Jeffrey Selingo
Only now are colleges realizing that the implications of AI are much greater and are already outrunning their institutional ability to respond. As schools struggle to update their curricula and classroom policies, they also confront a deeper problem: the suddenly enormous gap between what they say a degree is for and what the labor market now demands. In that mismatch, students are left to absorb the risk. Alina McMahon and millions of other Gen-Zers like her are caught in a muddled in-between moment: colleges only just beginning to think about how to adapt and redefine their mission in the post-AI world, and a job market that’s changing much, much faster.
What feels like a sudden, unexpected dilemma for Gen-Z graduates has only been made worse by several structural changes across higher education over the past decade.
First, a huge surge of undergraduates shifted to majoring in fields now being upended by AI. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, a long-running survey of college freshmen by UCLA found students much more focused on going to college to “get a better job” than on what they previously wanted most: to learn more about things that interested them. That new mind-set showed up in what they picked as a major in college. Between 2010 and 2020, fields such as philosophy, history, and English saw a big drop in popularity. The latter two majors fell by one-third in that ten-year period while overall humanities enrollment declined by almost a fifth. Where did they go? A lot pivoted to computer science and related fields.