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- [00:01]
Podcast Host - Sponsor Announcer
This show is brought to you by Pepsi. In 2025, Pepsi brought back a classic, the Pepsi Challenge, where in blind taste tests participants were given two zero sugar colas and had to choose which taste they preferred. 66% of participants chose Pepsi zero sugar over Coca Cola zero sugar and Pepsi zero sugar won 100% of markets where Pepsi conducted the Pepsi Challenge. Even in Coke's hometown of Atlanta. It's the Pepsi Paradox, the idea that once labels and bias disappear, you may be surprised by what you actually prefer. And in the case of the Pepsi Paradox, cola drinkers prefer the taste of Pepsi Zero Sugar. Go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar today. You deserve taste. You deserve Pepsi.
- [00:49]
Podcast Host - Segment Introducer
Coming up on TODAY Explained. I talked to one of the top stars of the Democratic Party and one of the most divisive about her run for Senate in Texas. I wonder, like, is there times in which the rhetoric goes too far? Are there times in which you should say, you know, maybe I messed that one up?
- [01:04]
Podcast Host - Sponsor Announcer
No, not in this environment, I don't. I think that, you know, we are really in unchartered territory.
- [01:12]
Podcast Host - Segment Introducer
Representative Jasmine Crockett this week on Today explained. Listen wherever you get your podcast.
- [01:23]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
How the heck should colleges handle AI? Should they face the fact that whether they like it or not, most students are already using it? Should they figure out how to best help their students prepare for jobs in the modern world? Or should they continue to ban AI, call it cheating and stuff their heads in the sand? Well, you can probably tell where I stand on that question. Today's guest, Jeff Salingo, is a journalist with decades of experience covering higher education. He's written many books, including Dream School Finding a College that's Right for your. Most recently, he wrote a great article in New York magazine called the Campus AI Crisis. Jeff has smart ideas about how colleges should deal with AI. He also has a more, shall we say, modern view of the role colleges should play in today's world. You traditionalists out there might want to cover your ears. Here's Jeff on colleges and AI. Jeff, welcome. Great to have you. This is an incredibly important topic these days that everybody's worried about. And in reading your excellent article in New York magazine, it sounds like, first off, you seem relatively persuaded that AI is affecting the job market for recent college graduates.
- [02:39]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
There's no doubt about it that it definitely has a big influence. You're seeing this in a number of areas. One is just in terms of the internships students are able to get while in college. A lot of those are kind of entry level internships where Work is now being done by AI. Same thing with those kind of first rungs of the career ladder after graduation. But I'm also hearing from company executives that I talk people who hire. It's really about reducing headcount right now. And so to invest in AI, so it's not necessarily AI replacing workers, but to have the capital to invest in AI, they're reducing headcount. And the first headcount you usually reduce are those entry level workers who, as many people who hire tell me, just take a while to pay off. And so it's just easier to cut those rugs first.
- [03:33]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And you had an interview with one recent graduate who said something fascinating to me, which is basically, you know, hey, all this stuff I was trained to do actually is exactly what AI is for and it does really well. And now they want to stick me in sales training and other people things like I want to do the analysis. So are you seeing divisions there too?
- [03:53]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Well, and that student was a computer science major, which by the way, 10 years ago we were telling students, major in computer science, major in computer science, because that's the future. And now computer science graduates have some of the highest unemployment rates. And by the way, students are already starting to react to that. Last fall, some of the biggest drops in undergraduate enrollment were in CS programs.
- [04:15]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And to sort of flip it around because we talk about unemployment, it is tough. I am not minimizing it at all. And when I read your descriptions and others of how different it is now that when I graduated I would have been one of the folks who didn't make it. I was just not organized enough. But to flip it around, even with the elevated unemployment rate for folks right out of school, and certainly in computer science, as you mentioned, the vast majority of people are still getting jobs. So we are not in a situation that is approximating some of the worst rhetoric out of Silicon Valley, which is that all jobs are going to disappear and so forth. So it's out there like you can still succeed. And so if there are any people you talk to who found a job, even though there's AI and are now basically helping their employers because they have a leg up on it. Be great to hear about that.
