Although the midterm results will undoubtedly change what’s in store for higher education over the next two years, there are plenty of existing commentaries about that, so consider this a politics free edition. Instead, I want to discuss an interesting Chronicle piece about the use of AI on campuses by employees and what this means for the future of our professions. I close with three Sparks about admissions, British higher education, and religious exemptions from AI. 

The Importance of Early Learnings  

From What AI Is Doing to Campus Work | The Chronicle of Higher Education 

The Chronicle looks at how generative AI is changing work on campuses. 

Our Thoughts  

Way back when I was just starting my career in higher education as an academic advisor, I made a mistake. I was fresh out of grad school and eager to help students. At that time, the institution I worked for had two withdrawal deadlines—a regular one for any reason and a very late one for medical or mental health reasons. A student came in to complete a withdrawal with a note from their doctor, and so I processed the paperwork. A couple of hours later, my director came into my office to ask about it in a supportive, patient manner. Long story short—I hadn’t followed the correct institutional procedure, and so I had to contact the student, who was already in distress, apologize, and explain the process. I may or may not have gotten an earful from their parent. Needless to say, I learned a few lessons that day about how to be a better advisor that I carried forward both in my advising practice, and later when I became a leader and then a unit head. 

While being an academic advisor wasn’t my first job, it was my first professional employment.  And those hard-won experiences during that first year are what allowed me to transform into the more senior advisor years later who was able to assemble twenty-eight offices across campus to improve our first-year student onboarding. Would I have been able to do that successfully without that initial learning period? Probably not.  

I had those early-career experiences on my mind as I read through this piece from The Chronicle. Hearing how Craig Burgess, general counsel at Morehouse College, started using AI the way he would use a young associate after funding for a junior counsel position was cut gave me pause. I mean, I certainly don’t fault him for his choice. If I were a one-person legal office handling litigation, contracts, and everything else that higher education legal offices deal with, I would probably have done the same thing.  

However, Burgess also said that because AI has made him more productive, he hasn’t pushed to hire a second lawyer. That’s great for the institution’s payroll; it can invest that money into something else. But I worry about what it means for the training and development of our junior employees as AI quietly moves through our offices. I can see a position in the registrar’s office or financial aid or IR that sits vacant for a semester, which then becomes a year. The work is probably still getting done, and eventually the position disappears. And yes, I’m not naive; I know this was already happening. But now, “AI can cover it” is an easy rationale for why departments don’t need more staff, and the people using it may not realize they’re also neglecting the next generation of registrars or financial aid directors.  

In Issue 102, I asked who companies would promote into mid-level roles if they replaced their entry-level workers with AI. Then, in Issue 119, I went a step further, arguing that entry-level jobs are where people build the tacit knowledge that protects a more experienced worker from automation. In those issues, I was writing about companies. I didn’t expect those same arguments to apply to higher education so soon. Today’s AI chatbots could probably have processed that medical withdrawal correctly, since, unlike my young self, they would have followed the procedure to the letter. But those early mistakes are what shaped me into a professional and enabled me to make the connections necessary to advance larger-scale institutional initiatives. So much of what makes our campus offices work is the people, who understand why a weird validation code exists or how the policies scattered across multiple documents fit together. People learn these things by doing that tedious work first, getting some of it wrong, and learning from their colleagues. Burgess can check the AI output as he would a junior associate’s work because I’m guessing Burgess himself spent time as a junior associate, reading case law, and developing his deep knowledge. 

Colleges and universities are, at their core, learning organizations. We already put enormous effort into first-year experiences and mentoring programs for our students, but I’m not sure we always apply the same thinking to the people who start working on our campuses. Learning is learning, and as you’ve seen me argue more than once in this newsletter, the struggle is part of how students anyone learns. Helping staff grow and develop was always one of my favorite parts of working at institutions, in part, I think, because someone once spent time helping me grow so I worry about what happens when AI absorbs too much of the work that our newest employees used to learn from. If a tool processes a withdrawal, an academic advisor misses the opportunity to learn how to have hard conversations with students. And when people who learned to do their jobs through the struggle start to retire, who will be developed enough to take their place?  While we debate AI’s place in the classroom, let’s be sure not to lose sight of the learning that happens outside of it for all members of our campus communities.  

Sparks 

• As courting students gets tougher, colleges vie to make the admissions process friendlier  (The Hechinger Report) - Jon Marcus looks at ways colleges and universities are attempting to make the admissions process more welcoming for students. This article is interesting because it assumes that many institutions haven't already made this shift and gives you some insight into the admissions world.
• Too many degrees ‘not value for money’, says Andy Haldane (Times Higher Education) - A leading British economist argues that many degrees do not provide enough value. I know this is not about the US sector, but it’s good to remember that the value higher education is being questioned globally.
• U of Kentucky Says Humanist Admin Exempt From AI (Inside Higher Ed) - An employee received a religious accommodation excusing him from personally using AI in his role at his institution. Since I wrote about higher education employees using AI, I thought this was a nice counterpoint.