Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Welcome back to GenShift, where we explore how generational experiences shape the way we live, learn, lead, and work. I'm Dr. Katherine Jeffrey. Today, we're continuing my conversation with Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.

In our last episode, we talked about the changing landscape of higher education, what a college degree means today, what employers expect from graduates, and how well colleges are preparing students for the world of work. But we ended with a question we really can't talk about education today without asking: what happens when AI changes not only how students learn, but what they actually need to learn? Because there's an interesting tension here.

Students are entering workplaces where knowing how to use AI may quickly become an expectation, while many colleges and professors are still trying to figure out when students should use it and when they shouldn't. So today, Ted and I are going to dig into that very thing. What do students gain when they use AI?

What might they lose if they rely on it too much? And how do we make sure AI helps students think better instead of simply doing the thinking for them? And to be honest, a lot of Gen Z-ers are worried about this very thing. We'll also talk about what all of this means for professors, employers, and ultimately, the kind of people we're preparing to lead, work, and participate in society.

So let's jump back in to my conversation with Ted Mitchell.

 Many employers say new graduates require significant development, obviously, through their first year on the job, right? More and more they're saying, "Whoa," "What's happening?"

We're missing some things." So would you say this is primarily a college problem or is this a workplace problem? 

Ted Mitchell: It's a distance between the two problem. Mm-hmm. I think that the w- the world of work has changed much faster than colleges have changed. And I think even at a starting point colleges and universities always had a difficult relationship with this idea that you should help people succeed in the world of work.

This goes back to the Middle Ages, there's something dirty about going to work and getting paid for it. We've always had some tension there, but I think that the changes in work have exacerbated those.

And I think one of the things that we at ACE are really working hard on is to say to our colleges and universities, students need to have experience in today's world of work while they're in college. Cause we can't tell the story about the world of work good enough. We just need to put 'em out there, and this is why I think internships and apprenticeships are so important today, to give students a sense on the ground, what it's like to show up to work in a modern workplace, whether that's healthcare or construction or computer science or hedge funds.

They've all undergone such changes. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Would you say, too, it's like that experiential piece? I'm gonna take what I'm learning here, and I'm actually going to apply it, so this matters to my current life and my future life. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, absolutely, and I think, it's funny. I'm very old.

I'm not old enough to have known John Dewey who was a turn of the- ... century philosopher.

But, Dewey got this right in the 1880s when he said that, the best way to learn something is to engage with it, to do it. You can see things, you can hear things, you can read things, but it's not until you can actually put it together with an actual real-world thing that you learn it.

So we've known this, and we struggle with it. But I think the time has come. I think we can break through and I think that this is one of the fundamental ways in which AI is a friend, not a foe. AI can build situations for people to apply their learning in almost any discipline.

And I'm really looking forward to that part of the AI revolution. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. I never thought about that, how it will make education so much more applicable, with a lot less energy spent perhaps creating those spaces.

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's right. Think about, most of the kinds of things that we're talking about are generating a question and see if you have the tools to generate reasonable hypotheses about how to deal with it- whether it's a civil engineering problem or a philosophy problem. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 'Cause those critical thinking skills are gonna be Yeah ... essential. 

Always been essential, but even more so with AI, right? Which again, we'll get into that. What would you say to someone who believes that college is simply not necessary anymore?

Ted Mitchell: I don't think that college is necessary for everybody. 

And I think that's one of the mistakes we've made in American public policy over the last 20 years is it's the flip side of the access issue. I think we've opened the doors to far more people, and that's great.

But I also think that we've said to people, " If you don't go to college, you won't get X, Y, Z," starting with earnings.

We know for a fact that there are plenty, let's take the earnings part, plenty of jobs that people will earn a middle class, upper middle class income without going to college.

I think that's great. And if somebody leaves high school and they know that they wanna pursue one of those occupations, then I think we should support them in every way possible.

For what is going to be a majority of jobs and a majority of positions in the American economy at least, people will need to know how to learn, they will need to know the range of places they can get new information, they need to know the critical thinking skills to be able to tell truth from untruth.

And most people will continue to get that from college. 

But I'm also hopeful that we can develop ways for people who don't take the college route to challenge themselves and be challenged by things that help them be better citizens be more fruitful members of their communities.