- [05:08]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Yeah. So I think a couple of things that are really differentiating students, internships still matter. So the more that you could get an internship in college, because that is a door in to a lot of companies, many companies use it essentially as a long term interview to decide if this is somebody that they want to hire. But internships, as I said earlier, Tough to get. So what else can you do? And part of it is like learning how to do the work, learning skills that others might not have. So for example, in the interviews for the story, I met a history student who learned how to visualize data because he knew that, you know, visualizing data, but he also had the history background would be really useful to him. Or a business major who knew data analytics. I met a couple of people who had project no matter their major, most of them were in the humanities who got project management certificate to learn how to manage big projects. So it's not the degree itself still matters, matters more than anything else. But having some other sort of skill set that you either get through further education, that you get to work on a project as an undergraduate or get as an internship, those are what really is the value add and kind of the differentiator that I'm seeing in the job market. You can't just go to college, go to class, get the degree and hope for the job. Right?
- [06:28]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Which was exactly my approach. I'm glad it worked then, probably wouldn't work now. All right, let's back up. Your article is called the Campus AI Crisis about how colleges are dealing with the new technology. You also have a book called Dream School Finding a College that's Right for you, which sounds very important. So what I'd love to do is just actually step back before we look at what's happening on campus and ask you a question that I know is going to appall my friends and family who are professors and in academia and love liberal arts, liberal arts sake. And it has nothing to do with jobs and it's supposed to be different. But let me ask you the question, which is today, what is college for?
- [07:08]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
College? You know, most students go to college to get a job. And I'm sorry, I know that people who work in colleges say, well, there's all these other life benefits. You know, we know that people who go to college are healthier. We know that they participate more in civic organizations, they vote more, they're just more involved in their communities. We know that it's a life changing moment at the age of 18. I know all that happens. But at the end of the day, with prices now approaching six figures at some private colleges, by the way, for one year, you know, parents want to be able to send their kids to college so that they actually have an economic return at the end of the day. So I agree that there's all these other benefits to college, but getting a job is critically important and probably it's the most important thing in that, in that element.
- [08:02]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And I think to generalize, as you suggested, a lot of people in the academic community would, behind closed doors, want to revolt against that and say, no, no, no, it's the value, it's the study for itself and so forth. And it's not our job. And this is the time that you're out of the world. We shouldn't be training. You learn that stuff on the job. But it sounds like your view is colleges should at least work a little bit harder to prepare people for the working world.
- [08:30]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
I think there's a couple of things. There's a mindset shift among faculty. I have met too many faculty, not everywhere and not at every institution, not in every discipline, who don't think it's their job to help students get a job. So I think that mindset shift has to change. But I don't want to take employers off the hook here because I think that employers and colleges need to work together a lot more. I that colleges, you know, they tend to send their students into certain sectors. Most colleges, you know, most of the job market is regional, as I found out in the research for Dream School. You know, with the exception of a few national universities, most students are going to end up going within a, you know, a couple hundred miles of their home campus to get their first job. Well, colleges need to work with those employers about like, what do you need? What are the skills that you're missing? Could you help us work on projects that you have where our students could get real experience? Could they get internships? So I think that needs to be much more of a cooperative agreement between colleges and employers. Because right now what we do is we end up sending students kind of into the void between graduation and the job market. And we say as colleges, job market's not our responsibility. And employers say, well, you know, colleges are not training students for us. And so they're kind of like talking past each other. And I think that this moment, especially around AI, really requires employers and colleges to work much more in concert for training those students for the future.
- [10:00]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And you talk about in your article some folks who even have the idea that colleges might want to have students actually get paid jobs while they're in college that count toward college credit. You talk about how the career services office is usually off on the side. I mean, I remember this. It's like the responsible, forward looking students visited the career services office and interviewed for real jobs. And people like me who just hoped the future would turn out somehow ignored everything, everything until we were way past college. But so it, it sounds like you really think for most colleges, much more integrated, we are preparing you. We will even help you into the working world.
- [10:37]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
There's no doubt about it. I mean, most students actually never visit the career center because they don't think it's really going to be helpful. Or they think, by the way, it's something that seniors do before they graduate and they're not doing it early on. And most career centers, to be honest with you, are. You know, colleges give lip service to that. They don't really invest much in it, so they're not really helpful. If you're a STEM major, your needs are very different than if you're an English major or philosophy major. So I'm really impressed with colleges. You know, Wake Forest does this really well, where they're focused on career services for different majors and what different majors need at different points in their career. Because that's the other point. A freshman in college has very different needs than a senior in college.
- [11:19]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And so you, because you've written a book about choosing the right school, is that you're basically putting this on students and parents and saying, look, the first thing you need to do is say, well, actually, what do you want out of a college education? And are there schools you can choose that do what you're saying where it's much more integrated?
