Admissions and student services will be affected first.
For decades, higher education’s solution to burgeoning enrollment and increased demand for student services stayed the same: hire more people. As Fran Yeary, a former vice chancellor at University of California at Berkeley, told me in 2012. “We threw people at problems, rather than technology.” Bur now, with enrollment declines exacerbating financial worries and more than half of college staff members considering leaving their jobs in the next yar, colleges need to learn how to rely on technology. While much of the discussion has focused on what generative AI means for teaching. Learning, and research, its immediate impact will like be felt on functions outside of the academic core.
Let’s start where turnover rates among staff are the worst: admission. Most colleges accept most t students who apply using a selection process that is routine and predictable. .AI could be trained to make decisions about who gets accepted – or at least make the first cut of applicants. Yes, colleges will still need humans for recruiting, but even there, AI is increasingly capable of finding and marketing to prospective students. At selective institutions, which have seen their applications total skyrocket in recent years. AI can at the very least reviews the quantitative elements of admissions, such as high-schools courses and grades, and reduce the number of fields that need a human touch.
College have already started to deploy AI-powered chatbots to answer student’s everyday questions and help them show up for classes. Sainta Lois University, for instance, added smart devices to dorm rooms hat have been programmed to answer more than 600 question from “What time toes the library close tonight?’ to “Where is the registrar’s office? “
The net iterations fo these chatbots is to personalize them to answer question that are specific to a student “”When Georgia State University added a chatbot to an intragovernmental course to nudge students on studying and assignments, researchers found significant improvements in student performance. In particular, firs-generation students who got reminders took the recommended actions, such as completing assignments, ant higher rates.
With campuses ow awash in data about their students and operations, AI can e used to tackle administrative functions from financial aid to the registrar’s office. At Arizona State University, AI is rewriting course descriptions to make them more informative for prospective students and improve search performance on th ewe.
So far, however, most of the e uses on AI on the administrative side are about making operations more efficient or improving the student experience, not reducing the work force. Official at companies that provide AI services to higher education tell me that collets are sometimes reluctant to buy the products because they don’t want them to be seen as replacing people. But until campuses us AI n that way – to take over for people in jobs that involve processing information or doing repeatable tasks -0 then we won’t reverse or slow down the upward-cost trajectory of higher education where most tuition dollars are nor spent on functions outside of classroom.
Jeffrey J. Selingo, an author and former editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, is a professor of practice at Arizona State University.