I don't think it'll ever be either or, but I wanna work on the bridge in between.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: What does that look like, that, and what does that look like to build those skills?

Ted Mitchell: So I think in California there's a high school curriculum that you may have seen. It's called Connected Learning, and the idea was to create apprenticeships with some of the building trades that would also satisfy the A through G college requirements.

Which are what you need to do to be able to get into the UC system in California. And so it's this great curriculum that, says, if you're really trying to build a house, you need to know a heck of a lot of geometry. And by the way, you probably need to know some algebra to go along with that to be able to figure out what the load-bearing part of any kind of joint you make is.

And it is possible to create a curriculum that joins the vocational and the academic. I don't think that's gonna sweep the nation because it's really hard to do. But I think that allowing pieces of both to emerge within a single institution. For a community college to be able to be working hard on someone's medical accounting program where it's what they wanna do.

They wanna go to work in the back office of a hospital and help all of us figure out how to make our insurance work. God, we need them. I do. And so while they're doing that, it's important then for them also to figure out how to work in that environment and also build communities of citizens who can collectively think about healthcare.

Maybe you have philosophy of public health or a public health policy course that goes along with the technical stuff. University of Texas has done an interesting thing. They have now opened transcripts to Google certificates that are offered through Coursera, and we might have talked about this when we were in Omaha together.

That University of Texas students can take up to four Google certificates on the Coursera platform and transfer those into their UT transcript. So you might have a philosopher at the University of Texas Austin who also has a four-course specialty- Yeah ... in data analysis.

And so I think that those are the ways that we're gonna start to mix the vocational and the non-vocational. And we'll develop off-ramps from colleges and on-ramps to college that will allow people to move from college pre-degree, but with skills that are marketable and to be able to work on those, and should they need to come back to college, to come back and transfer some of what they learned on the job to their college transcript. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Which I think so, fits so well with what this generation is saying. "This is what we want." "We don't just wanna be stuck in this one pipeline for the rest of our lives. There's so many things I'm interested in and so many ways I wanna learn and grow, and so give me options, give me flexibility, give me opportunity."

Ted Mitchell: This is where your work has been so important in my thinking, is just that. It's the generational mismatch that I inelegantly spoke of at the very beginning.

When you think about primary and secondary education, you call it K12.

Right? And that could be a sentence if you- If you think about it in one way. Or, just a kind of a mindless pipeline with not a lot of choice in it. And this generation of young people especially just isn't putting up with that. They're already doing it.

They're living multiple lives I don't wanna say in secret. In broad daylight, but we're not paying attention to it. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: That's really well said. I love how you put that. They're living multiple lives in broad daylight, but we're just not. We're just like, "Yep, this is how the world works."

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, sit down for 12 years.

Yeah. We'll get back to you at the end. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. And that's what I try to tell employers all the time is like you're bringing these Gen Zers into your workplace, and you expect them to just understand how they're supposed to function. But the way that we function in the workplace is not the way they've lived their lives, and I think you just explained that in a brilliant way.

It's like we have to create new ways of being in the workplace if they're gonna succeed and enjoy being part of whatever you have to offer. 

Ted Mitchell: And that's so important because that's the other assumption that we make is that here's your job, take it or leave it.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Ted Mitchell: And I think that is devastating to individuals, and it's terrible for any business that you're in because if you're not in the-- and this is my view, if you're not in the human growth business, then you have no business employing people. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. I think that's so important.

Ted Mitchell: And I think from a college point of view, how many decades have we talked about lifelong learning, right? But now we really have to just do it. That's a part of being an employer is encouraging people to develop some part of their life that I hope is connected to what they're doing at work, but, may also not be.

We may not pay for that, but we ought to be able to give people license and freedom to be able to explore. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. Oh, I'm gonna make everyone I speak to listen to this podcast. 

Ted Mitchell: Oh, you're too nice.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So one more question, then we'll get into AI. Yeah ... has higher education been asking the wrong question? Instead of asking how many students graduate, should we be asking who are our students becoming?

Ted Mitchell: We should be asking both. One of my lines when I talk to my colleagues is some version of 100% of students who come to our doors come to get a degree and only 60% leave with a degree. And so what should we say about the 40% who don't get a degree?

