How do we prepare college students for the AI world?

The rise of artificial intelligence is threatening the foundations of education — how we teach, how we assess and even how students learn to think. Cheating has become effortless. Attention spans are dissolving. And the future job landscape is so uncertain that we don’t know what careers to prepare students for. A recent NBC News poll of nearly 20,000 Americans shows the public is evenly divided, with about half believing we should integrate AI into education and half believing we should ban it.

So, as we welcome the Class of 2029 to our campuses, what should colleges do?

Although some urge higher education to prioritize STEM fields and AI-related job skills, a surprising number of technology leaders are advising the opposite.

“I no longer think you should learn to code,” says investor and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. “The engineer’s role will be supervisory, at best, within 18 months.”

Roman Vorel, chief information officer of Honeywell, argues that “the future belongs to leaders with high EQs — those with empathy, self-awareness and the ability to make genuine human connections — because AI will democratize IQ.”

Daniel Kokotajlo, co-author of “AI 2027,” which projects a set of scenarios leading to an “enormous” impact of superhuman AI over the next decade, puts it bluntly: “Economic productivity is just no longer the name of the game when it comes to raising kids. What still matters is that my kids are good people — and that they have wisdom and virtue.”

In other words, as machines gain in speed and capability, the most valuable human traits may not be technical but moral and interpersonal. Technology journalist Steven Levy spoke even more plainly in a recent commencement address at Temple University: “You have something that no computer can ever have. It’s a superpower, and every one of you has it in abundance: your humanity.”

It might seem like a tall order to cultivate attention, empathy, judgment and character — qualities that are hard to measure and even harder to mass-produce. Fortunately, we have an answer, one that turns out to be surprisingly ancient: liberal education. Small liberal arts colleges may enroll only a modest 4% of our undergraduates, but they are, historically and today, our nation’s seed bank for deep and broad humanistic education.

Liberal education is structured around serious engagement with texts, works of art and scientific discoveries that have shaped our understanding of truth, justice, beauty and the nature of the world. Students don’t just absorb information — they engage in dialogue and active inquiry, learning to grapple with foundational questions. What is the good life? What is the relationship between mathematics and reality? Can reason and faith coexist? Why do music and art move us?

These acts — reading, looking, listening, discussing — may sound modest, but they are powerful tools for developing the skills students most need. Wrestling with a challenging text over hours and days strengthens attention like physical exercise builds stamina. Conversation sharpens the ability to speak and listen with care, to weigh opposing views, to connect thought with feeling. This kind of education, by deepening our understanding of ourselves and our world, cultivates wisdom — and it’s remarkably resistant to the shortcuts AI offers.

If you spent a week at the college I lead, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., you might forget that AI even exists. It’s hard to fake a two-hour conversation about “Don Quixote” after reading only an AI summary, and it’s awkward to continue that conversation with your friends over a meal in the dining hall. Should you succumb to the temptations of AI in writing a paper, you’re likely to find yourself floundering in the follow-up discussion with faculty.

Liberal arts colleges have one other indispensable tool for deepening learning and human connection: culture. Most are small, tight-knit communities where students and faculty know one another and ideas are exchanged face to face. Students don’t choose these schools by default; they opt in, often for their distinctiveness. The pull of technology is less strong at these colleges, because they create intense, sustaining, unmediated experiences of communal thinking. This strong culture might be seen as a kind of technology itself — one designed not to dissipate minds and hearts, but to support and deepen them.

Paradoxically, four years largely removed from the influence of technology is one of the best ways of preparing for life and work in an increasingly technologized world.

Carla Echevarria, a 1996 alumna of St. John’s and now a senior manager of user experience at Google DeepMind, admits that she would “struggle with Schrödinger in senior lab and then bang my head against Hegel for a couple of hours and then weep in the library while listening to ‘Tristan und Isolde.’ That brings an intellectual fearlessness.

“When I started working in AI, I didn’t really know anything about AI,” she adds. “I prepared for my interview by reading for a couple of weeks. That fearlessness is the greatest gift of the education.” Many alums echo this belief regardless of the fields they go into.

As we head into this school year and into a future shaped by powerful and unpredictable machines, the best preparation may not be a new invention, but an old discipline. We don’t need a thousand new small colleges, but we need a thousand of our colleges and universities, large and small, to embrace an overdue renaissance of these deeply humanizing educational practices. We don’t need to outpace AI — we need to educate people who can think clearly, act wisely and live well with others.

J. Walter Sterling is the president of St. John’s College, with campuses in Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe, N.M.