With the unpredictable effects of generative AI on jobs, will the well-rounded student be more appealing to colleges?

It is often said on these pages that the tippy-top colleges favor spikey applicants. Do you think that will change given the uncertainty generative AI has injected into the job market? Should it?

Arguably, colleges may want people who are more clearly set up to adapt as the world changes, rapidly.

Alternatively, perhaps the “new world” will require more, highly specialized experts who are augmented by AI capabilities.

Curious what this community thinks.

AI in its current state is just a buzzword. Other than chatbot and making (poor) lists and summaries, not sure exactly how it’s actually changed the world. (Much like “big data” from 5-10 years ago.)

In general, you just need to be adaptable. If your job is in unskilled labor (i.e. copy/paste responses in chats/emails), then that’s more of a worry than things that require human judgment/instinct (i.e. most jobs using your college degree).

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That has not been my experience. I have seen impacts on software engineers; on marketing professionals; on HR professionals; on legal research; on customer service professionals.

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I think colleges want the highest stat kids they can get and in many cases, the richest kids they can find.

High stats help a college’s image - and so many rely on tuition, that wealth matters.

I don’t see why AI would change that.

If anything, AI can make consumers believe that college isn’t necessary - and ultimately lessen the pool of kids attending - which would be bad for the higher education industry.

So I think the word is “Pivot” can the student pivot when this new reality takes shape. Most people I know use AI as an adjunct. It’s not even great at that… “Yet” depending on the field.

As an aside, I am a medical consultant for an AI medical scribe company. I beta tested like 5 of the leading one’s. I have been “live” in the office for 10 months. It listens to me and the patient at the same time and creates the SOAP note that we use for our charts. My note is done in 30 seconds with about 98%accuracy with quotes from the patient. It’s fantastic! I am also a speech recognition leader using Dragon since like 1990. So offices are replacing their live medical scribes with also foreign one’s that come up on the iPad. Many are so much more efficient that they can do away with a few medical assistants. We can have the front office do back to school forms, referral letters, patient summaries just pop up at the front desk when the doctor states what they want so just one push of a button makes that note per the patient chart. So instead of two front office people many are downsizing to one or the like.

My point is every industry is looking at bottom line profits. If there is a way to use AI as an advantage then people will be fired. I talked to a radiologist the other day. He said the writing is on the wall and he feels like he has less then 5 year’s left due to AI and it’s accuracy.

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I don’t think colleges, even tippy-top ones, are thinking this philosophically. I think they mainly want students with high stats, high levels of social connections, and high levels of money (except for a limited % of students without money, for charitable purposes.)

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Colleges want good students that can learn. They want students that are active in their high school communities so maybe they will be active on the college campus. I am not sure how AI comes into this. I have to assume as AI is improved then colleges will interject it into their learning protocols.

And it is… Go Blue!
https://genai.umich.edu/

I suspect both generalists and specialists in all fields will be impacted by generative AI – either being replaced by it or figuring out how to use it effectively.

True - but there is an abundance of such students applying for very few spots at the highly rejective schools. Being a smart kid involved in the community doesn’t on its own get you admitted today. Being spikey does seem to help.

I believe colleges are interested in the employment results of their recent grads. And, assuming that is correct, it shouldn’t be long before college AO’s begin to assess what type of applicant will do well in tomorrow’s job world.

Also true but also depends on the school. There will always be those that are more and some less spikey. There will always be room for those in the middle. Many schools enrollments are declining. Outside of maybe the top 30-50 , lots of schools will be struggling for students in general

I expect the AI hype will increase interest in students wanting to study in AI related majors. Colleges have been adapting to the change in interest. For example, Penn added a BSE major in Artificial Intelligence a few months ago. I expect some other elite colleges will do something similar in coming years.

Many colleges have added an AI concentration option as part of their CS major, and have seen rapid enrollment increases in that concentration. CS in general has also seen rapid enrollment increases at all Ivy+ type colleges with open major enrollment I am aware of. At many such colleges, CS has become the most popular major. For example, Duke CS BS+BS2 major totals by year is below. That’s a 22x increase in enrollment over a span of 12 years. If you sum all variations of CS major (AB, BS, BSF), then 2024 totals were 423 majors and 72 minors, making CS by far the most popular major at Duke.

CS Major Enrollment at Duke (BS + BS2)
2012 – 16
2014 – 44
2016 – 93
2018 – 136
2020 – 203
2022 – 233
2024 – 352

It’s possible that some Ivy+ colleges will try to limit CS enrollment and recover some of the lost humanities enrollment, but I don’t see that happening in a direct way. Instead the trend of increasing CS/AI interest seems quite strong.

Regarding “tippy-top colleges favor spikey applicants”, that depends on how you define “spikey”. If you mean favoring an IMO gold medal winner who had a few B’s in English, over a typical 4.0 high stat kid; I don’t think that is going to change. If anything the increased selectivity and increased grade inflation + test optional will drive colleges to place a greater emphasis on things like state/national level EC/awards.

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Aren’t “well rounded students” already those that colleges which use holistic admissions want? Are you saying you think other colleges will move from more stats based admissions offers to holistic? Or holistic colleges will become “more” holistic? Or what?

We’ve know for some decades that tech changes what jobs are going to be useful or even survive. Not sure AI by itself changes what colleges are looking for. Will probably change what they offer those students, but that’s a different issue.

It’s being backed into their curriculum and research at the schools I looked at. Augmented /Mixed reality was all the rage a few years back. Now it’s AI but I do think AI has more uses.

The most selective colleges were already expecting most of their successful unhooked applicants to be intellectually well-rounded in the sense of taking the most advanced courses available and getting top grades across all the core areas.

Then to the extent they then had any additional academic or non-academic “spike”, this would usually be in addition to, not a substitute for, that sort of intellectual well-roundedness. And I think such a “spike” was less required than just one of a number of possible ways to stand out from the other academically excellent applicants (and maybe not the most common way of successfully standing out, despite what some people have insisted, but that is a whole other story).

Then outside of the most selective colleges, some other colleges–or specialty schools or majors or so on–could be a little more tolerant of notable areas of relative academic weakness (or simply neglect). But I think those programs largely were just reacting to the nature of the applicants in their demand pool. Like if kids wanted to specialize early, they created programs for such kids.

So in that sense, I think it would take HS students changing their norms dramatically in order to dramatically change the admissions of colleges generally.

We shall see!

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If college graduates need to be more adaptable in the workforce because of AI, then that might be used to justify what colleges should teach their students, but it has nothing to do with who they should choose to admit.

Whether or not their admitted students have a “spike” (which is just code for “outstanding in some way”), they will still have taken a broad set of courses in high school. And some will say that the unpredictability of the future workplace is a good reason for everyone to take a mix of General Ed classes in college, making sure that engineers can write and polisci majors can do math at more than just a high school level and everyone has some basic foreign language capability.

Personally I’m skeptical that some of these required GE courses will mean anything for employability, but that debate is nothing new, and has been going on since way before anyone thought of AI.

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