Those are the folks that are most interesting to me to answer your question, is on the one hand, I could think of it as an abject failure on the part of the student, an abject failure on the part of the institution a shared failure or a success.

And the question about who they become is about actually asking if it's a success. I might have gotten everything I need in a year and a half, found my passion, found a path, and said, " Bye-bye. Thank you. It was really great." And- Yeah ... and every day we read about people for whom that's true.

They're usually billionaires. You know, you can't sample on that, that dependent variable. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. Yep. But they know that's real, right?

Ted Mitchell: Know it's real, and it's not just real for the billionaires. So we do a bad job of figuring out who people are becoming, whether they're graduates or not.

And if I could wave a magic wand, what I would want would be a way for us to measure wellbeing and have that be right up there along with earnings as a way of ranking and rating colleges. And we can't get there yet. I don't know if we'll get there, but, I am envious of the nation, the Kingdom of Bhutan because of their ability to measure gross national happiness. We have some aspiring to do to be able to- Ah

measure wellbeing among our graduates and among the people who choose for one reason or another to not stick around. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I love that, and I think this generation, our Gen Z-ers, are really pushing that as well. Because even if you look in the workplace, we talk about work/life balance, and I'm like, "Oh no.

It is now life/work balance," yeah. And they'll say no to, coming into even a fun corporate event in the evenings because they're like that's my time," like when I get to do the things I enjoy outside of my job.

That may even be a requirement for them. That could say a lot about an institution to a Gen Z-er if they're actually measuring that. If I just come through your doors, even if it's just for a year... this is the positive ways it will impact my life. 

Ted Mitchell: And for me, because I am a fan of higher education, and I continue to be a fan of a bachelor's degree, I think we need to build around that student.

And so we need to build around students who come, go away, come back, go away, come back, go away. And this is actually where I think the regional and commuter institutions and the online institutions have it all over the residential institutions. I was the president of a small liberal arts college, and, we loved, especially faculty love transfer students because they bring an energy.

But, if you're a 28-year-old military veteran coming to a liberal arts college and living, living in a dorm with 18-year-olds, it's a bit of a problem, right? So Katherine's head is exploding here. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And so the flexibility that this generation is seeking, I think, is a much better match for sort of the new generation of institutions that are much more fluid and dynamic in their in and out and part-time and not part-time.

We're getting there, but we're not gonna get there in the institutions that started in 1679. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: That's what I'm thinking as you're saying this. So how does a four-year institution, right? This is who we are, this is how we've branded ourselves, this is who we've always been.

If you're talking to the president of an institution like that what would you say? What do they need to do? 

Ted Mitchell: It's a very interesting organizational design question. They either need to start to change the design of the core of what they do. And that's really hard because at the core you have those faculty that we've been talking about who really have their minds set on you going through four years uninterrupted.

It was hard enough to get the faculty to accept foreign study. It's like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna lose them for a year."

... 

Ted Mitchell: But the majority of institutions that wanna do this are building experimental institutions around their core. ASU, Arizona State is the dominant model.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And Southern New Hampshire as well. So Southern New Hampshire actually has a campus in Manchester but it is a 10th of their enrollment. Arizona State has a big campus and they have, big research enterprise, R1 institution. They've got a football team that occasionally competes for the national championship.

That's 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: right, yes. 

Ted Mitchell: And they've- Yeah ... they've got all of that, but then they have 100,000 students spread across the world doing all of these very interesting things on their own schedule. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. 

Ted Mitchell: There are institutions that are making these moves.

Vanderbilt has been in the news lately for starting campuses in California. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, interesting. 

Ted Mitchell: Okay. They're not just campuses, they're not mini Vandys. They're campuses that are much more flexible- ... where the courses are delivered in a much more dynamic way.

So it's that idea of creating outliers. I think of them as, pioneers on the frontier that are creating new kinds of academic settlements that I think are more attuned to what's going on. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I love that. I need to ask you this. This as you're talking I'm like, oh my gosh.

So I have a nephew who just graduated college. So when you think about online versus in the classroom, he's like, "When I started college I was in the classroom and I felt like I was learning and, I met people," right?