- [11:37]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Oh, there's definitely schools, but unfortunately, many of them are not at the top, very top of the rankings. And I often talk in my newest book, Dream School, that students start the college search kind of midstream. They just start putting names on a list, often that they hear in their surrounding community. You know, stickers they see on the back of cars. Instagram. You know, every senior class in America has an Instagram page telling you where their seniors are going to college. And so there's these same names you hear over and over again, and students just start putting those names on a list without really understanding what they want out of the college experience. Do you want to live far from home, close to home, A rural or city? What kind of career do you want? So if you want to work in the music industry, should you really be in the middle of Maine or should you be in Nashville or LA or New York or closer? So you could do internships during college? Right. There's all these things that I don't think students and families think about because they're just often so enamored with the name. In fact, we saw that, we did a survey of 3,000 plus parents for this book. And there's so much pressure to feel like I'm going to the most selective, highly ranked college I can get into. Because in this job market, parents think the name on the degree provides insurance in this job market. And that's true if you get, by the way, all these other experiences in college, if you do internships and get real skills. But you could get those skills and internships by going to other places where the faculty might be less concerned about doing their own research or working with graduate students and might be more focused on your success as a student. And I often found that at college that were kind of outside of the top 25 or top 50, where their success was really dependent on their student success.
- [13:21]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And I think to give parents a little bit of a break and students, it did used to be much more insurance than it is now, I think. I mean, certainly again, when I graduated from college, the only impressive thing on my resume was the name of the college. And it did a lot of work for me for a long time.
- [13:39]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
And it still does. It still does. But, but you need. You need plus and right.
- [13:45]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Yes. And so it. But also, to put it sounds like what you're saying is you got to take agency earlier on in the process, starting in high school, figuring out maybe what you want to do, what college serves, that make an active choice, which is great training. I talked to Bill Gurley eventually, the venture capitalist last week, and he said, you know, one of the reasons career decision making is so difficult is we don't really actually have to make any decisions until we graduate from college. Because you go to school and you go to a decent college and you think that somebody else is driving the train, and then suddenly you're out and you have to choose your entire life, which is incredibly difficult. So you're basically giving great general advice, which is take agency earlier.
- [14:28]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Yes. And I understand. I have a 16 year old at home who has no idea what she wants to do. And a lot of students don't, even if they think they do. A third of students change their major in college anyway. And most kids don't necessarily work in majors that they have. So I think the key is also, like, what, what interests you, even if you don't pick that major right off the bat. But how do you get experience to see what those jobs are? So, Henry, I never forget, I interviewed this architecture major at UVA a couple of years ago and he was telling me that, you know, he had an internship his junior year between his junior and senior year at uva, and he said, oh, this is what the job is like. I never knew what an architect really did on a day to day basis and he hated it. And he realized he was already a senior essentially in college and it was like too late to change his mind like I think we should do. Even by the way, in high school, a lot more job shadowing, a lot more really understanding what most jobs are because to an 18 year old or a 22 year old, when they look at job titles they feel like a foreign language because they really don't know what most of these people do.
- [15:41]
Podcast Host - Sponsor Announcer
This show is brought to you by Pepsi. Life is full of paradoxes, like how getting an answer always leads to more questions, or how too many choices can make it impossible to make one. Then there's the Pepsi paradox. The idea that when labels and bias disappear, cola drinkers prefer the taste of Pepsi Zero Sugar over Coca Cola Zero Sugar. In 2025, Pepsi brought back the Pepsi Challenge. In blind taste tests, participants were given two zero sugar colas and asked to choose which taste they preferred. It turned out that 66% of participants chose Pepsi Zero Sugar over Coca Cola Zero Sugar. And Pepsi Zero Sugar won 100% of markets where Pepsi conducted the Pepsi Challenge. Even in Coke's hometown of Atlanta, in a world of so many options, it's easy to let other people influence our choices. Instead of asking what do I like? We start asking what does everyone else like? But you don't have to make the same decisions as everyone else. Choose what you like. Go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar Today you deserve taste. You deserve Pepsi.
- [16:42]
Sponsor Voice - Experian
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- [16:44]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Cute.
- [16:45]
Sponsor Voice - Experian
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- [17:10]
Podcast Host - Sponsor Announcer
Experian.
- [17:12]
Podcast Host - Segment Introducer
When it comes to the new Melania movie, here are some important numbers to remember. Forty million. That's how much Amazon paid Melania Trump's production studio for the rights to the film. It's the highest price ever paid for a documentary. 35 million. That's about how much Amazon spent marketing the film. 28 million. How much went to the first lady and 7 million. That's how much the Melania movie made on opening weekend, which is honestly pretty good and certainly more than many box office insiders projected. So how did this movie get made? Who's it for? And if this is finally Melania Trump's side of the story, what does she have to say? That's coming up on Today explained from vox. Listen, weekday afternoons, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:12]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
All right, let's get to what we're actually here to talk about. AI and campus. How are colleges handling AI right now?
