Very glad this thoughtful engagement with AI’s integration came up on my feed!
Optimizing education to death is no doubt harmful.
I do believe we need to find a balance and a way to properly engage with AI in the classroom.
Not that you argue against this in your article, but I believe it’s an important fact to emphasise.
Furthermore, I can see the perspective and stance of any university implementing AI-supporting policies as quite strong. The truth of the matter is, AI skills and the ability to integrate, understand, and interact with LLMs are going to be incredibly important for the vast majority of jobs, and increasingly so as time goes on.
At my own institution, Occidental College, college leadership has been extremely resistant to accepting AI, in contrast to Columbia, and I think to the institution’s harm.
Institutions should be for learning. Unfortunately, they have become centers for job-preparation.
From the perspective of job preparation, it is crucial to integrate AI into classwork.
Outsourcing cognition is incredibly harmful. As an example, if our Econ professors aren’t acknowledging the existence of AI in furthering our understanding, helping to illustrate issues graphically, analyzing data, etc., how can students ever expect to be what employers want for a job?
I hate that this is the criterion for success. Success is securing your next job, your next grade, your next internship. It is no longer whether you actually synthesize and understand information - and these jobs used to be outcomes of this learning!
I personally feel that this is not an AI issue - this is a job market and an issue of the nature of education.
And one of the major problems is that institutions seem unable to face the need to integrate AI in a healthy way. Either they fully accept it and become slaves to it, or they ignore it entirely; either way, it harms students’ education. There is no balance, no transparency, no meetings with students or polling, and no real effort to understand how we can best contribute to society.
As I sit in microeconomics with you I wonder…… are the people who can help pull STEM classes out of their decision to make a final class grade come from 90% tests, the artists and creatives whose crafts have been deemed of less monetary value by capitalist standards? Has AI become the weapon against their own logical economic stronghold? In turn, freeing those that hold the power to create something truly human to help save them from the smooth brain? How can STEM classes incorporate what you experienced in CC, in the end creating something truly educational and creative? People’s ability to create art might be what combats the outsourcing of thought.
That's really interesting Maxwell! I totally agree that giving people more creative agency is one of the possible solutions (or at the very least, a way to look at these problems from another angle). We shouldn't be outsourcing the things that give us joy--and I think our Micro class is really exemplary of the kind of people-forward teaching that really attracts students in a time when so many people surrender to digital dissociation
This is a wonderful piece. Thank you, Ms. Chen. It validates the concerns and beliefs that I’ve had for some time about artificial “intelligence.” Its full-throated embrace by Columbia is very regrettable, and leaving it to faculty to ensure that ai is used appropriately, and consistently with Columbia’s educational mission, is, I believe, quite misguided.
Thank you for your kind words! I hope as more people understand its limitations, we'll see a renaissance of people actually valuing education qua education again.
I’ve landed here, via Doreen’s newsletter. Excellent piece, thank you.🙏🏼
Thank you so much for reading!!
Very glad this thoughtful engagement with AI’s integration came up on my feed!
Optimizing education to death is no doubt harmful.
I do believe we need to find a balance and a way to properly engage with AI in the classroom.
Not that you argue against this in your article, but I believe it’s an important fact to emphasise.
Furthermore, I can see the perspective and stance of any university implementing AI-supporting policies as quite strong. The truth of the matter is, AI skills and the ability to integrate, understand, and interact with LLMs are going to be incredibly important for the vast majority of jobs, and increasingly so as time goes on.
At my own institution, Occidental College, college leadership has been extremely resistant to accepting AI, in contrast to Columbia, and I think to the institution’s harm.
Institutions should be for learning. Unfortunately, they have become centers for job-preparation.
From the perspective of job preparation, it is crucial to integrate AI into classwork.
Outsourcing cognition is incredibly harmful. As an example, if our Econ professors aren’t acknowledging the existence of AI in furthering our understanding, helping to illustrate issues graphically, analyzing data, etc., how can students ever expect to be what employers want for a job?
I hate that this is the criterion for success. Success is securing your next job, your next grade, your next internship. It is no longer whether you actually synthesize and understand information - and these jobs used to be outcomes of this learning!
I personally feel that this is not an AI issue - this is a job market and an issue of the nature of education.
And one of the major problems is that institutions seem unable to face the need to integrate AI in a healthy way. Either they fully accept it and become slaves to it, or they ignore it entirely; either way, it harms students’ education. There is no balance, no transparency, no meetings with students or polling, and no real effort to understand how we can best contribute to society.
As I sit in microeconomics with you I wonder…… are the people who can help pull STEM classes out of their decision to make a final class grade come from 90% tests, the artists and creatives whose crafts have been deemed of less monetary value by capitalist standards? Has AI become the weapon against their own logical economic stronghold? In turn, freeing those that hold the power to create something truly human to help save them from the smooth brain? How can STEM classes incorporate what you experienced in CC, in the end creating something truly educational and creative? People’s ability to create art might be what combats the outsourcing of thought.
That's really interesting Maxwell! I totally agree that giving people more creative agency is one of the possible solutions (or at the very least, a way to look at these problems from another angle). We shouldn't be outsourcing the things that give us joy--and I think our Micro class is really exemplary of the kind of people-forward teaching that really attracts students in a time when so many people surrender to digital dissociation
This is a wonderful piece. Thank you, Ms. Chen. It validates the concerns and beliefs that I’ve had for some time about artificial “intelligence.” Its full-throated embrace by Columbia is very regrettable, and leaving it to faculty to ensure that ai is used appropriately, and consistently with Columbia’s educational mission, is, I believe, quite misguided.
Thank you for your kind words! I hope as more people understand its limitations, we'll see a renaissance of people actually valuing education qua education again.