And he's an athlete as well, so he said, "Now all my classes are online, like every single one." And he said, "I can tell the difference between somebody who attended a class and their retention, in person, versus just having online courses." And he felt like by the end of his college career he's "What did I learn?"

Yeah. He kinda felt frustrated in that sense. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. His experience is not unusual and I think is all too typical. Look, we learned this about education in general during COVID. That if you just take what you did in person and put it on the screen, it's going to be generous, suboptimal.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Ted Mitchell: That you really need to do things differently in order to create any of that kind of, first of all, feedback to make sure that people have retained what they're learning, and the interaction that you get in the best especially small college classes. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And so we need the pedagogy to catch up with the technology.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Ted Mitchell: Which is gonna be a good lead into AI. So I do a lot of work as you mentioned at the beginning with friends at Coursera.

And so this is one of the big challenges for online providers is how do you think about pedagogy in a new way? How do you think about how to get students excited?

And, the research at Coursera is really very similar to the research that any web designer does for any enterprise, is that if you can't capture the viewer's attention in three to five seconds...

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Not very long ... 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, not very long. And if I thought about my own career as a professor, if three to five seconds, oh, my God, three to five seconds I've, barely gotten through the boring stuff about what's next in the syllabus.

and- 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Exactly.

Ted Mitchell: When your papers are gonna get returned. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And so we really do need to engineer the learning experience in a way that is that takes advantage of the technology- ... but doesn't let the technology be an excuse for anybody for not doing the hard work. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So if you can talk about, what are some things you would advise when it's online?

If I was teaching an online course, what would you recommend for me? 

Ted Mitchell: The simplest thing is to start every engagement with an online poll, and it doesn't matter if there are 10 students in the class or 1,000 students in the class.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Immediately.

Yeah ... 

Ted Mitchell: you can see yourself in those numbers. Yeah. You can see yourself in the bar charts that come around. Yeah. And then you begin to decode that. You've built a little bit of engagement in which they're seeing the course through something that they've done. Something that they've reacted to.

Then the other is to have a whole lot of, in thinking about just basic Zoom technology, to have the chat be free-floating and for people, going back to people living multiple lives, I really don't care if in the Zoom chat somebody says, " Hey, I went to see a Brandi Carlile concert on Saturday."

"It was really cool. Anybody else go?" That's fine. Let's live while we're doing this. Yeah.

And then finally is to have sort of quizzes and ways for people to demonstrate that they've been paying attention throughout the session.

And basically to have it so that you can't just walking around the house doing chores and this thing pops up, you're not gonna get back on until you make an answer to the question. Ah. So there are ways to force people to keep their attention.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, that's good. That's a good accountability tool. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. Those are the ones that you could do even if you're just, using Zoom as your basic technology. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, that's good.

Speaker 4: You've probably seen it before. A Gen Z employee suggests new software, but their Boomer manager shuts it down with, "No, we've always done it this way." Or maybe you've watched a Traditionalist roll their eyes when a Millennial colleague asks about working remotely. These moments create unproductive tension, leading to frustration, dissatisfaction, and stress, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Workplaces don't have to be divided. That's why I created the GenShift e-learning course. With over 20 years studying generational differences, I've built over 40 lessons to help bridge the gap in life, leadership, and work. Enroll today and get 10% off with promo code PODGENSHIFT. Want to go deeper?

Schedule a free demo or book a workshop with your team to develop practical strategies for intergenerational success. Visit katherinejeffery.com/elearning to get started. Let's build a space where every generation can thrive.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay, let's go to AI now. All right. We've been dancing around it 'cause obviously it's huge.

But we cannot dance around it anymore. So let me start here. So most college students use AI regularly, but they're often discouraged or even prohibited from using it in college. And then what I'm seeing in the workplace, they're coming in the workplace and companies expect "You should be fluent in this.

What's wrong with you?" And they're like, "No, I've been told not to use it," or some of them just don't agree with AI. They think it's killing the planet. I've even heard them talk about "I'm not gonna be smart. It's gonna take away my ability to think." So what are we actually teaching students when we're, like, saying, "Oh, AI's the future, but don't use it"?

Ted Mitchell: Gee, that's the first time I've ever been asked that question.