- [18:20]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Not very well. They have essentially buried their head in the sand. Going back to the introduction of ChatGPT. They first didn't take it seriously. They were. There was a little bit of sense of wonderment about it, and then there was a sense of what I would call compliance and policing. Right. They saw AI as a cheating tool that needed to be controlled instead of how do we figure out how to use this as a team, a teaching and learning tool, and how do we prepare our students for the world after college? And we're starting to see that change now, a couple of years later, where colleges realize it's here to stay. It's going to change the world in ways we still probably don't understand, and we need to kind of get on board. The problem now is like, what do we do? Right? So I mentioned in the article, Ohio State announced with big fanfare last year that, you know, every, every student is going to be AI literate and by the way, by 2029. So they have a couple of years of a Runway to do that. But then I talked to the provost for the article and I said, well, how are you going to do that? And he said, well, it's really up to the faculty. It's really up to the schools. And I get it. Every discipline is different. Again, a STEM major is different than a philosophy major, but when you let it up to the faculty, you end up having a very uneven experience for students. And there was a student early on in that article who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh who said that some faculty were experimenting with AI. Others basically turned it off and wouldn't let you use it. Others accused you of cheating if you used it. And when it's up to the faculty and there's not a lot of guidance from the top or there's not a lot of education. Most faculty have been teaching for years. They don't really know how to best use this. There's a loss about what to do. And so some students are going to have a great experience in some of their classes. They're going to have a terrible experience in other their classes and they're not really going to come out as Ohio State. Now Purdue, by the way, has followed this to say you're really AI literate.
- [20:17]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And you make another great point, which is the more broader point that education, for those of us who have been in technology for a while, is remarkably seemingly resistant to change. We generally teach the way we taught 150 years ago. And again I will get pounded by my family and friends for observing that and so forth, forth. But why is that? Why are the universities so hidebound?
- [20:43]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Well, they hate to be compared to business, by the way. Their contention is like all these institutions have been around for hundreds of years and if you look at the Fortune 50, a lot of those companies have changed over the years. So if we follow the business world and we're worried more about quarterly goals or yearly annual goals, we kind of miss that forest for the trees about the long tail of education and technology. So I think that's one of the reasons they're resistant to change is because they want to sit back and wait to see what really is happening. But the problem is that you only get to go to college once. And I mentioned at the top of my article I went to College in 1991. By the time I graduated in 1995, the Internet was a thing. So I went to college pre Internet, graduated into a post Internet world. And college itself didn't prepare me for that world because everybody was like kind of waiting around, they thought, oh, the Internet is this cool encyclopedia thing, right? It's this cool like communication email thing. Well, I wanted to be a journalist. Nobody talked about what was going to happen to journalism. I mean, nobody really knew. I understood, but nobody really talked about how we're now going to have these creators and video and audio and all these other things are going to happen and kind of start to prepare students for that world. And so that's the problem with colleges is that they kind of wait and they wait too long to try to figure out what the use case is. And meanwhile every year they're graduating students into an economy not really prepared.
- [22:14]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And so you've studied today's universities, you have a daughter who's preparing for college. If you could draw up a perfect college or even a perfect professor, given AI, given the approach, what would it be? And if you've talked to professors in colleges that are using AI in a great way, let's hear it.
- [22:35]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Well, so I interviewed an Ohio State professor in the business school there who is Using it around a logistics course that he teaches. As he said, it used to be that the business majors were always at a disadvantage with the CS majors who knew how to program. And now they're more even. Right? As we know, in a lot of our lives, I use AI to do things that I either need to do faster or I don't know how to do. And increasingly, I think that professors who have figured that out like to basically bring students up to an even level for something that they may have to do on the job, I think is a really good idea. And again, we're seeing professors do this. But where I think what's happening now is that what we most need is to just give students more exposure to the employment market. And so colleges like Northeastern, for example, or Georgia Tech or the University of Cincinnati, where they build a co op right into the undergraduate experience so that you're working at the same time that you're going to school, or, you know, there's a small little college in Georgia called Barry College where students have campus jobs where they're learning things like Salesforce or Workday, right? They're learning software or they're managing projects. I wrote an article for Fast Company recently about Saxby's Coffee, which is a. Is a coffee, a regional coffee chain that has stores on campus that are completely run by students, including everybody from the manager on down. They're responsible for P and L even, and responsible for hiring and firing and human resources decisions. Right? So those things that really integrate the workforce more into the. Into the educational mission of the university. Because right now we see it as a binary world, right? We see, okay, you're going to get educated and then you're going to work. And even when you get into the workforce, as we know, education doesn't stop. You're going to. Especially in this world, you're going to constantly need to be upskilling and reskilling. And we need to get students kind of into that mindset that there is work and learning happening at the same time, that they're not separate.
