Preparing Students for an AI-Infused Workforce

Relevant Links:

“AI Is Not Just Ending Entry-Level Jobs. It’s the End of the Career Ladder as We Know It,” CNBC“

The Rise of AI Will Make Liberal Arts Degrees Popular Again. Here’s Why,” in Inc magazine.

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

3:49 - What Is an AI-Ready Graduate?

7:52 - How AI is Changing Early-Career Jobs

11:00 - What Skills and Mindsets Do Students Need?

14:31 - How Colleges Can Increase Experiential Education With Employers

22:19 - What Colleges Do As Employers Pull Back on Internships

28:37 - What is the Purpose of College in an AI World?

34:14 - How the Signaling Power of College Could Change in the AI Era

37:38 - How Students Are Using AI to Create

41:25 - Will AI Bring Resurgence of Liberal Arts?

45:50 - How Creativity is Important Even in the Finance Sector

49:31 - Why AI is More Creative Than Humans

51:40 - What Colleges Can Do in the Next 12 Months

Transcript

Jeff Selingo

Hi, Future U listeners. Jeff Selingo here.

You know, it's hard to believe that ChatGPT was released just three years ago. So much of the discussion in higher ed since then has been on the impact of large language models and what they're capable of.

In many ways, higher ed sees AI as a threat, which I, for one, think is a mistake because it's already shaping institutions on all fronts, how we teach, how students learn, and how employers hire. The question we're going to tackle on today's episode is how we harness AI as an opportunity so that college graduates are ready for a world where human skills and creativity complement AI.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience of college and university leaders and faculty members at the Adobe EduMax Conference in San Jose in October. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as Michael Horn and I enjoyed leading the conversation.

Here you go.

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Jeff Selingo

Welcome, everyone. So it's so good to be here in San Jose with all of you, and a huge thank you to Adobe for hosting us today at EduMax 2025.

Michael Horn

And the context for why we are gathering and our conversation today is AI.

As we know, AI is reshaping higher education on all sorts of fronts — from how we teach and how students learn to how employers hire. And in many ways higher ed sees AI — we should recognize it — they see it as a threat. But we also know that it's also an opportunity right now.

And during today's discussion we're going to try to lean in on the opportunity framing specifically. We wanna dig deeper on how we can harness AI so that graduates are ready for a world where human skills and creativity complement AI rather than compete with it.

Jeff Selingo

And today, we have three really interesting perspectives on this.

We have Simon Kho with us, who's founder of Kho Labs, a consultancy created to partner with organizations in reimagining creating talent solutions to achieve business growth ambitions. He has formerly led the global early careers function at JPMorgan, KPMG, Discover Financial Services, and Raymond James Financial. So as we're thinking about how we're preparing the next generation of leaders in all different industries, Simon is going to bring an employer perspective with us today.

We also have Allison Salisbury, who is founder and CEO of Humanist Venture Studio here in California, who will also be bringing the perspective not only of employers, but also how AI is intersecting with both education and employers as well.

And finally, Jennifer Sparrow, who is associate vice president for research and instructional technology and chief academic technology officer at NYU, New York University.

Welcome.

Michael Horn

Sort of the warm-up question, if you will, the lightning round question. We can take it straight around. Jennifer, you can kick us off.

When you hear the phrase right now, 'AI-ready graduate,' what does that mean to you from the position you sit in?

Jennifer Sparrow

Sure. From my perspective, I was thinking about this extensively, both once you got the questions and then on the flight here and certainly this morning as I was writing out my answers at the Marriott this morning. But as I'm thinking about this and as we've been talking about it at NYU, and thanks for the cheering crowd up there. I appreciate it, my section up there.

I think about the 'AI-ready graduate' as a learner who's been given the opportunity to really practice and sharpen their skills in what is probably more classically called a liberal arts education. Critical thinking, creative problem solving, cross-cultural communication, something I love to call ‘failure fluency,’ but probably is more lovingly called grit across this, technological adaptability and curiosity. Right? We want students to have had that opportunity to do all of those things: to practice, to fail, and try them again. And to understand where AI is appropriate for use and where it isn't appropriate for us to be able to utilize it. And so that's what I think of when I think of an 'AI-ready graduate.'

Michael Horn

Simon?

Simon Kho

Well, I think for the 'AI-ready graduate,' I think the immediate answer is, 'Can they do it better than our own people can?'

And we've been seeing this with students. Right? Like, we've hired students because we want them to have the tech skills. Now we want them to have the AI skills because we don't really understand it.

If you talk to hiring managers I would put money down that most of them are like, well 'We kind of use it this way.' And you're going to get very inconsistent answers even within one organization, much less across an industry or across all industries. So when you're trying to prepare all of your students, right, beyond tech or financial services in any kind of role, I think that we're still struggling to figure out what does that actually mean?

From a skill standpoint, it is around 'Can they use it?' 'Are they fluent, are they kind of conversational in using it?' But I think the skills that we are looking at have to think beyond AI.

The thing that keeps me up at night is the fact that we're having the conversation around' 'Does AI replace student hiring?' Right? And you've probably heard this. Certainly I will talk more about this. It's my soapbox. But you know, we don't know. We don't know what our needs are in the immediate term, but it's easy to say AI can do a lot of things that our entry-level college hires can do. But then if we look at second, third, fourth year out, we don't have the skills to be able to use the kind of the work that's produced by AI.