 So on the ground I think that there are three reactions. Institutions are having one of three reactions to AI. You've got the the head in the sand crowd that you were talking about, the, no never. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. 

Ted Mitchell: And by the way you can't breathe.

Yeah, it's not gonna happen, and so I'm not quite sure what those institutions are expecting will be the outcome. And then there are the students who don't wanna use it for all kinds of reasons. I think that there are the environmental concerns, there are the ethical concerns, and there are certainly the privacy concerns. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: We roughly know that they're out there, but I think we need to be better at understanding where these models are trained, how much of what we ask and put in becomes a part of training that we do or don't control.

And that's the second group, I think, are institutions that are thinking of it first from a policy point of view. How can we make sure that within the known universe which is expanding as we speak how can we create guardrails that keep students safe? 

That's number one.

And so depending on how far down the age range you go, I think that, it starts with things like agentic AI is different from character AI. Character AI is a huge problem for young adults and teenagers and we need to protect them from those. Agentic AI where the agents are actually doing, working on your behalf, great.

Let's draw a line there. Then where are these models trained? Can we create a walled garden in our institution where Anthropic will help us keep, what what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens at Northern Iowa stays in Northern Iowa, those kinds of things.

And I think in that middle group then that having established those policy guardrails, institutions have dived into helping students become flu- So once we've solved the safety first, then let's move into how can you use AI in a way that is productive and useful for you, that doesn't substitute its imagined intelligence for yours?

How do you guide AI through a conversation? What we learned from our friends in Omaha is you actually don't wanna get the answer the first time.

You wanna have to ask over and over again to sharpen your own thinking about what you're asking- Yeah ... and to ask AI to look in places that you haven't looked. And if you do that, then you're, I think, becoming a more active learner of AI rather than a passive learner. So policy, active learning, figuring out how to create agents and other tools that can help you do the non-creative, non-intellectual part of your work.

I'm trying to train an agent right now to go through my emails. One of the things I'm bad at is responding to questions that I've asked other people. And so I'll send you an email and say, and it'll be on the top of my mind, "Gosh, I really wanna know.

I saw that you did this presentation. Could I see your slides?" 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And then I'll ignore it. And two weeks later I'll be scrolling through my email and I'll see- 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: You're like, "Ugh, I know" ... "

Ted Mitchell: They didn't respond to me." 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. 

Ted Mitchell: So I'm building an agent that's gonna help me do that.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Let me know when you get that done. I could use it too. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. I definitely will. Yeah. I think that those are the kinds of things that employers want their people to be able to do. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: Is to bring efficiencies, to allow computers to do the work that computers can do, leaving the room for humans to do the things that computers can't.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. So let me take you back to the classroom. Yeah. When a student uses AI to complete an assignment, what do they lose and what do they gain? A lot of even parents are asking this question.

Ted Mitchell: They lose the challenge of assembling information. They lose the logic exercise of assembling information in an order that is like a geometric proof. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes.

Ted Mitchell: They lose the challenge of picking the right word to express a nuance of an argument. 

All of these are challenges, right?

Which is why it's so easy to just push the button. They lose the challenge of reworking something three or four or five times to be able to make it better. And so I think all of those are fundamental things that make us work as humans. And without that, I think we really do become objects of life rather than the subjects of our own lives.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: That's a profound statement. So then what do they gain? Why would we want them to do that? 

Ted Mitchell: I think that it challenges them to frame the question in a way that generates a decent response.

So if your goal is to make AI good at answering a question, then that's a reasonable challenge to put to students is, why did World War I start? Fine, then, let's challenge AI to make an argument that makes sense. But if it's anything other than that, I think that students are always on the losing end of substituting AI learning for theirs.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So man, that puts a lot of pressure on an educator. 

Ted Mitchell: Sure does, because this goes back to the conversation about the pedagogy not keeping up with the technology. 

When you're writing class assignments, you have to write them in a completely different way now. And thinking about how to AI-proof your quizzes, lectures, and term papers and things. The easy way, and many institutions are doing this, is to revert back to, blue books.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. It's crazy. 

Ted Mitchell: That doesn't bother me. I think that's certainly one way you can do it.

