Automation and an Uncertain Future

It is no secret that the digital revolution has fully arrived. As automation becomes ever more common, even those professions once thought to be insulated from technological disruption face an uncertain future. Given that state of uncertainty, Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun argues in Robot Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence that college graduates can no longer be confident that the job they hold will be financially sustainable for the long term. Automation, long a threat to low-skilled jobs, is now cost-effective in all repetitive work, including high-skilled jobs in health care, law, and research. As a result, for many the prospect of being replaced by a robot is ever more pressing.

To address this state of unrest, it falls to higher education to prepare graduates for the cascade of changes that are careening through the world of work. But how can institutions steeped in centuries of tradition prepare the next generation of professionals, when there is no clarity about what professions will exist to employ them?

Aoun argues that colleges and universities must reinvent themselves to address this age of disruption and to provide their students the educational foundation that ensures their employability in the coming decades. To do so, he calls for higher education to focus on those traits that separate humans from the machines they create. He dubs this new framework "Humanics."

Aoun details a two-tiered structure for Humanics and explains how these tiers work together to foster creativity in students. The first tier consists of a trio of 21st-century literacies or content areas that he argues must be central to any forward-thinking educational program. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, Aoun argues that all students must be proficient in data interpretation and analysis, technical functions such as coding and engineering, and human-centric studies such as design thinking and communication.

This first tier of literacies forms the knowledge scaffold for Aoun's second tier of cognitive capacities. Systems thinking, critical thinking, entrepreneurship, and cultural agility constitute the four mind-sets that Aoun argues are critical to distinguishing human employees from machines. A student with these mind-sets can solve problems holistically and creatively while making rational judgments in complex cultural situations.

Having defined what a robot-proof education must entail, Aoun delves into how that education should be offered and what colleges and universities must do to meet the needs of a modern student body. Relying heavily on examples from Northeastern University, he calls for higher education to fully embrace experiential, lifelong learning. He argues that it is only through rich, integrative experiences that students can apply their 21st-century literacies to complex problems, which will ultimately mold their mind-sets. This type of learning must be lifelong in scope because the rapid rate of change that accompanies automation will require that students consistently refresh their skill sets.

Aoun's argument is timely, and his two-tiered framework of modern competencies and mind-sets succinctly encapsulates a vision of one possible future structure for higher education. His advocacy for lifelong education is important and will doubtless be echoed by educational leaders and politicians alike in the years to come. There is room, though, for a clearer roadmap for implementation of this vision. He describes a modularized version of the curriculum in which the traditional separation between undergraduate and graduate work falls away, the content is customized to students' needs, and the value of quality teaching is both recognized and incentivized. While these causes are noble, it is important to acknowledge the barriers to attaining them, including admissions, prerequisites, co-curricular record, financial aid, tuition rates, accreditation, promotion and tenure — all these entrenched processes and many more that we take for granted as the current way of being on campus. All would need to be reshaped or made flexible, and Aoun's book does little to describe how that might come about.

The professional world, too, would need to reshape its understanding of the value and meaning of a college degree. Certain industries have begun to do just that by prioritizing microcredentials, incentivizing the use of badges and other skill metrics over degrees. In these professions, Aoun's vision of a stackable and modular skill sets works well and would indeed foster both job security and mobility. Other fields, such as education and nursing, have an entrenched reliance on traditional degrees and credentials, however. Employees in these very human-centric fields rely on traditional licenses and certifications for career advancement. Turning the degree- and credential-granting system on its head would do little to ensure the future employability of workers in fields such as these. Aoun's reshaped educational environment, then, may not serve the needs of all students if we usher in the new to the exclusion of the old.

Aoun acknowledges that education will never be a cure-all for society's ills. He implies that for the coming generation of students, Humanics is better medicine than what is currently on offer. A more practical approach might be to see Humanics not as a new prescription but rather as a supplement to our current educational regimen.

In an automated world, machines will absorb an ever-growing portion of the mundane and predicable tasks that workers now complete. To prepare for the economic disruption such automation may cause, higher education must create a generation of graduates that is liberated to think creatively while continuing to function in more traditional capacities. Perhaps marrying Joseph Aoun's vision of the new Humanics with the current higher education model will ensure that America's workers and the colleges and universities that educate them are indeed robot proof.

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Jeremy Van Hof is Director of Learning Technology and Development at Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University.