So that's where the dialogue that needs to happen across employers, academics, career services, right, and vendors even. Like, how do we have this conversation? I'm really excited to be here because I don't see us having this conversation at this scale.

Allison Salisbury

I think the most exciting and important shift when we talk about an 'AI-ready learner' and worker is actually the shift from being a consumer of AI to being a creator with it. And so when you watch learners and I'd argue workers who continue to be learners their entire lives create apps or games or create a project with AI, you see this flip that changes the relationship to learning and work. And I was recently with the chief people officer of Zapier, a leading technology and AI company, and they published an AI-fluency framework for their own workforce that I think is relevant to any company, any institution, and any learner anywhere. And what's interesting about that is about two-thirds of it have nothing to do with technological skills. It's things like creative confidence, ethical judgment, and this mindset that the world is editable — that you can just build things.

And I think in many ways AI has done for human agency and for creative power what sort of reading and the printing press did for knowledge. And that is an incredibly exciting shift. And so I think if the project of higher education, I think, increasingly needs to be how we help cultivate that human agency among learners so that they graduate with this self-belief and self-confidence that they can build things in collaboration both with other humans, but also with nonhuman intelligence as well.

Jeff Selingo

I like that idea of confidence. Like how do we build confidence in them?

So Simon, you just have been in the financial services industry. And when we think about what is happening with early careers right now, particularly around AI eating jobs, which you see often in the press these days, we think of that both in technology and financial services.

So where have you seen AI kind of already change the early-career roles, and what does that mean?

Simon Kho

Yeah. So if you think about, you know, a fresh grad or a new college grad, part of the first year that's critical is helping them take their textbook or academic knowledge and apply it practically. Right?

A lot of organizations and banks now have invested in a one- or two-year curriculum for college new hires. They're experiential learners. So, you know, academics typically do a great job in teaching concepts, but now they come into the workplace and they need to learn the fundamentals of processes. And so a lot of those first year roles are some of the kind of tactical basic execution roles, which AI can replace. And so that's what's coming up.

And so, you know, to pull the curtain back behind the conversations we have internally. It's real easy to say, 'college students are expensive.' Not from a salary standpoint, but the investment that we have to make in bringing them in, doing the internship, training them as interns, bringing them as new hires, training them for up to two years, the time to productivity of a college new hire. You have to wait eighteen months. By the way, they get really fidgety and then they decide they want to go to another job. So you can see the challenges that we're having from an HR standpoint around, 'Where are we getting value, will AI solve this for us?'

The bigger issue really for us is, well, two issues. Number one, when will we have the second and third year staff that we need if we're not hiring them in at the first-year level? It's really easy to think about it that way. The other problem that we're having is, fine, we can hire people at the second- and third-year level, but if they haven't done the work, do they actually understand the work that AI is producing?

One of the things that we're seeing. The way we're using AI — so it's simplifying the way we do kind of data analysis, reports, research. Right? All of the kind of like things that you could do coming out of a classroom. But the application of that, the interpretation of the data, the analysis, and then the collaboration across teams with that information, that's where we really need the human element. That's where we need great graduates that understand how to do that. But I think we're not even having the right conversations internally. Right?

So, it replaces some of the baseline work. And I think we have to accept the fact that it's going to happen. You know, I remember talking to a leader who said, 'What if we just choose not to use AI?' I'm like, 'Well, let's look at productivity.' Right? 'Let's look at the pressure that you have on the time that we spend and how much that's gonna impact bottom line.' So we have to figure out how we're gonna do it.

But in reality most teams are still struggling a little bit with where do we use it responsibly. And then what we're also seeing, I know it's a bit of a run on, so sorry, is that our students are our new hires are very quick to say, 'Whatever AI pushes out, we just present that.' And we're finding a lot of errors in the work that's happening there as well. So we're struggling. We don't know just yet. Again, every organization is slightly different in how advanced they are in figuring this out.

Jeff Selingo

Right. So for all the academics in the room who work at a variety of different colleges and universities, what are some of the more important skills and mindsets do you think? What are some of the more important skills and mindsets that you think they need coming out?

Simon Kho

Okay. So beyond learning and being comfortable with the AI platforms, right, I think it's going to require — and prompt engineering, all that other sort of learning languages — but understanding kind of data, data interpretation, data analysis. I think learning how to deal with output of what AI is producing, right?

But then I think the more important skills are the cross-cut collaboration skills, influencing and communication skills. Because those are the human skills that are required to take that information and create value and present that to other teams, leaders, clients.

So I think from that perspective, that's really the skills that you may not see right away, may not need right away from a college grad, but eventually, within the first two years that they're in the workplace, they're going to need to be able to demonstrate those types of skills.

Michael Horn

There's something interesting there because you're talking about some of this may be later, but also there's this pressure for that entry-level person to actually bring skills and be better than the existing. That's a big shift. I wanna turn to Allison here because you heard that answer, really on two different aspects, really, of how it's changing the ladder, but also the skills, mindsets, how that interplays with knowledge and understanding of how a particular company goes about its work. I'd love your take that draws from your vantage point.

What are you seeing as the skills, mindsets, and how that interplays with domain-specific knowledge and so forth that it's critical for students to bring if AI is increasingly the expectation as they get into the world of work?

Allison Salisbury

Yeah. I think what's happening to the early career ladder is maybe one of the most important things happening in education right now. I think it is one of the most important things to be looking at as educators. And because functionally what's happening is two things. You're expecting a 22-year-old or someone into their first professional job to increasingly be doing the job we used to require of a 27 year old. And so you're witnessing something on the order of an experience gap of three to five years in the job descriptions that are being posted for entry-level work.