Oral exams, that's another way to do it. Yeah. And that helps with my goal of making students say what they mean. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And then I think that there's a whole opening for there isn't even a word for it yet. People who produce learning engagements to be able to produce things that are all about hypothesis testing, that are all about scenarios that you have to decode that are much more challenging where AI can be a participant but really can't get at the right answer.

Yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And, I do think that there's an industry that's gonna come out of this. 

That's movie producing Except it's gonna be educational experience producing. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Fascinating. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, and I don't know where it's gonna start, but I'm really excited about it. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And will the metaverse play into that?

Ted Mitchell: Probably, yeah. And you're gonna have people who are very skilled at bringing in video data and numerical data and stories, and put all of those together in a way that then the human has to make connections and decode against all of that. And the more different fractals for the experience that's created, the more it's gonna make the experience, the journey, a human journey rather than an AI journey.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: That gets me excited. Like, what does that look like? 

Ted Mitchell: Let's go build that company. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, let's do it. That sounds like a lot of fun on both ends, right? At creating- Yeah ... that, but then actually experiencing that I think would be pretty cool. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, and we've talked a lot for a long time about edutainment.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And okay, good, but that's done, 'cause I think we're done with edutainment. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: Because it's still one way. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And now we're in this world where we really are creating a user-based experience. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep ... 

Ted Mitchell: That will help people learn things.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And that's what they're used to.

Ted Mitchell: Thank you. It does come back to your, main observation. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: Let's ask Ted in 1981 when I started teaching to build one of those for his class.

That's not gonna happen. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. No, yeah. Totally different world, yeah. Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: So you're gonna need a whole new- 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah ... 

Ted Mitchell: add-on an adjacent industry to do this for educators at every level. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: It used to be easy to write a textbook. It used to be the way that professors made a little bit of extra money is writing a textbook.

This is the equivalent of that. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Which seems so much more involved.

Ted Mitchell: Totally right. Totally right. Totally 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Right. But yeah, I think you're right.

So let me go back to employers. Yeah. You mentioned AI start to do a lot of that traditional entry level work, right?

Computers do what computers do so humans can do what humans do. A lot of people still think about the traditional career ladder, which I tend to think with Gen Z it's more of a lattice, right? They move sideways. Yep. They move down, not just in this orderly way.

So what starts to happen to those first steps on that ladder? 

Ted Mitchell: That's a big question, and there's not an easy answer to it because I think the first thing that's happening is a lot of those entry level jobs are the ones that computers can do at least as well as humans.

I think that employers are going to need to think about the talent that comes into the organization as being talent that is already ready to do the next level of interpreting and demanding more of the technology. So it comes back to what do college students need to know when they get out to be able to occupy the next first rungs?

And I think that this is where institutions like Ohio State are getting it right. And so Ohio State has challenged all of its departments to come up with a theory of how AI can help in their discipline. And to train students to use AI as an assistant in everything from classics to mechanical engineering.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Wow. 

Ted Mitchell: So that a classics major from Ohio State is gonna be able to go into a company with fluency in basic technology, but also with the ability to think about how it can solve really interesting problems that aren't necessarily quantitative, that aren't necessarily modeling, et cetera. And so I think that kind of fluency- not just be about, the 10 low level create an agent to help you with your email. But how can AI help us understand public policy problems or problems in historical analysis so that those graduates are at the next level of of using and thinking about AI.

I'm really excited about that. I don't know of any other institutions that are doing that across their departments, but I'm very excited to watch what happens there. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: That's really fascinating. Isn't it? And then as an employer, you're bringing me next level skills. 

Ted Mitchell: That's right.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Side note, because I'm just interested in your thoughts or you may know why this is happening, 'cause this is the clickbait title, right? The whole University of Michigan not giving grades in one of their schools.

Do you have any thoughts on that, comments?

I feel like after you talked so highly of Ohio State, we have to bring up Michigan. 

Ted Mitchell: We have to bring up their competitor. It is true that MIT has not done freshman grades for a long time, and they, still seem to be putting out people who are pretty rigorous in their thinking.

The, the answer to these questions is always, what are you gonna do instead? So UC Santa Cruz was a very forward-thinking institution when it was founded, and it was founded on no grades ever. And that was fine as long as faculty were willing to put the time into doing real evaluations of student work and to write about it.