- [24:42]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And you also talk about how the. When you really look into the details of employment of recent college graduates, it's actually striated between the top universities and the less expensive universities and then the big middle, and it's the middle that's getting hammered. Why is that?
- [24:59]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
It's a fascinating research study out of Harvard. And they didn't actually. The researchers didn't actually study that. But when I asked the researchers, kind of their theories was that if you go to a highly selective University, obviously they're, they're worth it. And you're going to still pay for those students at a less, you know, at the bottom rung, you're going to get like kind of workers who just can get the work done. They may not be the most talented, but they're, they're going to get the work done. And then you kind of have this murky middle where students are neither kind of highly talented or they're, they, you know, they didn't do a lot in college. And so that's where you kind of, you're kind of missing out on that middle. And by the way, most colleges, universities sit in that middle ground. And so my concern if I'm a student right now looking at college and I can't get into one of those highly selective places, is that even if I end up in that murky middle again, going back to what we talked about earlier, get real skills, like, try to figure out, should I get like certificates on the side, should I try to get more jobs, internships, things like that. The more that you could do while you're in college, the better off you're going to be after.
- [26:07]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And what is it you talk about that and you refer to at the top tier, for example, they have the highest skill and you just said talent, right. In the modern world, what is talent and what is skill? What should they be learning?
- [26:23]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
So I think some of it is actual job skills, like whether it's like project management or data visualization and things like that. Right. So I was talking earlier about some of these students and majors that we think of as the humanities. You know, trying to get a real skill that is a, you know, something that employers are looking for. But more than that, and this is where I think the liberal arts could potentially start to make a comeback if we design it in the right way. I often heard from employers that they want students who have some discernment. They want students who can work in teams. They want students who could problem solve. They want students who could just by the way, get the job done. And that often comes from, you know, the ambiguity of a liberal arts degree where everybody says, well, what are you going to do with that degree? A lot of that work, you know, deep reading, deep writing, deep thinking, deep conversation, really helps you with those skills that employers want. The problem is, is that most students graduate with a psychology degree or they graduate with a English degree. They don't know how to talk about that in a job interview, and they don't have any proof that they can actually do those things because many of them haven't done anything in college to show that they haven't done a job, they haven't worked on big projects. So if you could show that along with your degree, I think this is where the liberal arts can actually start to make a little bit of a comeback.
- [27:51]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And so it is different. I mean, when I went to school, I do think I was helped again mainly by the name of the university that I went to, but I could write. I mean, that's something that had been drummed into me. Read something, analyze it, write. I was able to use that. It sounds like that is changing. ChatGPT is pretty good at that.
- [28:09]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
It's pretty good.
- [28:10]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Way faster than a lot of us even now. But certainly when you're really learning to do professional writing and that kind of thing. But teamwork, taking a project from start to finish, hiring and inspiring people, those are all things that AI is not going to be able to.
- [28:28]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
And problem solving, like, how do I. I have a naughty problem here that I have to figure out. Like, you know, ChatGPT probably could help you a little bit by, you know, you interrogate it a little bit. Well, I have this problem I have to solve. How do I do it? And you go through the different steps, but eventually you're going to have to figure that out as a human. And Henry, you know, ChatGPT could do a lot of the work. It could write the first draft, second drafts of a lot of things. You're right about that. But there is this ability to just get stuff done. And this is one thing that I'm hearing not only from college professors, we saw this post pandemic. Students not showing up for class, not handing in assignments, asking for extra time. And then that leads into the workplace where their ability to kind of manage projects and just get stuff done is a real skill now that employers actually want because they're not seen enough in enough college graduates.
- [29:22]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And I have to say, from my own AI experiments in different aspects of creating a publication, that is the piece that actually makes it not an incredible time saver. There are certain aspects of it, and you talk about this in your article too, where it's great at taking notes, it's great at summarizing, it's great at bullet points, it's great at drilling me on different topics to prepare for things. So it does a lot of things that used to I have to do or would have somebody to do, but I can't just press a button and suddenly have something that is worth a human being's time immediately, especially when anybody can go and look it up. So it's that getting stuff done and producing it that's still the hard part. And I know folks in Silicon Valley say, oh, just wait another month to be able to do everything, but it doesn't seem to be going that fast.