So we've been talking about the skills gap for the last 15 to 20 years. I think the next 15 to 20 we're going to be talking about the experience gap. And it's only going to get harder.

I mean when you look at the data, it's something like 8% of early-career roles have gone away compared to expert roles, just in the last year or two. And I would generally expect that curve to be linear, if not exponential.

And so then the question is sort of, 'What do we do about it?' And specifically, 'What do institutions do about it?' And I do think that there is a win-win strategy here. We have long known experiential learning and applied learning and project-based learning is a highly efficacious way for students to master the skills and competencies required of them. For some reason we don't do it. You all probably know better than I do.

But I think that this is a bit of a kick in the butt to say, okay, if the experience gap is even bigger than the skills gap, what might it look like for every postsecondary learner to have 50% of their experience as a learner be applied. Applied in projects, applied in internships, applied in simulations, applied in their community. So that they are actually gaining the fluency of application while they are learners so that they can overcome that skills gap on the other side of it. And I think that would be a tremendous, tremendous design challenge for higher education to take on.

Michael Horn

So I want to stay with you there and let you opine about how you would do that design challenge. Because you've worked at Davidson. You design products and services in companies to work with higher ed. Right? This is something you think about. And as I was reflecting on your answer, it occurred to me that for many years the answer of education when we've expected more from graduates is just to increase the number of years of education For economic reasons and a whole host of other sets of pressures right now, that might not be practical. But how do we get to a 50% applied set of experiences? What would you do as you look at it?

And then, Simon, jump in right after, before we bring Jennifer into the conversation.

Allison Salisbury

Yeah. I think we have some models out there that work.

I mean, the co-op model is an obvious one that many of us have admired for a very long time. It requires a fundamental restructuring around the academic project of the institution. But I do think that is the level of concern I have for college graduates today, that it's actually worth that redesign. Whether it's a co-op model that weaves work and learning in a very formal way for credit within the undergraduate experience.

I think increasingly you're seeing AR and VR take off in pretty tremendous ways that allow for low-risk, high-repetition practice. I think increasingly, institutions, especially as they adopt AI technologies for teaching and learning, should be really calling for — like demanding — AI solutions that are not just one-to-one instruction and practice, but are actually designed to create and facilitate social learning, social experiences, and project-based learning as teams. There's absolutely no reason why AI can't facilitate that. It doesn't have to be a one-to-one tutoring and coaching experience. It should be a platform that creates group collaboration and that allows us to scale the kind of feedback and practice that historically was really hard to do because of faculty-student ratios.

Those are just some of the things that I think are on the table for the future.

I will say, one headwind here is that employers, because they increasingly are hiring less for entry-level roles, they're also starting to cancel their internships. They're canceling their early-career programs. They're making themselves less available for project-based learning, for gig work, for those summer experiences that are so formative to so many learners. And so I'm not exactly sure where we make that up. I think that is like one of the collective action problems that we're gonna see play out over the next decade.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And that's the question actually I have, Simon, as you jump into the same question, I would love your thinking about this because what Allison just brought up: how we reduce the friction for employers to offer these experiences, derisk it, make it less expensive, less taxing on their current employees who are like, 'Yeah, I get it. It's important three years from now, but I've got here and now urgent stuff that just needs to get done. Am I really gonna allocate time to that?'

How do we make this more feasible on the employer side so that they do the sorts of things Allison just described?

Simon Kho

I 100% agree with that. You know, we've taken on the responsibility of training. Interns, full time, right. You know, early careers now is not just acquisition, but it's also development, so anything that we can do to partner to give them tangible experience. But then that the students can also understand the skills that they're gaining, because sometimes they're going through these projects, even case competitions, or if they're holding a student leadership position, and I ask them, 'What skills have you developed in that role?' And they can't answer that question, I'm like, 'God, that's a massive miss.' So it's not necessarily just work experience, it's any sort of experience.

So one thing I would say is, 'Have you mapped out the skills that we believe students need to have?' And then maybe at the university setting — whether it's in the classroom, whether it's at a work-study role, whether it's, you know, a case competition, a hackathon — actually map it back to, 'What skills are you gaining?' So that they actually understand that this is still part of that learning, and they're gaining a kind of ... They're adding to their toolkit that they're going to walk into the workplace with. But also the tangible part about job employment and experience.

The summer internship has always been the holy grail, right? Everyone thinks they should have it. I mean, you all know, we all like to travel during the summer. I can't get hiring managers to show up sometimes and meet with their students during the summer. By the way, our workloads are usually down during the summer. Right? And depending on, in financial services, when your year end and quarter ends are, we don't really necessarily have the work. And to try to manage a 19- or 20-year-old for 12 weeks, right, how much are we really kind of teaching them in that environment?

So the schools that have pivoted and I think a lot of the Southwest schools ... Back in my KPMG days, we loved the schools in Texas, because you guys did the winter co-ops or winter internships, which by the way, was a lot better for accounting firms than the summers, right? And so then you could create different opportunities that met the business demand around that. Co-ops are great. I do love co-op programs. But it's hard to navigate, 'How do you then change the academic cycle?' When then you're doing co-curricular, you know, time off.

Micro-internships, I can't figure out why we haven't landed that. I think it's because it takes so much time to ramp up that if it's a four-week internship, takes them a week and a half to actually learn the job, so then what's the value? I think we need to rethink that.

