Transcription
We decided to change everything. Change culture, change design, change intellectual structure, use technology, move in new directions, and then we began measuring learning outcomes.
For all the talk about changes in higher ed, including just this week when the University of Virginia became the first public college to agree to Trump administration oversight, the biggest cause for change, AI, doesn't come up all that often in the political debate. For nearly a quarter century, Michael Crowe has led the university that is by some measures the largest in the United States. Few people have thought as much about American higher education while also having the ability to influence it on such a large scale. But when we first talked with him a little over a year ago, we didn't cover artificial intelligence. A lot has changed since then.
AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind.
Another uncomfortable truth linked to AI.
AI. AI. AI.
AI.
It's not a bubble.
Obviously, the most disruptive technology in the history of mankind.
Egalitarian access to knowledge is at the highest level in the history of our species. What we have is a walking, talking, reference library on any subject, and we never had anything like that in our society before.
We wanted to know how artificial intelligence is changing the American college experience, what it means for the teachers and students who have now made it a regular part of their lives. But we also asked Crowe about the outcomes for recent graduates and how his school is preparing students for an economy that is moving very fast.
What does that do to teaching? I mean, back in the olden days, we wrote essays. We wrote blue books back when I was there. How do you do things like essays and evaluations?
Well, I think what has to happen, and we've experienced this at ASU with our 6,000 faculty members, several thousand of which are already AI trained, is you have to up the game. Perhaps we were learning too slowly, too incrementally, too much in a regimented or industrial way. With the AI tools that are available now, you can up the game, uh, enhance the question complexity, enhance the answer complexity, expect more of the students. We had somebody uh, give their test out of the business school to an AI system and get everything right instantly. Well, then the test is too easy. The test is too simple. So, you need it's basically a way in our view to accelerate learning, to broaden learning, and to speed learning. So, you have to look at it as a new way to basically make the game more intensive. The model's always changing. So Plato, you know, was against the written word. He thought everything should be uh thought through uh verbally and communicated verbally. There were unbelievable forces against the development of the printed book. And so uh the internet in its development, the web and its development all had people that were against it. And so AI changes the model in the sense that it speeds it up and intensifies it. It personalized the learner's experience, but it doesn't teach those core things. There's no values being taught. There's no values being experienced. There's no lived experiences being built. So what we really have here now is we just have this massive hypers speed calculator capable of going to all of the digitized information. You asking a question about that information and getting the most probable answer. It's all about the questions that you're asking. It's not about the answers. It's about the questions. And that's what people need to really figure out.
Does it change the notion of cheating?
I'll bet humans have cheated for quite a while. It does change the nature of what is your work. Now, if you're answering a complex question and you're using a reference library and an AI system to answer that question, that seems legitimate. If you're if you're using it to produce your analytical response that's supposed to be demonstrative of your ability, well, then you're you're you're cheating. Uh now, you have to then build a system which recognizes the ability to gain access to these tools. Now, sometimes it's just going to be you in there by yourself taking the test because they've got to know that you know how to ask the question, you know how to derive the answer, that your brain works in a certain way. Beyond that, the AI systems are going to enhance learning in every possible way and that the idea of cheating will change.
At this point, are there some things that you can learn that AI cannot teach to you?
Absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, an AI system can't teach you to be innovative. It can't teach you to be creative. It cannot teach you grit. It cannot teach you the discovery process. It cannot teach you I mean, it's a machine. It's a it's an advanced hypers speed calculator. Uh, it can do things that you can't do. It can think around corners that you can't see. Uh uh but of course so can a so can a dog. And so and so it's it's it's a powerful analytical tool to enhance our mental capabilities, not to replace them.
