Cosmo Crixter 🟠

I have an essay this morning in @campusreform about AI and higher education. Universities face multiple problems all at once--- politicization, affordability, the demographic cliff, and AI. No one wants to be the one to pull the plug on an institution. But the ones on life support will draw resources away from schools with better chances, and pull them down, too. This is also happening within institutions --- the politicized departments weighing down everyone else should probably just be thrown overboard. But if we just focus on AI, what can be done? (1) adopt a barbell strategy with more human-centered instruction and assessment and more AI use to automate routine tasks, including grading. And it's not hypocritical to require undergraduate students to do their own work while graders rely on AI, especially for lower-level classes. There are a number of asymmetries between faculty and students which justify AI use in grading. (2) adopt an organizational brain -- dump all your handbooks and rules and institutional knowledge into local/private computers and automate as much as possible while rooting out unnecessary expenses, duplicate licenses, and so on. Everyone complains about administrative bloat. Well, now the technology exists to automate the bloat away. A lot of schools are too risk averse to experiment. But lots of apparent risk-aversion is just cowardice --- someone would rather stick with the status quo, and take the 5% chance of things magically turning around than make a courageous decision that gives a +20% chance of success. They would really rather go down with the ship, with everyone, than make a courageous decision and have people yell at them. And that kind of cowardice, which is widespread within higher ed, explains why so many places are going to be in a world of hurt, not just with AI, but with the other problems, too. campusreform.org/article/opi…