But I do think that we're now facing the time where we have to think differently around this.

The couple other pieces that I would say is thinking about the projects, the things that you can directly impact, how do you shape those like they are work projects? Right. So that there's very clear deliverables, they have to meet with you as the client in terms of understanding the assignment, they think about the presentation, there's a feedback loop. Things like that that will create — simulate some job type experiences that you can do.

And then the final piece is, maybe it's not direct work, but I've seen some successful models where they tap into alumni or recent grads that come in and work with students around, 'What's that real-life perspective?' Right? So while it may not be direct work, they're gaining that perspective around classroom work or projects that they're doing, but you can leverage your alumni because if nothing else I can tell you in college recruiting, I can't stop my alumni from coming to my door saying, 'We don't hire enough students from X university.' So, use your alumni. They are a pain in my butt, but they are advocates for the university, so get them involved in how they can help educate and prepare students from your universities to enter the workforce.

Jeff Selingo

Okay. So, Jennifer, that was a huge list. Right. But go ahead.

Jennifer Sparrow

But I wanna flip this on its head a little bit, which is I would ... If we're doing our jobs as higher ed institutions and giving students the skills that they need, not only around those liberal arts skills of critical thinking, creative problem solving, but also around the AI — not only the literacy, but I would call it a fluency of how are we co-creators of knowledge in this.

I would encourage employers to think about this young batch of students coming out as opportunities for the workforce to learn because I would envision... Again, I spent a a short time in industry, but I've spent most of my career in higher education. But I know that there are folks that are like, 'Oh, I don't touch it.' Right? In industry. Right? 'I don't touch it. I don't know how to use it.' And so I think there's an opportunity, whether your folks are there in the summertime or not, to bring in these students who are using it every single day. Who are using it on a variety of problems that they're encountering. They understand how to get the data out of it. And if we're doing our jobs of making them more literate and fluent around how to interpret that data, leverage this as an opportunity to share both ways. Right?

And so we've seen this with other technologies. Right? There's a groundswell of students who are starting to use these tools. Our faculty maybe aren't as quick to use these tools, and we as an institution are trying to keep up and close that gap.

And so I do think it's really important for us to think about this as bidirectional. It empowers your student workers, your student interns to bring something to the table that maybe they couldn't have brought to the table as a standard internship before where they were all consuming in the learning.

Jeff Selingo

So I'm kind of curious about the laundry list that both Allison and Simon laid out about what universities need to do. There's a lot of demands on colleges and universities right now. But around this kind of competency gap, this experience gap.

And I'm more curious, not about the technical skills necessarily, but the human creative skills that often happen in internships, early careers, where students learn to work with others, learn to problem-solve. And learn to use kind of the creative skills especially that they learned in college.

If those opportunities are reduced or disappear, what does that mean for colleges and universities? So how can institutions… what should they be doing or what are they doing? What are you even doing at NYU to try to potentially fill this gap?

Jennifer Sparrow

Sure. And I agree with Allison that we really need to figure out how we grow the most human skills that we need to do and do so in a way that is real world — real-world based. Because those are the places where we know, students will learn.

And so I think part of this is maybe and again, I'm maybe taking a rose-colored glasses perspective on this. I don't see the end of higher education. So I'll just let everybody take a deep breath. It's fine. Thank you.

Jeff Selingo

Sure. That's good news to everybody.

Jennifer Sparrow

Yeah. Right. I do see opportunity for us to rethink curriculum. And AI as a tool for cheating is giving us an opportunity to do that. Right? So this fear that AI is going to do all the work for a student is really, I think, an opportunity for us to think about more of those collaborative problems that we present to students. How do we reshape the kinds of work that we're asking students to output that isn't just a paper that could be written by AI and then turned in as their own — whether they've looked at it and edited it or not. Right? Although those are probably important learning skills as well that we need to go back and check the work.

I think there are other things that we need to be doing as an institution or as higher ed in general. One of those is providing equitable access to the tools. We certainly have a divide between those students that have the ability and access to resources around the most advanced and most costly AI tools. We as an institution want to make sure that we're not increasing that gap. So, 'How do we provide access to those tools?' I think is really important.

I think it is really important for us right now in closing that gap between what our students are bringing to the table and what our faculty are bringing to the table is a space, both physical and psychologically safe space, that allow faculty to try new things. So how do they come in and try AI?

If you go in and talk to faculty right now, and this has been true. ChatGPT is a little over 1,000 days old. So let's think about that. It's three years old. Think about a three-year old and what they're able to do. And so we're asking faculty to change a lifetime of how they've done things based on a three-year-old tool. When you ask them how many have used AI, and we're not talking abou in Google Maps. Right? But how many of them are using AI in their own personal work? And we're still seeing 60% to 70% of faculty are not raising their hands. And so right. So this is a huge challenge. Right?

Jeff Selingo

And this is at, you know. This is at NYU, like a big research university. Right?

Jennifer Sparrow

This is everywhere I've been. Right? It is at NYU, but also everywhere that I've been. Right? So we need to provide a safe space for faculty to try that. We need to give them permission to get in there and try and fail. We wanna provide , development opportunities for faculty. We wanna provide the lowest barrier of entry for them to change their curriculum. So how do we provide elbow-to-elbow support to rethink how they do more of those problem-based learning activities? And I think we really need to be thinking about, ‘What does the conversation look like with AI as a co-creator of knowledge?’

