Toward a New College Culture
Students who want to achieve; Faculty who want to mentor
According to the most recent data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in mid-December, the unemployment rate for recent college grads stands at 5.8 percent, a full 1.7 percent higher than the average across all workers. Recent college grads are also experiencing an unemployment rate almost double the average for all college grads, which stands at 2.9 percent.
College culture has to adapt to the Average is Over with AI world. Here is what I suggest should happen.
Achievement Mindset vs. Spoiled-Brat Mindset
Students who have an achievement mindset will be winners. Students who have the spoiled-brat mindset will be losers. The achiever exerts effort in order to obtain from college the abilities needed to accomplish ambitious goals. The spoiled brat feels entitled to high status while exercising minimal effort.
Harvard and other Ivy League universities have always had a mix of both high-achievement students and spoiled-brat students. Even in their heyday, they had heirs of rich parents, athletes, and legacy admissions who were spoiled brats. But grade inflation and social justice activism have catered to the spoiled-brat mindset. From my distant perspective, it appears that the spoiled-brat culture at the Ivy League has become more prominent.
When I was in graduate school at MIT, the undergraduates had a high-achievement mindset. But I fear that in recent years DEI has eaten away at that.
If you want to see the high-achievement mindset, follow the substack of the Austin Scholar. In her latest post, she writes,
Alpha’s approach to creative writing (or any other form of creativity) isn’t about replacing human creativity with AI. It’s about building the fundamental skills that make creativity possible in the first place, and then giving kids endless opportunities to practice those skills in ways that actually matter to them.
The Alpha school has a culture of high achievement. Its culture should be a model for college today.
Mentor Mindset vs. Bishop Mindset
The traditional faculty-student relationship in academia is one of bishop and novice. The faculty bishop’s job is to teach the novices. The bishop is the ultimate authority. Novices can only advance by listening to the bishop.
Actually, that may be an overly charitable reading of faculty culture. Faculty are so caught up in the zero-sum status competition they call “research” that they want to have as little to do with students as possible.
AI makes the faculty bishop obsolete. The student novice can instead learn from AI as a personal tutor.
I believe that the role of the professor should shift to one of mentor. That is a radical shift, and most academics are neither willing nor able to take on that role.
The bishop mindset says that you are the subject-matter expert, and your job is to pass along your expertise to the novices. The mentor mindset says that your job is to understand the individual students and their needs. AI can act as a tutor, passing along subject-matter expertise. The AI can use quizzes, interviews, spaced repetition, and other techniques supported by education research. Your job is to act as a facilitator of the student’s growth.
At the Alpha school, there are no teachers. Instead, there are guides. They have a different mindset from teachers. Guides help with motivation and general direction. A background in athletic coaching can be good preparation for becoming a guide.
Just as Alpha has done away with teachers, it could be that a forward-thinking college needs to do away with professors. Maybe it needs people with business experience or coaching experience to help provide students with inspiration and advice. Maybe it needs people who are experienced with using AI to learn, who can then help students make the best use of AI tutors.
The mentor mindset is dramatically different from the bishop mindset. If my intuition about it is correct, then we ought to be as radical about higher education as the Alpha School is about K-12 education.
You are not kidding about the Bishop mindset being a charitable interpretation. I have had faculty who were on my dissertation committee when I was getting my PhD 25 years ago tell me how wrong I am without explanation on social media. The mindset of the sage/bishop/smartest person in any room needs to go. A new college culture of mentoring is very much needed.
I think perhaps the bigger issue with higher education, and education more broadly, is that the credentialing function is performed by the same people performing (or not) the teaching function. As a result the answer to “did you teach this student what he is supposed to know” pretty much always is “yes” and if they can’t pass tests and that makes the teacher look bad the teacher just says they passed the test. Whether the teacher is of the bishop or mentor model seems unimportant in that case as the incentives are the same.
I think until teaching the material is uncoupled from testing whether students know the material we won’t be able to fix that.