Conversations abound about how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world. AI and its applications are advancing at a pace that outstrips regulatory and ethical frameworks. In the face of these challenges, higher education must develop students into fluent, intelligent, and ethical users of AI and work to ensure that the benefits of AI reach broadly across communities.
Over the past 150 years, every major technological wave led to profound disruptions. History shows, however, that past technological revolutions generated enormous economic growth and created new industries. At the same time, they also left behind whole communities and populations, widened regional and educational divides, and concentrated opportunity among those with early access to skills, capital, and networks. These outcomes were not inevitable.
AI will no doubt reshape work across broad sectors of the global economy. What distinguishes this moment is not disruption alone, but the pace, scale, and portability of the technology itself. The technology is diffusing faster and more broadly than previous innovations, compressing the time that institutions have to respond. AI’s unprecedented speed and scale create urgency around deliberately shaping its distribution. Society faces risks, but also a (narrow) window of opportunity to shape outcomes in a way that benefits everyone. As society adapts to AI, it has a chance to do better than with past revolutions. The greater risk is not that AI will eliminate jobs, but that its benefits will once again accrue unevenly. Here, higher education has an opportunity to get this right, ensuring that AI creates broad advantages across all divides—race, income, geography—that characterize the human experience.
Public investment in education, vocational training, community colleges, and research universities has played a decisive role in building the human capital and research capacity that helped the United States become a global economic and innovation leader. AI poses a new challenge to these institutions. They must advance the foundational sciences that power AI itself, while also preparing a broad, representative population for a future where AI is pervasive in all fields.
In conversations with employers across industries, it has become clear to me that higher education must take the lead in cultivating a workforce capable of engaging with AI fluently, critically, and ethically. To begin with, higher education must create opportunities for all students to develop practical fluency in using AI tools. This includes mastering prompt design (phrasing queries to elicit the most useful response), integrating AI into workflows, and collaborating effectively with AI systems so that they enhance human creativity and critical thinking.
Simply knowing how to use AI is not enough. Not everyone needs to be able to write or understand code for AI systems, but they should at least understand the basics of how data are ingested and used by large language models (LLMs) to shape outputs in response to human queries. These systems do not reason or have some special access to the “truth”; they predict patterns from vast training data. Information at the edges of knowledge—such as nascent discoveries or contested positions—is often underrepresented. If LLMs had existed at the time the theories were proposed, they would not have extolled ideas like evolution, continental drift, or handwashing for infection control. In addition, the public needs to understand that the data that feed LLMs can be manipulated for political or other purposes. Higher education must train people to critically evaluate output, cross-check it with human expertise, and recognize AI’s biases and limitations.
There is no doubt that students of all kinds will use AI; most already are. The task now is to help them become professional and ethical users. This includes learning how and when to acknowledge AI use, how to distinguish between tasks where AI tools work well and where they do not, and how to know when to challenge AI-based output or decisions. As a matter of course, AI must be used in ways that align with professional standards and serve the public good.
Institutions like my own, which serves students from all backgrounds, including a majority of low-income and first-generation students, face an especially urgent need to step up—at a pace that matches AI’s rapid evolution. Although AI promises extraordinary gains in productivity and innovation, its benefits will accrue unevenly unless higher education acts decisively to broaden access, skills, and agency.
In the end, it is human intelligence, creativity, and innovation that will determine our collective future.