Jeff Selingo

So, Jennifer, what needs to happen? So for everybody in the room here who works at colleges and universities, what needs to happen for that safe space to happen? Right? So like last night at the reception, you know, there were all these Adobe tools and we were using them. It was just kind of fun.

Jennifer Sparrow

Oh, great.

Jeff Selingo

It was fun. Right? Learning is supposed to be fun.

Jennifer Sparrow

I love that. I mean, I love the fun piece. This, 'How do we make it fun?'

Jeff Selingo

How do we make it fun for them to understand how they could be co-creators in the classroom?

Jennifer Sparrow

Right. I also would add that we wanna provide access to boring AI. Okay. Right? So the things that faculty hate doing. What do you hate to do? And that's how sometimes I start this conversation with faculty, is, 'What do you wanna stop doing?' What is the thing in your day that you're like, 'Ugh, I have to get up and do that today.' But then I get to teach. Right? And so figuring out how to leverage those AI tools to get rid of that mundane, those repetitive tasks, I think is critically important. So I think that's number one.

I think number two is we really need to be able to say to faculty, 'When you do these things, what does it free you up to do that makes you more human?' Did you come to the university to, I don't know, write your PNT dossier? Probably not. Right. You came to the university to do research, to have contact with students, to create new knowledge. And so I think that's really just a critical piece in how we showcase, 'Here's the boring AI, and this is what it can take off your plate that allows you to have those more human contacts with folks.'

Jeff Selingo

Great

Jennifer Sparrow

I would say for students, we need to talk about AI literacy. So we need to understand: 'When should I use this? When shouldn't I use this? What are the ethical use cases? How do I interpret the data that comes out of this?' We need to understand how to vet and critically examine how their learning shifts with these tools. Right? So 18-year-olds probably can't tell you, 'This is why learning is important.' And so if we're doing our job as educators, I think we have to be focused on those kinds of things.

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Michael Horn

Well, that's centering a lot of metacognitive processes. Right? A sense of, 'Why?' So a sense of purpose and things of that nature.

I wanna switch gears just a little bit, which is into the purpose of higher ed more generally, which you're inviting in a lot of your answers there. I'd love you to jump in and then Allison, I'd love you afterwards. Because there is this other piece of it. And Jeff and I have had a debate about this on Future U that people can listen to and on our answers.

But I'd love your takes where if AI can design a course, it can deliver it, it can frankly take the course, to say nothing of helping the student. They can actually just take it. Right? In some places it's enrolling as students.

What's the purpose of college in this AI world?

Jennifer Sparrow

So I appreciate the existential question this morning. And I really debated …

Michael Horn

I hope you've had your coffee.

Jennifer Sparrow

Diet Coke, yes. So thank you.

I really debated this and, you know, we've been noodling on these questions for, you know, about ten days now. And I debated whether or not I was gonna come in with a very optimistic perspective or if I was gonna bow down to the AI overlords. And I've decided I'm not gonna bow down to the AI overlords today. Thank you.

Michael Horn

It seems like 90% are in support of that. I don't know what the 10% are. But yeah.

Jennifer Sparrow

I appreciate that. I don't know. Maybe they're just AI bots. Thank you for your support.

I think the role of college is gonna be increasingly more about building and reinforcing and celebrating that which makes us truly human. So the creativity skills, the human connections that we create. I think we're in incredibly divisive times in our in our public discourse. And so how do we go back to a place where discourse is welcome and and can be done in a way that is polite and educated and respectful? Yeah. Thank you.

I wanna I think for 28 years I've been trying to help faculty and learners understand how they leverage technology to solve today's problems. What I think is really interesting is we're going to give students and learners at our institutions — or we should be giving students and learners at our institutions — the opportunity to invent the next problems. Right? We don't even know what those are yet. And so we wanna give them the opportunity to be inventors of those problems, and then how do we solve them together.

Jeff Selingo

But we need to create room in the curriculum to do that. Correct?

Jennifer Sparrow

Correct. And so I do think it takes an opportunity...

Again, we have to start both from the student demand of what we're doing to do differently and faculty education to be able to do that. So I don't have a like, 'Here's our script, here's our playbook for how to go and do this.' I wish I did. I'm sure I could go on the circuit and help people. But I just don't.

Jeff Selingo

You should. Because I think that's one thing that Michael and I brought up recently when we talked about this is that it really requires almost a redesign of the university.

Michael Horn

And I wanna hear, Allison, your take on this as well, right? What do you see as the purpose and what are the principles that flow from that perhaps?

Allison Salisbury

Yeah. I've long liked a framework around the purpose of education at the individual level. Because I think you have another conversation about the purpose of higher education at the societal level.

But at the individual level, I think about it as skills, social capital and occupational identity. So what do you know how to do? Who do you know? And what's the network of relationships you draw on for support and advice and help? And then occupational identity, which I think is like shockingly never talked about, but it's what you believe you can be, what you want to become.

And I think the project of education, especially higher education, has to equally cultivate the three and then the relationship between the three. And we become very obsessed with skills because it's something that you can see in data. It's something that can be quantified. We have all this language around the skills gap.

But I actually think when you look at, ‘What creates opportunity — what provides support?’ It's social capital.

And when you look at, 'What is the compass someone uses to make decisions about the courses they take, the majors they do, the jobs that they want, what they believe their purpose as a person and as a worker is in this world?' It comes from occupational identity.

And so I think the project of higher education increasingly needs to center on all three.