- [30:11]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
It doesn't. And I think there is a little bit of discernment. I think we all have had experience with AI where things are just a little bit off and you have to kind of really take it with a little skeptical eye. So there's a little bit of expertise and knowledge that still count. And in fact, there was another study that's been highly cited out of Stanford that looks at this idea of how people with more experience are actually not losing their jobs because that experience helps them with that discernment about what's right and what's wrong with AI.
- [30:43]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And so you've also looked at this from the entry level hiring point of view and you have some companies. So what are companies ideally looking for in students right out of school with respect to AI?
- [30:56]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Well, part of the problem is they're looking for students with essentially a couple of years experience. It's that whole catch 22, right? How do I get experience if nobody will hire me with experience? And so, so around AI, I think they're really, first of all, I think most, most companies don't really know what they're looking for. From what I can tell in talking to a number of not only chief HR people, but the actual people who hire. I mean, that's part of the problem, as you know, with most larger organizations is you have the CEO who wants one thing, you have like chief HR who wants another thing. And then you have the actual people on the ground who do the hiring day to day who need a job done tomorrow, and that's what they're hiring for. So there's not a lot of alignment in a lot of these companies clarity about what they really want. But they do want students with experience just using it, using it and understanding how to use it, you know, what tools they can use, show their work. And this is where I do worry that this kind of policing mentality of higher ed where, where we don't use it or we don't use it in certain classes that students come out and they really don't know how the tools can be used, when they can be used, when they work, when they don't work. That's the piece that I think when I talk to employers that they want is just a greater understanding and colleges and universities, unfortunately are not producing that right now. I, I have said multiple times in other venues that if I were leading a college right now, I would just press pause on a lot of things, run like a really fast sprint project on a strategy around AI, both from running the institution, by the way, on the business side, but also on the learning and teaching side and just really come up with ideas. Because right now what's happening is there's all these incremental steps, or they're doing what Ohio State did, making a big announcement, but not. There's not a lot underneath that to understand how this actually going to be put in place.
- [32:55]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Yeah, and I would say there are a lot of reasons for that. In addition to the fact that education is not an industry that's known for its innovation, which is I have sort of discovered recently talking to my friends who are professors. Professors don't really think they work for their dean. It's not a direct relationship like it is in business, which was very startling to me. I mean, the dean can't tell them what to do. No, they can't. So it's a very fraught situation.
- [33:20]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Well, and they also don't really cooperate across the institution because they think as long as my department is okay, there's a very much of a zero sum game right now in higher ed because there's a, you know, we're in a moment of scarcity. And so what ends up happening is you kind of like, I'm in my department is okay, and I'm going to protect it at all costs. So there's no incentive for me to work with somebody in another school, in another department to kind of figure this thing out, because I don't really want to help them if they go away, who cares? I'm still here. So there's not a institutional mentality around this. There's much more of a my discipline, my department.
- [33:54]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And you had a very interesting example from Carlyle, I think, which is a huge private equity firm that almost anyone interested in finance would be thrilled to be considered to work for or get a job at. And they were using AI in a very proactive way.
- [34:10]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Yeah, they were using it to essentially do a lot of the grunt work, but then at the end, a analyst or somebody else would come in and end up like basically summarizing the work. And so this is where I think, again, where colleges can really show students there's a set of work that you have to do to get a project done. What can AI do? What needs to be checked, what needs to be summarized and what do you need to have knowledge about? And that's the part that I don't think when colleges say we're just shutting it off in this class or we're not being transparent. This is another thing, Henry, that I hear often from professors where, by the way, a couple of professors have been like, caught or somebody's even suing a professor for using AI to grade or to write a syllabus, right? Like professors are using it, but they're not telling their students. And students are using it and they're not telling their professors. And if we had more of a transparent relationship. So a professor comes in and says, you could use it for this assignment and here's how I think we should use it for the assignment. Or students come in and say, here's how I used it for this assignment and was it was really useful, or another student says it wasn't very useful at all for this reason. That's how people learn. But when you make it a again a cheating tool, people are like afraid to talk about it. And that really worries me because that's how we learn coming into the workforce.
- [35:36]
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- [36:03]
Podcast Host - Net Worth and Chill Segment
Week on Net Worth and Chill. I'm talking about what happens after you've mastered the basics how to build wealth that actually lasts for generations. With the top 1% holding nearly a third of the nation's wealth and 98% of them being men, breaking into generational wealth isn't just about getting rich. It's about changing who gets to stay rich. Plus, I'm explaining the great wealth transfer $124 trillion about to change hands over the next 25 years, and what it means for you. I'm an your questions about calculating your net worth, whether you should rent or buy to build wealth, and how to pass your retirement accounts to your kids without losing them to probate court. Whether you're just getting started or already maxing out your 401k, this episode will show you how to think bigger than just making money today. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF on the research.
