This graduation season, several commencement speakers made national news, not for delivering a memorable address, but because their AI-positive comments were met with boos and jeers from graduates. But this hostility may have less to do with a generation alarmed by AI’s threat to future jobs, and more to do with our collective understanding of what college and university are for.
In the 21st century, higher education’s raison d’être has been distilled to a cost-benefit framework, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis. Schools are understood to foster the economic potential of their graduates through specialization and skill building leading to a credential that signals market value to prospective employers. The mono-dimensional value advanced in this framework is the promise of wage and wealth premiums that exceed those of nondegree earners and new horizons of opportunity.
For many of today’s graduates, that promise feels increasingly fragile. We should expect visceral disapproval from graduates when they are reminded the blueprint they have invested time, money, and hope into is being redefined in a way that complicates their next chapter and potentially delegitimizes their credential. That is, AI has scrambled all the traditional guideposts for thinking about the future. To make matters worse, the implication is to embrace AI-induced dynamism with the same enthusiasm as the speakers who, it should be noted, benefited from the very educational system they are now suggesting to be obsolete.
To be clear, workforce preparation is certainly a key dimension of a college or university’s value proposition. However, to reduce higher education’s purpose to nothing other than economic considerations is to advance a narrative that is increasingly disconnected from the realities of soaring costs, housing instability, market dynamism, political fragility and the uncertainties of digitization. Who wouldn’t boo?
A different story
For decades, commentary around higher education has emphasized productivity, specialization and return on investment. Yet these are precisely the domains in which AI excels, leaving graduates with the anxiety-producing prospect of competing against a force whose capacities consistently outpace their own.
What is needed is a different story, one that considers the economics of education as well as its intellectual, moral, social, and even spiritual elements. While not abandoning the vocational dimensions of higher education, this narrative would also highlight its formative aspects in service of human flourishing.
At its best, this includes intellectual formation, or education as philosophia — the love of wisdom for its own sake. Classrooms are meant to expand student horizons and invite them to encounter the world with wonder, appreciation and understanding. Cultivated wisdom affords meaningful connections between the disciplines, forms our social imaginary and advances norms of truth-seeking.
Not unrelated, another dimension of higher education is character formation. A school worthy of the name does not simply develop skills among students; it considers their moral application. As the ethicist Martha Nussbaum reminds us, “A good doctor is also a good poisoner.”
Another dimension is civic and social formation — the evergreen reminder that we are citizens before consumers and that a full-bodied education precedes self-governance. Harvard’s Michael Sandel has criticized the modern university as little more than a sorting machine in service of the professions, minimizing or diminishing their role in addressing enduring questions, cultivating responsible citizens, and encouraging the moral formation of students — what he calls “soul craft.”
And, of course, economic formation matters. It is true that college graduates consistently experience far greater earning capacity, wage premiums and wealth premiums throughout their lifetimes than noncollege graduates. Moreover, the future marketplace is predicted to overwhelmingly favor students who possess a bachelor’s or master’s degree.
A different kind of hope
Importantly, these attributes become more, not less, important in an era of AI ascendancy. However, to settle here is to miss a larger point.
It is not simply that AI is a threat to jobs. Rather, expressions of dissatisfaction with AI reveal the impoverishment of the story we have told ourselves regarding the value and purpose of higher education. Students aren’t booing technology as if they are recalcitrant tech-phobic Luddites clinging to a bygone era. They are booing the broken promises of a system organized around reductionistic utility assumptions.
As I have suggested, we need another story with another promise — a better promise. Not merely a promise of market relevance in an age of digitization. A promise of human flourishing.
Should that promise come with a six-figure price tag? Probably not. Educational opportunities must be attainable and, thus, affordable. But the language of affordability reminds us that the totality of higher education’s value cannot be fully captured by market logic alone. To approach education as a market commodity is to reduce the fullness of its value proposition and disfigure its meaning.
Commencement boos that made headlines this spring may say less about our fears of AI and more about our prevailing narratives of higher education. To build resilient institutions and graduates, we need a richer account of why education exists and what it is for — not merely for workplace development, but the formation of persons capable of wisdom, virtue, responsibility, and meaningful work. This vision offers something more enduring than market relevance. It offers hope of a different kind. And AI will not make that vision obsolete. It makes it indispensable.