And I think that sort of connects to one of the biggest shifts that you'll hear people talk about, which is we have to shift the purpose of all education at all levels from knowledge acquisition and knowledge dissemination — what you know — to what you know how to do with what you know. And that's coming back to sort of some of my original comments on agency and this belief that you are a creator in the world, that you can go build things, that you can build things with humans, that you can build things with nonhuman intelligence. And I believe that that needs to be the real backbone of what we're preparing people to go do in the world. And that's in stark contrast to how we currently prepare. Our successful student is actually one that takes direction very well — that fulfills requirements to a T.

Jeff Selingo

Checks boxes.

Allison Salisbury

Checks boxes. Yes.

I mean Carl Sagan wrote about this when it came to how we prepare scientists and how we're really doing a very poor job of it. And it's because entry-level science classes are memorization. It's not 'til much later on in your scientific career where you actually invent new knowledge. And he argued that actually is systematically filtering out the people who become the best scientists. I think that's true now across all disciplines. Because I think the future of almost every job is a future where people have to be creators. Because if you're not creating, it's 100% going to be done by a robot.

Michael Horn

So I wanna lean in on some of the things that are implicit on that.

But Simon, I wanna take it in a slightly different direction, which is that the college degree has long held signaling power, right, to employers about prospective employees. And frankly, the stronger the signal, historically speaking, that meant the more selective the institution and a set of gates, if you will, on the front end of that.

I'm curious how you think that signaling power might or might not change in an AI world? Particularly given what Allison was saying around the emphasis of not just what we assume employees have experienced and know, but, like, the evidence perhaps around what they know and what they can do with it. And who knows what they can do with it as well, and how that may or may not change.

Simon Kho

Right, so as potentially one of the oldest college recruiters out there I can talk about what it used to be like 30 years ago. We knew that we would have a relationship with a certain university. We know the academic curriculum. We know what that degree means, right? We know what they should know, and that would be a good hire. That's kind of left. You know, that's not on the table anymore. And you look at kind of what's happened, especially after COVID, like we've stopped going to campuses, right? We can do everything through Handshake, 12Twenty, Ripple Match. There are actually tools that will match students with our job profile, so why do we even need to go to schools anymore?

So the brand of the school, I mean, it still matters to many people, but probably not as significant anymore, even majors.

Jeff Selingo

Could you say that louder for people in the back?

Simon Kho

The brand of a school and the cost of your education doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to.

Right, yes, I will admit that I've worked for companies that are like, 'If we don't recruit from Ivy League schools, then we're not getting the best talent.' So that conversation is still happening. But when we're school agnostic in the way we recruit, — that we're not going to the career fairs, we're not going into the classrooms — I think we're eroding the relationship with with the university so we have to figure out, 'How do we pull that back together?'

But the fact is, right, even majors don't matter. Half of my tech hires at Raymond James weren't computer science majors, right. And some of them didn't even complete their undergraduate degree. They came out of boot camp. So we're looking for skills in a different way.

One thing that, you know, Allison said that I'd like to just follow-up on is if we start thinking differently around job skill versus career skill, right? So there's a jobs go around how to do the job that you're being hired into, but we all know that today's students are very happy being job-hoppers, how they reinvent themselves. Right? And so the career skill is, 'How do you kind of prepare yourself to be an effective career professional to solve the problems that haven't even been created yet?'

You know, think about five years ago, we weren't talking about AI. And now look at us trying to figure it out, right? I'm thinking what's the next thing three years from now? And we need a workforce that can be agile, that can problem solve, that can think these things through, that can be part of our leadership teams, that can influence senior leaders, that can talk to clients, like all of these skills are the skills that a college degree is going to get you. Right?

So I think more and more so we need to lean into the value of a college education is a broader set of skills and not simply just preparing you to get that first job out of college.

The hardest part, for those of you who are deans and senior administrators, you're getting calls from parents saying, we just spent $400,000 on our kid's education, he can't get a job. So we have the dual responsibility in doing that. But I do think that the value of college education is there. We just have to think differently about how we talk about that.

Jeff Selingo

So I wanna come back to, Jennifer, something you said earlier around kind of how higher ed is thinking about AI in the undergraduate curriculum. You know, it has moved, I think, from a discussion around cheating to how we can use it. We know, for example, from surveys that students are using AI in part to produce music and visuals and presentations and that students and faculty actually see AI-assisted creative work through a different lens than they do AI generated essays or taking tests, for example — problem sets, for example.

So what are you seeing at NYU or the other universities you're involved with? You know, what excites you about how students are using AI, especially kind of in this creative space that we've been talking about?

Jennifer Sparrow

Right. And I think that's really such an important piece here, and we're talking about it at NYU.

So at NYU we have, you know, we have great creative majors. Right? We have theater and music and dance and film — world renowned. Right? And we have incredibly creative people coming out.

But we also have a huge number of students that are in majors that we wouldn't necessarily consider creatives. Right? So we have engineering students, and we have science students, and we have writing students. Right? That these aren't necessarily places where you would think of creativity necessarily as a foundation of what we're doing.

And so what I've seen from I think, just across the university is how we lower that barrier of entry to being a creative because we're taking away the things that, you know, if I'm not an expert at Photoshop, I can go in and now use these tools to do those things that would be creative. I can use my words and explain what I wanna do and not have to be able to do that — not know the tools to do it in those high-end technologies that we have available for them.

So what we're seeing is an opportunity for students to be entrepreneurs, to be creators, to be makers. And these are students that wouldn't necessarily have seen that in themselves before.