In order to ensure that AI is a springboard rather than a crutch, Crow says students and teachers will have to raise the bar. And one place he's already seen signs of AI's ability to supercharge progress is in the school's research programs. It's almost unbelievable. We have probably 50 research groups that are using advanced AI to solve unsolvable problems to figure out how to process materials or manage the Mississippi River in a different way in terms of the flow of the water and the flow of the dirt and other things that go down the river. We've got people doing advanced chemistry now. We're using AI systems to think beyond the way that we normally think to create more revolutionary opportunity. uh there was a a study recently done by some of our faculty at the speed with which you could complete the work equivalent to a dissertation in in uh genetics 14 days. What that means then is that the PhD that normally takes four or five years to set up the experiments, do the experiments, do the work, be evaluated. Maybe the PhD student of the future will do the equivalent of 20 PhDs. That will speed up the cures for cancer. That will speed up the analytical tools that will help restore sight in human beings. that will that will speed up the techniques that use electromagnetic current to affect people with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodeenerative diseases all of which are computationally limited.
Certainly the world has changed enormously since I came out of college a long time ago now but my sense is the rate of change has really increased maybe even geometrically how fast it's changing how do you prepare graduates today for a world 20 30 40 years down the road that I can't even imagine.
So there's there's no way to prepare someone for something you don't know what it will be except one thing. What we call we're we're attempting to take all the people that are coming to our university, 120,000 degree seeeking students, 700,000 other learners who are just taking courses with us digitally and otherwise. Can we help create you to be a master learner? Can we help you to be a person capable of learning anything, adjusting to anything, adapting to anything? It's really that because we don't know what all of the adaptations that will be required are. We do know that you should be grounded in, you know, American history and economics and the role of democracy and and certain subjects in math and science and so forth and so on. And then after that, we find a learning path for you to take where you learn to learn. We don't care what your major is. You can I met a kid the other day was majoring in opera and physics. Great. Fine. Fantastic. That's how that kid learns. And so and so that's what we're after. How do you how do you create universal learners capable of learning anything? And that's the pathway.
We hear at 40,000 ft about a shifting employment situation for recent college graduates because of AI. Are you seeing any of that in the real world?
We're not we're not seeing that in our graduates. Now, the problem with people talking about all college graduates, there's more than 20 million people in college. A couple million go to what you think of as sleepaway colleges. You know, they go they go to places where you're, you know, you're living on campus. The other 18 million go to college in some other way, community college, online, some kind of other course, and so forth. So we're not seeing any change. Uh you know we're seeing the same level of anxiety. We're seeing the same level of the process. We're you know more than 95% of our students that graduate as undergraduates are employed or in graduate school within the first year. Uh almost all within the second year. Uh so we're we're still you know seeing good ROIs. But what we are seeing is students you know who are quite savvy you know adjusting their trend. So we're seeing a slightly downward trend in computer science and a slightly slightly upward trend in double majoring and triple majoring. Uh uh more uh people moving into analytics and supply chain and all kinds of other things. And so the market for learning is also adjusting.
We measure our success based on who we include. Crow hopes the size and scope of ASU will help with that adjustment, allowing students to react quickly and build new skills for the changing world. And in a school made famous for opening its doors rather than being exclusive, he thinks the most important skills of all can come from unlikely places.
We've even got ways now that we're using advanced AI enhanced robots to help people that aren't qualified to get into a particular college to do what they want to do to get them qualified. Guess what? When we get them qualified, they have more grit and determination than anyone else who sort of walked into it from high school and they outperform everyone.
There's a theme going on right now that maybe college has been overrated, oversold. What do you say to parents?
What we have is a way for your your child, your student to learn on the path that's going to enhance their ability to be most adaptive throughout their life. So, don't worry about their major. So, we get these parents that say, "Well, my kid needs to major in accounting so they can get a job, or they need to major in anything other than political science or history or English, where they'll never get a job." That's actually not true. Some of the hottest things that we have that we're producing right now are English majors that can code. And so, they have a broader perspective and they can code. And so, we provide free coding classes to everyone in the institution. We provide other ways in which you can double major, triple major, take other kinds of things. And so what we say to parents is let's find the way where your kid is going to smile while learning, while preparing themselves to be a master learner, and you'll have to worry about them less. If they take a fixed thing in a fixed way, on a fixed pathway, uh they could find themselves in an alley and no way out. We're trying to make sure that that doesn't.