecurity concerns in the era of AI are stoking conversations that should have happened decades ago.

“We were all busy doing the things, building technology into teaching and learning, and we had a lot of assumptions and really didn’t engage in some of these conversations,” he said. “And now it’s becoming unavoidable, because it’s embedded. And we are at a crisis point in a lot of ways, in terms of our trust in institutions—not just higher ed.”

Teaching in the Age of AI

At the two-day event in Salt Lake City organized by Inside Higher Ed and its parent company, Times Higher Education, attendees also considered how to respond to the threat to entry-level white-collar jobs posed by the evolution of AI—a risk articulated by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last month when he predicted AI could wipe out half of those positions within just five years.

During a discussion on leveraging workforce partnerships for future skills, Sarah DeMark, vice president of academic portfolio at the fully online Western Governors University, said WGU’s instruction and curriculum model is informed by employment data and focused on helping students both develop and effectively market the skills they learn in college. “It’s not just about degree completion, it’s about getting a job,” she said. “One of the big opportunities [institutions] have is transparency around the skills and competencies students are gaining through the courses and programs they’re taking.”

Hollis Robbins, special adviser for humanities diplomacy at the University of Utah, offered a different perspective on workforce preparation, saying faculty should be able to do more than teach skills and information in the age of AI, when students no longer need a professor to learn easily accessible, established information.

“My own view is that AI is going to be teaching general education courses,” she said. With that in mind, “it’s important to reconfigure their business models to double down on faculty expertise and say that’s the value of what [students] are paying for.”

Meanwhile, in a discussion about getting the most out of teaching with AI, Zawan Al Bulushi, an assistant professor of education at the University of Arizona, said that she sees generative AI as a “friend” that offers shortcuts for professors who may feel overwhelmed by their workloads. She uses it to craft lesson plans that strike the right tone with students and create visually appealing lecture slides that keep students engaged.

“The best educators won’t be replaced by AI,” she said. “But those who use it well will redefine what’s possible.”

Bulushi is an outlier among most faculty, however, as many institutions still have no formal AI policy supporting students and faculty in engaging with the technology.

Recent findings from Inside Higher Ed’s survey of chief information officers showed that more than half of CIOs say their institution hasn’t adopted institutionwide formal policies or guidelines for the use of AI tools for general use. And 31 percent said their institution hasn’t adopted any policy or guidelines in the areas of instruction, administrative tasks, student services or research assistance.

“If you don’t have a policy, then it’s a little bit like the wild, wild West. Entities like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft are all competing, and they’re all telling you that they’re the answer,” Marvin Krislov, president of Pace University, said in the opening plenary. “But there doesn’t seem to be regulation on the federal level and there doesn’t seem to be consensus in higher education. At least on an institutional level, I hope people will start—if they haven’t already—grappling with [AI].”

Maricel Lawrence, innovation catalyst at Purdue Global, advised institutions to consider why they want to use new AI technologies before jumping headfirst into adoption.

“We need a larger conversation about what it means to learn and how to advance student success,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “AI could help us in many ways, but it shouldn’t be that we’re starting the conversation with AI.”