And so how are we doing that? I mean, again, this is I think this is a slow ground swell of how we bring faculty along to re-envision what their curriculum looks like. How do I take an engineering class and leverage a makerspace or leverage an AI creative tool around a podcast creation, for example, so that you're getting students to not only do the research but also be good communicators about, 'This is what my research means. This is how it impacts people.' Right?

And we can do that because we've been able to provide tools to students that do sort of the back-end work of getting started, getting the technology set up, producing it, getting the cleanup done — those things that would sort of be maybe internship or entry-level skills that we would need going in here.

So I'm not saying that this would replace all of that, but where we provide those spaces both for faculty to rethink what they're doing in their courses, how do we support them so they don't need to be the technological experts in this? How do we support students in providing the right access to the tools, again, equitably across the entire institution? And then bring them into these spaces where they can learn together and they can learn from the tools that they have access to to be those creators of new knowledge.

Jeff Selingo

We have about 18 minutes left. We are going to try to do, one or two questions from the audience in a few minutes. So if you have questions, think of them. We're not gonna run mics, so, we'll repeat your question from the audience.

But Allison, Michael mentioned earlier that you graduated from Davidson College. You worked with Carol Quillen the former president there for a little bit as well, one of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges.

The liberal arts in general have kind of fallen on hard times over the last 15-20 years as students flocked into STEM and business because they thought that's where the jobs were. Are we going to see a resurgence of the liberal arts because of what's happening right now?

Allison Salisbury

Yeah. Liberal arts have never gone out of vogue for me.

Jennifer Sparrow

Me either, Allison, just to be clear.

Allison Salisbury

And despite being like the economic mobility and opportunity person, right, like I believe these things absolutely can and should coexist.

And it's so exciting right now because whether it's a Fortune 500 business leader, CHRO, or whether it's a YC partner, early stage founder, they're all using the same words to describe the kind of worker that they want. And they're using the same exact words that liberal arts educators have been using for a century ... longer. And we all know them.

What I think though is really important is that I think you can separate the liberal arts institution from the liberal arts values and pedagogical methodology. So I don't actually think there's anything automagically that happens when you read Homer's "Odyssey" that instantly makes you a creative problem solver. Right? Like it's actually the pedagogical method that often is used in the humanities that allows people to wrestle with moral ambiguity, to have to generate new knowledge, to negotiate multiple world views and then decide which one is their own for now — as well as the values overlay that we bring to the table around ethical deliberations.

There is absolutely nothing sacred about that that can't be done across every single discipline in every single program across postsecondary education. I actually happen to know that many of the early coding bootcamps, like Dev Bootcamp a decade ago, actually practiced many of these quote liberal arts pedagogical methodologies as a part of teaching coding. And so I think that we should really think about how, whether you're teaching technical skills or whether you're teaching the humanities, what the pedagogical methodology is and really center that in the conversation.

There's nothing, I think, that liberal arts institutions own about that methodology.

The other thing that I'll just say at a slightly different altitude is I think one of the most interesting things that's happening in the world of work right now that's relevant to this conversation with the liberal arts, especially within technology companies that are starting for the first time now — so they get to form their teams and they get to write their job descriptions however they want, they're not inheriting any organizational debt — is you're seeing the collapsing of functions into single roles. So you used to see a posting for a visual designer, a product manager, a front engineer, a back-end engineer, and then kind of maybe a handful of other supporting functions. And increasingly, you're seeing all those rolled into one job description.

You're seeing somebody, you're seeing sort of employers request range and breadth and the ability to think about a body and system of work really strategically because what AI is so good at is specialization. So you get the specialized knowledge. You get the specialized work from your AI companions. And so what you need to be able to do as the human being is be that quarterback and functionally the manager of all of these AI workers that you have.

And I think that really brings into light, like, why when we talk about the early career ladder going away, why when we talk about the experience gap, why when we talk about these liberal arts mindsets and skill sets, why there's such a deep imperative around the future of work. And it's because increasingly the jobs are very holistic in their scope, require you to own a system of work, and then delegate the specialization. So we have to be pairing people who know how to actually do that out of the gate upon graduation.

Michael Horn

Super interesting. Two quick questions as we start to wrap up before we go to a couple audience.

But Simon, this one's for you because it occurs to me we've been talking a lot about relying on your expertise in the financial services industry. And I suspect a lot of folks are like, what does creativity have to do with that? They're not automatic, pairings and so forth.

And so against this backdrop, I would just love to, you know, hear, like, what are the creative human skills that you hope individuals bring into that world? And what are you looking for, right, in hiring? And how did you know when someone had those?

Simon Kho

So creativity is not a word we like to use with financial statements or accounting.

Michael Horn

But they sometimes do.

Simon Kho

We don't like to admit that in public.

But the reality is kind of very much to Allison's point, it's the skills around, when you think about what creativity is, right, it is problem solving. It is design. It is thinking kind of very differently. There's a human element to that, and kind of everything we've talked about in this dialogue has really been around what do we do when kind of the baseline work can be executed through AI, but it's everything else that we do with that. Right?

So I think the thing that strikes me most, as I've been listening to some really smart panelists here, is that important piece around interpretation, you know, but then more importantly, communication around that. You know, you've heard me use the words like... Communication used to be this core competency that was in every job description. What we've been trying to do is to dig deeper into what's the actual skill. Sales is communication. Influencing is communication. Teaming is communication. So those are actually the skills that AI could never do, right? That we can then rely on our own people, our own personnel, that if we can get more hires that know how to use that, that's where the creativity comes in.