And as faculty became less and less interested, it became just a way of getting out of something. And that's my worry about Michigan, is that it's a way of getting out of the pressure of grades and not substituting something that would help people make the transition from somewhat easier work to really hard work.

And I'd like to see how they're gonna fill that gap before I can be enthusiastic about it. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Mm, That's fair. I love it. Okay, so one question we always have to talk about on a GenShift episode is, how much of this is actually generational?

Ted Mitchell: I think a ton of it is generational, and I don't think that it is genetic generational. I think it's environmental generational.

Remember when we used to fret about multitasking? That's just evaporated as multitasking has become life. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, you're right. It's just a part of how we exist.

Ted Mitchell: And you'll be glad to know that I've been doing nothing- ... focused on our conversation. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: You're not responding to those emails? 

Ted Mitchell: I'm not responding to those. There is a little window up here, but my eyesight is bad, and it's helping me out. But I think that the changes in technology the changes in demographics I think all of those has created an environment that makes this generation very different from others.

And I think that the sense of immediacy of both enjoyment and reward is interesting and is it's a struggle, as for employers who hire somebody on Tuesday and on Thursday they're wondering why they haven't been promoted or given more challenges.

In general, these are people who wanna move, who wanna grow, who wanna just, keep the pedal to the metal, and I think that's highly admirable. We worry a lot, I think correctly, about attention span. I've been reading deeply into the issue of the crisis of reading. I do think that people lose cognitive muscle-building when they don't read books. And read things that are three paragraph song instead. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah.

The crisis of reading, that's what you said. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. And the crisis of not reading, actually. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah.

Ted Mitchell: Or so I think that there are pluses and minuses, but I do think that this is a generation that's very different.

There are some things that we don't think about immediately when we think about this generation that I always like to point out, particularly in the environment of these, few and far between college campuses.

And, we see it in the politics and the culture wars. But in addition to all of the technology driven environmental changes and challenges, this group of students coming to college has grown up in more segregated neighborhoods than ever before, or at least since World War II. More segregated schools than any schools since the Brown decision.

And they're growing up in addition to being fragmenting in terms of attention and information, the social media silos that are by definition only capturing people who think alike it's creating a really siloed intellectual, cultural atmosphere for this generation.

And that's the one that I worry the most about. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So how as a parent would you combat that? You have millennials, right? 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. Yep, I would throw them into every kind of place that they could possibly mix with people who aren't like them. 

I think that, youth sports continues to be one of those places, and where I get worried is when youth sports becomes just another place where kids segregate economically mostly.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: But, youth sports clubs. We're suffering a paucity of those, and I would actually encourage parents to build some of those.

Get together with other parents and, build a group that does something in the neighborhood whether it's a community garden or something. But just get our kids out with people they wouldn't normally hang with. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I love that. It's interesting 'cause we talk all about diversity. But you're saying we're less diverse as we interact with the world than we ever have been. 

Ted Mitchell: I think that's right. Although I'm really encouraged when we look at the attitude surveys of this generation, they're totally open to people who are different from them.

The support for LGBTQ peers is extraordinary. I don't think race matters a whole lot to people, at least intellectually.

But when they come onto some of our campuses, they don't have the equipment to move beyond that intellectual acceptance to having the tools to actually find out that some of those people, you might actually disagree with them, and then how do you manage that?

And I think that we need to do a better job on college campuses in giving people muscle for how to appreciate what they say about diversity and translate that into being able to have a conversation between a Palestinian rights person and an Israeli citizen. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. And I've heard Gen Z-ers articulate that before we say we're so into diversity, but then we struggle actually accepting that people are different, and I think it's all the things you just mentioned that- Yeah

have contributed. I think they wanna be here, they want- Yeah. Oh- ... to be open and engaging but you're right. It's teaching them that muscle and getting them to actually use it. 

