What Are Teachers for in the Age of AI?

Studies show teachers burnout around their 15th year. Robots never do. After developing their 1st lesson plans, most teachers recycle them year-after-year. Robots inject new data constantly.

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Last week, I came across an article by Jeffrey Selingo titled, “What is college for in the age of AI?,” in which he wrote:

Just three years after ChatGPT’s release, the speed of AI’s disruption on the early career job market is even catching the attention of observers at the highest level of the economy. In September, Fed chair Jerome Powell flagged the “particular focus on young people coming out of college” when asked about AI’s effects on the labor market. Brynjolfsson told me that if current trends hold, the impact of AI will be “quite a bit more noticeable” by the time the next graduating class hits the job market this spring. Employers already see it coming: In a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, nearly half of 200 employers rated the outlook for the class of 2026 as poor or fair, the most pessimistic outlook since the first year of the pandemic.

The upheaval in the early career job market has caught higher education flat-footed. Colleges have long had an uneasy relationship with their unofficial role as vocational pipelines. When generative AI burst onto campuses in 2022, many administrators and faculty saw it primarily as a threat to learning — the world’s greatest cheating tool. Professors resurrected blue books for in-classroom exams and demanded that AI tools added to software be blocked in their classes.

Only now are colleges realizing that the implications of AI are much greater and are already outrunning their institutional ability to respond. As schools struggle to update their curricula and classroom policies, they also confront a deeper problem: the suddenly enormous gap between what they say a degree is for and what the labor market now demands. In that mismatch, students are left to absorb the risk. Alina McMahon and millions of other Gen-Zers like her are caught in a muddled in-between moment: colleges only just beginning to think about how to adapt and redefine their mission in the post-AI world, and a job market that’s changing much, much faster.

Based on my experience with AI, it will crush college graduates with liberal arts majors and soft business school degrees like marketing and communication. Hiring those graduates just won’t be worth the squeeze given how much of what they would do can be done by AI. Hands-on majors or majors in engineering, finance, and accounting should do fine.