At the end of the day, relationship is the core part of, even in financial services, right?

I do this little bit of coaching with all these students who want to be investment bankers, and those of you who know, this is an example of how ugly recruiting has become. Oh, this is recorded, isn't it? Okay. Alright, well I'll just say it anyway. I think most people know. I no longer work for J. P. Morgan, it's fine.

But many of you may not know that students if they don't know by the end of their freshman year if they wanna be an investment banker, cannot actually be ready to apply. Because they have to apply by the end of first semester sophomore year for the internship between their junior and senior year. So we're about to open recruiting for summer 2017 or 2027. Right?

So students haven't even taken core finance classes. If you go to a liberal arts school and you're not even in the business program yet, you know, like, you're kind of out of luck because you will fail the technical interviews. Right, so there's so much pressure on students to try to figure out their career path when they even haven't taken the courses. Right?

So that's an example of the pressure that are on students to figure out, 'What am I going to do career-wise?' They don't know. Right?

And what's actually happening on the back end is we're seeing a lot of attrition. Right?

So the conversation that I think we need to have is around, 'How do we help students understand career journeys?' Right? How do we help them develop relationships? Because then they're thinking about recruiting as transaction.

One of the students told me, I sent a 100 inmails to bankers to try to get a lead on getting my application in front of a hiring manager. And I said, but think about what you're asking. If you're asking for a favor of someone and you don't even have a relationship, why in God's name would they ever do that? Right? And they don't see it that way.

So the creativity part still comes down to communication and relationship. And I think that that's a core part of the way we do business. Half the time, clients will choose, you know, us during a pitch, not just because we have the lowest rates, but because of the trust and the relationship that they build with the team.

Michael Horn

In the sense that numbers don't just represent numbers, but they represent real people, strategies, change.

Yeah. Sorry, Allison, you're going to jump in quickly, I think.

Allison Salisbury

I actually, just while we're still hovering on the conversation of creativity broadly, I have a little bit of a nit with the language. So I actually think AI is increasingly more creative than humans.

Jeff Selingo

Please don't say that.

Allison Salsbury

Just in its ability to generate a ton of different ideas. It has access literally to the entire corpus of human knowledge. So much of creativity is literally just taking pieces of fragments of ideas and information and recombining, which quite literally is what they're quite good at.

And so I actually didn't use the word creativity around what I think is the differentiating thing that humans are currently still best at. I used the word creator. And I do think it means different things.

I think being a creator is actually bringing the activation energy and the motivation to bring something into the world and then the skill set to do it. So it's the taste to know what matters. It's the activation energy to do it. It's the problem identification on what's even worth building.

And then I actually think the way that I'm seeing workflows happen right now is through saying, 'Okay, now what are 10 ways I could solve this problem?' That becomes the nonhuman intelligence interaction. What are 10 different ways I could solve this problem? Now that you have all the context around the problem I want to solve, why it matters, who I'm solving it for, I program you with that. Then I get a bunch of ideas back. And then I'm curating across those ideas which ones are actually most interesting and recombining them in different ways and then actually executing it in the world.

So it's like that's a whole bunch of stuff people get really excited about.

But like unsexy stuff are things like project management. Right? To be a creator where you actually build something in the world that matters, you have to know how to operate in the world and get things done and manage against timelines and work with other people and make trade-offs.

And so I actually think we should center the conversation less on creativity and more on, ‘What does it look like to make students creators?’

Michael Horn

So, final wrap up question for each of you. Lightning round — 30 to 60 seconds. Right?

Tactical and tangible. We've been talking about some big sweeping changes. What are, in the next 12 months, if you're in a college or university, what are the tangible tactical things you would do immediately to start moving toward the direction you each have painted in your view? Jennifer, let's go down the line.

Jennifer Sparrow

Okay. I would immerse every faculty member in AI — boring AI — and then I would, help them understand where that AI could help them in the places where they are most interested in having some rapid change to free themselves up for what they want to be doing more of.

Simon Kho

I think just what I was saying before is convene a... We know universities love working groups and task forces. Right, but start that dialogue, but pull in the right people to say, how do we really define the issue, right? Because I struggle with the fact that we're not talking to universities as employers, and yet we're the end users of your students, so we need to be part of that conversation, but then even across the university, how do we have a conversation cross-functionally so that we can start working on this problem together?

Michael Horn

Allison, final word.

Allison Salisbury

If we're talking about the academic experience, I would actually take a note from what the most innovative tech employers are doing, which is saying, 'Hey, these are business imperatives for this quarter. Let 1,000 flowers bloom on how you want to go solve them and the AI tools you want to use. And then come back and do show-and-tell. Walk us through what you did, how you did it, where it broke, what you learned, what you might be doing differently next.' And we should go do that within our classrooms. Because I actually do agree that students are quite curious, quite creative. And I think they'll bring back some really interesting ideas that you can then codify and take forward in your work. And then what it does is it celebrates them being investigative journalists on how they can use these tools to solve the problems they're most interested in.

Jennifer Sparrow

I love it.

Jeff Selingo

And shows how they're creative or could decide ...

Allison Salsbury

Creators.

Jeff Selingo

Or creators. In the moment.

Well, we're gonna leave it at that.

Please join me in thanking Allison, Simon, and Jennifer for being with us today. A big thank you to Adobe for having us here today as well.

And thank you to our audience for joining us for this live recording of Future U. Thank you.