- [36:50]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Report, which was the Carlyle example that you had, where the analyst has to write a paragraph afterwards. That is one area in my experiments where I used to be paid to write research reports. That was the product that would then be sent out. It would take weeks. Now it takes minutes. And it's good. It's not in the ones that I've seen a staggering work of analytical genius, but it's very good. And my question for you on that is if the human's job is just to write the summary, one of the things that was positive about taking weeks to write a research report and study a company and an industry and everything else is I knew a lot that did not go into the research. And I had tested a lot of theories and what have you. And in fact, one of the pieces of advice after I wrote my first one that I got from my boss was, yeah, that's fine, just throw out. It's 51 pages. Throw out the 50 pages. The only thing that matters is those bullets on the front. Cause that's all anybody's gonna read anyway. Which, fair, everybody's busy. But so how do we as humans, how do we still learn and how do we gather the judgment to be able to put that decision paragraph on there?
- [37:58]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question that I haven't quite figured out yet because I think what colleges are going to have to do. You know, you mentioned your early work. A lot of friends who worked for McKinsey said, you know, my first job at McKinsey was like putting together slides and other things. Like all, by the way, all the things that ChatGPT can do now or AI can do and then, by the way, but that taught me what I needed to get the second job and the third job and eventually, you know, leave and do other things. And when you take out that bottom rung, who's going to do that? That's where, as you said, most of the knowledge is created. Our college is going to have to take that on in some way. And they're not very good at that, as we discussed. Right. They don't think it's their job to prepare students for those first jobs. And now we're asking them almost to help them do those first jobs while they're in college. And Henry, that's a part that I haven't quite figured out whose role that's going to be. But we can't have. We have to have some bridge to get students from college to career. And if those first jobs used to be that Bridge and they no longer exist or they no longer exist in the same way. Who fills that role? I don't know the answer to that yet. I hope maybe one of your listeners has a smart answer to that.
- [39:10]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Great. If you do, please let us know, listeners. We'd love to hear it. Yeah. You also had another statistic that I hadn't seen before, which was very startling to me, about the percentage of expertise that we learn from studying versus doing versus peers. Tell us about that.
- [39:27]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Yeah. Very little we learn from actually in the classroom. And I think this goes back to what I said earlier, where we used to think there's classroom learning and then there's like on the job, hands on learning. Never shall the two mix. If I were to radically redesign college, it would be something that Matt Singelman from Burning Glass Institute said in the story. He said, we used to think of, you know, college with job on the side. Now we think of job with college on the side.
- [39:56]
Podcast Host - Segment Introducer
Right.
- [39:56]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
We have to think of these as much more integrated. I would be putting students, you know, constantly in a work environment or even on the college side. There's a lot of companies that will have colleges work on college classes, work on projects for them. Like, I would constantly be putting students into a workplace environment while they're learning, because that's that work. This is somebody from the chief learning officer at Workday who mentioned this. Like 80 to 85% of your learning is either going to come from actually doing it or by your peers, not by a professor at the front of the room.
- [40:32]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
So you've talked to everybody. You have a daughter who's getting there, who presumably, if it's at all like my relationship with my daughters back then was they were not going to listen to a word I said, never do. I was better off not saying anything. But you probably get advice or ask questions from other parents or other people. What do you advise today's high school students to do as they're thinking about college and AI and all of that?
- [40:57]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Well, I think first of all, use the tools. Right. Like, I'm constantly looking at how other people, again, peer learning, how other people are using these tools. I think we still have to go to college. I mean, there's, I know there's a whole narrative out there right now about don't go to college. But I, you know, looking at all the data from the past, I understand past is no necessarily a precursor to the future, but we know that students who go to college not only make more economically over time, although that's slowing down, they have more optionality, they have more choices, they could move up and out. There's just a lot more flexibility that they have with the degree. So that's one thing I'm telling my daughter is don't worry about what you're going to major in. Majors are going to change. Just go and use the tools, learn as much as you can and then at some point you are going to have to specialize and that's when you're going to get either this on the ground, on the job training, you're going to go and get a certificate in something that will teach you a specific skill. But you're going to kind of be this triple threat graduate in some way. Right. You're going to have have the background knowledge, you're going to have very specific domain knowledge and you're going to have like the hands on learning. And unfortunately what I think ends up happening is that many students leave college with maybe one or two of those things, but they don't often leave with the complete package. Often because they trust colleges to, you know, the degree is going to do it for me and that not the case anymore. And whose fault is that? I, I don't want to put this all on parents and students because when you're paying $100,000 for a product, you should trust that product to educate you in the right way. I think it's kind of a combination of parents, students, employers and colleges. But we don't have these systems really work together right now.
