WSJ Your Money Briefing - Colleges Revamp Courses to Help Prepare Students for the AI Workplace

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

As more companies incorporate generative AI tools, colleges and universities are racing to create new artificial-intelligence programs to prepare students with the skills they need to get a job. Wall Street Journal reporter Milla Surjadi joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss how the types of businesses requiring AI-related knowledge go beyond tech. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and they see an AI degree or AI coursework as a path to well-paying jobs. And they see an AI degree or AI coursework as a way to help their students get there. And the classes are not just limited to students who want to apply for tech jobs. We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Mila Serjati after the break. use beetlejuice don't ever say that name beetlejuice i'm serious if you say that name three times really bad stuff is gonna happen beetlejuice the juice is loose on september 6th we Are we doing this? The wait. Let's go, honey. Is over. Thank you all for coming to this very special occasion.

I felt a little tingle. Ew. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, September 6th. More colleges are overhauling their degree programs and adding artificial intelligence courses. Wall Street Journal reporter Mila Serjati joins me. Mila, what types of courses fall under the AI curriculum? Generally, these classes and these new AI minors are about how to use generative AI tools, how to apply AI in different fields of study, and how to think

about the ethical dilemmas that might arise when you are using AI in your daily life. I talked to one psychology student at Emory who took a class called Data Mining the Mind, and they learned how to use AI to detect patterns in a patient's speech to diagnose brain injuries and disorders. So classes are really application-based. Other schools really require students to get a deeper glimpse into the technology and the coding. So Emory requires students who are pursuing its AI minor to take an intro to a computer science course. At USC, it's the same idea. They have to take classes like programming in Python, basic tech and concepts behind artificial intelligence tools like neural networks as well.

Why the rush to launch AI classes now? Employers increasingly want their hires to have AI skills, and colleges are hearing about this. So as of December, there's a statistic from the Work Trend Index from Microsoft and LinkedIn that 66% of business leaders said they wouldn't hire someone without AI skills. They would not hire them. Yeah. So colleges are really looking at the rise in generative AI in the workplace and seeing that they have to prepare their students. A lot of it, as you can imagine, came after OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. So some students saw how pervasive this technology was in their lives, and they really started to worry about being left behind. I talked to one

student who was really anti-AI when it came out in 2022, he watched classmates using it and was really worried about academic integrity and how much creativity students could have in their lives after AI. But then he did a marketing internship the following summer, and he was really surprised when his boss kept asking him to use ChatGPT to draft crowdfunding pitches. And he got really scared about being left behind with this technology that's moving so fast. So he came around. Yeah. And he came back to Emory in the fall. And that was the time that they had just launched their AI minor. And so he enrolled in the introductory classes. And now he's all in. You mentioned some of these students are in computer science classes.

Are the programs geared to students already enrolled in tech classes? Quite the opposite, actually. What I heard from educators and administrators was that these classes and programs are intentionally designed for students who have no computer science background whatsoever. They're really aiming to reach all students at the university and make them AI literate. What types of knowledge are students likely to gain from AI courses to help them navigate the workforce? A professor at Harvard Business School that I talked to, Joseph Fuller, who researches the future of work, described AI literacy as the modern equivalent of typing in the 1970s and 80s. So this universal skill that all students going into all fields of work should

have. And so he says that job seekers should demonstrate that they can interact with a tool like ChatGPT and figure out how to prompt it to get the most accurate and thorough results. And so that's what students are going to learn from these AI courses. A big part of it is also knowing when AI is wrong because AI still makes a bunch of mistakes. Oh, so being a safety net there for AI. Yes, and knowing the ethics behind AI.

What fields are the courses preparing students for? It's not just technology fields like we would expect when we think about AI usually. On Handshake, which is a job search platform for college students, the share of job descriptions that mention ChatGPT and other generative AI tools has tripled in the last year. And of those jobs, while a quarter of those are tech-related. Sixteen percent are in marketing and 12 percent are in art and media. Some of these jobs are also in government, which has an AI talent gap right now. So Cornell is designing a minor that they hope will prepare students to fill some of those jobs. And then a number of these students are also going into jobs in the business and finance sectors that are using AI tools for efficiency. What do the colleges hope to get out of offering these kinds of courses?

One educator at USC described this to me as not really a choice. They're responding to student, parent, employer demand, and they see how this technology is changing the labor market and they're feeling the pressure to cater to that. But this is also coming at a time as more Americans are questioning the value of a college degree. Colleges are really eager to prove their relevance as a path to well-paying jobs, and they see an AI degree or AI coursework as a way to help their students get there. We've seen AI technology develop at lightning speed. Is there a concern that AI technology is likely to evolve and look different from what the schools are teaching today? That's one of the main concerns that educators have been telling me about. One educator said that you could take a two-week vacation and come back and be completely behind on the technology.

At colleges in general, it can take years for committees to approve new academic programs. So these schools are moving at speeds that we never really see in higher education, making programs in six months to a year. So it's a new way of doing business for the schools. Absolutely. At a bunch of these schools, they haven't had the chance to evaluate just how successful these programs are at helping students clinch jobs they wouldn't otherwise. It's really too early to tell. That's WSJ reporter Mila Serjati.

And that's it for your Money Briefing. We'll be back tomorrow with WSJ's Vanessa Furmans to discuss why your next raise might be less than you were expecting. This episode was produced by Zoe Kalkin with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.