Draft

One of the hardest jobs in the world right now must be figuring out what colleges should be teaching. The world is yelling at you from every angle that every single job is going to change forever, and you need to prepare all of your students for this. So what do you do? My guess —and note, I dropped out of college so I’m the last person who should weigh in— is that we likely want 75% of curriculum to be about the fundamentals of a particular field, and 25% applied AI skills in that domain (you can play with these numbers a bit). For the 75%, you learn all the same foundational principles of CS, or ME, or psychology, and so on that everyone did before AI. But all of this should be accelerated due to AI as well, so we probably compress the equivalent of masters degrees plus into every bachelors program. In this, we probably want to be teaching and testing on the fundamentals, even if in the real world you only deal with abstractions due to AI, because the only way people will properly wield these tools effectively is to understand how to tell the agent what you want to do, how you know when they’re going off the rails, how to fix what isn’t working, and so on. If you don’t know the fundamentals then no amount of abstractions will save you. Then, the leftover 25% goes into applied ways of working with AI in your particular field. If you’re studying CS, you use AI to build the craziest working software possible. If you’re in media, you’re producing a full film that looks like a blockbuster. If you’re in marketing, you’re figuring out how to do end-to-end marketing campaigns with the modern stack. This combination I think would make students extremely potent coming into the real word. In fact they likely would know vastly more about how to operate in the field in a modern way than existing employees, making them very compelling hires. Just a thought!