Ted Mitchell: That's right. That's right. If my magic wand had a second swipe I think it would be to reinstate some kind of national service and maybe put it squarely between high school and college.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: 'Cause I think more people need more time to decide whether they wanna go to college and what kind of college they're looking for. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: I think the automaticity of it doesn't serve anybody very well, and I think we've lost a lot of the places where, even doesn't matter how you really feel about the military, but, the military was a place where people got to mix during the draft times, you got to mix with people and depend on people who came from very different backgrounds. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah that's very provocative. Yeah. What would that look like? There'd be so much pushback, but man, 

Ted Mitchell: There is a national service movement afoot, and it's coming from very interesting places. Republican governor of Utah is promoting a state service program there.

Wow. And it's taking off. The Carnegie Foundation in New York is supporting some national service efforts. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Wow. And this is for men and women, like these would be- 

Ted Mitchell: Men and women military service, government service, community service. If you took all of the Vista, AmeriCorps- 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, yeah.

Ted Mitchell: Blah, blah, blah, put them all together and just say, "The important thing is that everybody does it." 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. ' Cause the gap year's more of a thing now too. Certainly wasn't a thing when I went to college, but now it's pretty normal. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, and a gap year is great. I think it's really admirable.

I wish my kids had done a gap year because it helps in that just getting away from the treadmill.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah ... 

Ted Mitchell: And having some thought. But the gap year is about individual stuff, and I think the service work is really about not only your own personal growth, but it's about the civic, the growth of sort of the sinews of civil society.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, okay. I just think there's so much value in that, in learning, like what does it look like to depend on people who are outside of my family, and how to build relationships, and how to share. 'Cause even, I talk about it all the time, the average number of kids in today's family is 1.7.

Yeah. Right. Versus Boomers, it's was 3.7.

Ted Mitchell: Is that right? It's 3.7? 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. 

Ted Mitchell: Whole different environment. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. And so even how you learn to socialize with people, it's just so different. And the Boomers didn't have a screen, right? And Gen Z has this other thing they're engaging with instead of their sibling even.

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So I just think that's a fascinating idea. I just love this conversation. But to wrap it up, I don't know, feels like a kinda simple question to ask, but when today's 18-year-olds look back 30 years from now, what do you hope that they say that college actually gave them?

Ted Mitchell: What I hope that college gives them, and it's so funny because it's gonna sound like completely orthogonal to anything that we've talked about. I hope that college gives them a sense of civic purpose and mission and the tools to execute against it. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: It's so good.

And some colleges actually promote that.

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I wouldn't say all of them do, but I think some of them there's more.

Ted Mitchell: And more, more and more are. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah.

Yeah, so Ted, thank you. This truly has been a blast.

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. Thank you, me too ... 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I love the way you articulate things and, the way you bring them into oh, that's a metaphor I can grasp. 'Cause I feel like the discussion around higher ed and even AI, it's just massive. Yeah. Yeah And a lot of people feel overwhelmed about it, and what do I do? How do I even start to navigate this? How do I think well about it? And I think you start to bring it into these places where, okay I can do that, I can make sense of that- Good ... and begin to take the next step in thinking about my future. 

Good. 

So to learn more about the work of the American Council on Education, visit their website, and we'll put that in the show notes and explore the research and resources they're actually producing for higher education.

Is, are there any specific ones you would call out aside from the two you said earlier that you think would be helpful? 

Ted Mitchell: We do a survey every five years. It's a little bit in-house, but we're about to launch it again, called the American College President.

I think it'd be interesting for parents to ask the question, what are these people thinking about? And every five years we ask that question, "What are you thinking about? What are you thinking about your college? What are you thinking about students?

What are you thinking about what students should know?" And so that, that'll be coming later but it'll be out in a few months. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: That's so good, right? 'Cause they're driving the ship, so you wanna know what their vision is. Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah and especially on some of these questions like are you in the no bucket of AI, or are you in the let's use it bucket of AI?

Are you in the whoa, go ahead 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: kind of thing? And does that go out to all presidents?

Ted Mitchell: Yeah 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay. 

Ted Mitchell: So it goes out to all 4,000. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Wow. Public and private.

Ted Mitchell: Public, private, two-year, four-year. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay ... 

Ted Mitchell: Online, offline. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: California Community College. 

Ted Mitchell: California Community Colleges, exactly. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: All right.

If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to follow GenShift, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's thinking about the future of higher education or just trying to make sense of higher education and where it is now. So thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on GenShift.