Is AI making college students’ skills ‘obsolete’?

The Future of College Education and AI’s Impact

In a thought-provoking column for Fortune, Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed.com, highlighted the potential obsolescence of skills taught in college due to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). Hyams raised concerns about the rapid pace at which technological innovation is reshaping industries compared to the gradual evolution of the Industrial Revolution. As AI finds its way into classrooms, some college professors have already faced instances of students cheating by utilizing AI-powered bots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT models.

Timothy Main, a writing professor at Canada’s Conestoga College, recently discovered that students had turned in assignments directly copied from ChatGPT without even bothering to read the content they submitted. This alarming incident has prompted Main and his colleagues to revamp the freshman writing course, introducing more personalized writing assignments that encourage students to express their own experiences, opinions, and perspectives. Additionally, the college plans to impose strict rules prohibiting the use of AI in assignments, even though AI models like ChatGPT have demonstrated exceptional performance in various domains, including higher education.

A study conducted at UCLA and published in July demonstrated that ChatGPT performs at a level comparable to college undergraduates in reasoning questions commonly found in standardized tests. This AI language model has effectively made its way into the realm of higher education, with its writing style being likened to that of a highly intelligent 12th-grader. While ChatGPT-3 was initially involved in the UCLA study, OpenAI has introduced GPT-4, which surpasses its predecessor in certain aspects. Notably, GPT-4 achieved around 80% accuracy on IQ questions from Raven’s Progressive Matrices, surpassing the average human performance of approximately 60%.

Highlighting the potential impact of AI on the job market, Goldman Sachs predicts that AI-powered bots could automate up to 300 million jobs worldwide, affecting two-thirds of jobs in the US and Europe to some extent. The investment banking firm warns of significant disruption, as AI contributed to a significant number of job losses in May, with approximately 4,000 individuals reportedly losing their jobs due to AI-related factors, marking the first instance of AI being listed as a contributing factor to layoffs.

As the influence of AI continues to grow, college education may need to adapt rapidly to ensure students are equipped with the skills necessary for the evolving job market. The intertwining of AI and education presents both challenges and opportunities to reimagine how students learn and develop essential abilities.

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