- [42:44]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Yeah, I think the sooner everybody realizes that the dean of the college is not driving the bus that you are riding on to your future career and in fact you have to be the driver the better in life and everything else. All right, so to close, let's look forward. So given what you know about universities and how slow the industry is to change and so forth, but how much pressure there is on it from multiple fronts, not just AI and so forth. Let's go out five to 10 years. What does college look like?
- [43:17]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
So first of all, I think we'll have fewer colleges. We are in a demographic cliff now with 18 year olds. And I think some colleges will close, I think other colleges will pivot and start to serve adult students. Because one of the things we didn't talk about is how do we train millions and tens of millions of adults now who are in the workforce and need to learn these skills as well. And I think colleges can play a role. I don't think they're the only player. Employers are obviously the player are player as well. So I think that some colleges will pivot to that. I also think that the colleges that are going to survive beyond, by the way, the biggest brand names, I think they're, they're safe is those colleges that come up with different pathways from high school into college and through college. So for example, you know, two year degrees that you build an apprenticeship around, you know, online and in person so that students could intern during the year. One of the things that didn't make the article, but Simon Coe, who used to head up early career recruiting at Raymond James, told me, is that, you know, the summer internship, it's kind of dead in some ways because it's not the best time. You know, the middle of August is not the best time to have somebody in the office. So how do you get more students to intern, for example, during the school year, especially if they're not in a big city? Well, could they take online courses while they're interning? So I think there's has to be. The traditional four year old full time residential model is definitely going to be in place at the top schools. But for everyone else we're going to have to think about a model that is a lot more flexible and different and allows people to get that experience as they're learning.
- [45:01]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And do we ever get to the point. And it can be even broader than college, certainly in high school or primary school or post grad, where for lack of a better description, if you see the first most recent series of Star Trek movies, when young Spock is on Vulcan, he and all of his peers are in these little sort of half bowls and they each have their own AI professor who's teaching them everything. And there's a, there's a human wander, I'm sorry, a Vulcan wandering around sort of supervising everybody, it seems with these tools that we should ultimately work towards something like that. Which is.
- [45:35]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Yes, more individualized learning.
- [45:37]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Exactly, much more. Because that is the way you learn is when somebody is right there with you and you're being forced to demonstrate that you've learned everything before you move on. It's incredibly powerful. We're all different. We all learn best in different ways. So it seems like that's an opportunity. Do you think we get there in the near, not to Vulcan? I realize that that sounds like a horrible dystopia to a lot of people. I don't mean that. But just much more individualized learning.
- [46:04]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
I'm skeptical, I'm hopeful. But I'm also skeptical because of something you've mentioned a couple of times, times higher education Education in general, not only higher ed, but K12 as well, is incredibly reluctant to change. It's incredibly risk averse. And I, you know, for example, you know, one of the reasons education costs so much is because it requires a lot of people. There's a lot of work now that can be done on college campuses by AI, especially kind of in the administrative and staff class. And whenever I ask professor, whenever I ask college leaders about this, they're like, yeah, but you know, we don't want to, you know, lay people off. We don't want to fire them. We'll wait till they retire and then we'll get those cost savings. I mean, that is not the way almost any other industry works. And so I, the reason I'm skeptical is because they will hold on to tradition as long as they can. And by the time they're ready to let go, I fear for some places it will just be too late.
- [47:02]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
And so then maybe the place we really start to see it is in corporate training, which is a massive industry that nobody hears about and is very difficult. And having been a CEO, it's incredibly important. You want to help your folks get as competent as possible as fast as possible. And yet the variation in the teacher, what they happen to like that. You want a way to standardize it without it and have it be individualized and have it be a single message. Very difficult. But that seems to me would be exactly what you could design with the new tools.
- [47:34]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
Well, as we know through the history of innovation, it's always external players that push the, you know, the incumbents either out or to change again. The incumbents in higher ed, they just are so reluctant and I'm hopeful, but I'm also just skeptical that they will.
- [47:53]
Podcast Host - Interviewer
Jeff, Campus AI Crisis is a great article. It's a privilege to talk to you. So thank you so much for joining.
- [47:58]
Jeff Selingo - Higher Education Journalist and Author
It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [48:10]
Podcast Host - Sponsor Announcer
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