The recent rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools has inspired growing anxiety on college campuses while fueling a national conversation about faculty attempts to thwart students from using the tools to cheat.
But that prevalent narrative around AI and cheating is overshadowing the technology’s true potential: Artificial intelligence holds great promise for dramatically enhancing the reach and impact of postsecondary institutions and improving outcomes for all students.
Last month, President Biden issued a sweeping executive order aimed at better mitigating the risks and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, while also arguing for the need to “shape AI’s potential to transform education by creating resources to support educators deploying AI-enabled educational tools.”
Biden’s call to action could not have been more timely.
The question now is not whether generative AI can positively transform educational access and attainment, but whether higher education is ready to truly democratize and personalize learning with these tools.
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AI’s transformational potential is perhaps greatest at community colleges, minority-serving institutions and open-access universities. These schools’ diversity necessitates a broader set of supports. Dedicated faculty and staff not only serve a very broad range of students — including first-generation and low-income learners, returning adults, those for whom English is a second language and those balancing academic pursuits with family and work responsibilities — but they do so with fewer resources than instructors at elite and flagship institutions. Generative AI tools can augment critically needed services such as advisers, tutors and coaches.
Exploring the possibilities of AI is not cheap, however. While some low-cost or free tools can make a difference, the largest impacts will be achieved through more advanced — and costly — tools that are developed with specific learner populations in mind and blend academic material with students’ sociocultural and language contexts rather than providing generic solutions.
Challenges around cost and availability could further disenfranchise the very learners who could gain the most from AI tools by denying them access to the experts, resources and development opportunities they need to benefit from them. Institutions may struggle to bring the true power of AI to bear on addressing their students’ needs.
Similarly, too often, the datasets and algorithms behind AI tools reflect historical inaccuracies and intrinsic biases that only further disenfranchise learners. This will continue to be the case until we collectively confront the inequitable ways that AI systems are designed and resources are distributed.
That’s why we need to think about AI differently, shifting our focus from debates about academic integrity and concerns about cheating to how we can leverage artificial intelligence in equitable ways that will boost college completion for all students.
Related: How college educators are using AI in the classroom
Let’s focus on how AI advances could provide all learners with the kinds of high-touch support already offered to students who attend wealthier institutions. AI tools could have a transformative effect on access, progression and completion for learners who were previously constrained by limitations of time, space and resources.
Imagine if generative AI tutors could provide 24/7 individualized support, along with AI-powered virtual reality tools that would widen access to experiential learning opportunities. What about having adaptive learning tools enabling students to learn at a pace that best suits their level of preparation? And personalized learning materials that reflect their backgrounds and lived experiences?
A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.
Such steps could augment engagement and outreach efforts to lower the barriers that prevent students from underserved communities from earning degrees.
This is not a speculative vision of a not-too-distant future, but an emerging reality on some campuses. Arizona State University, for example, has assembled a team of engineers and data scientists to develop AI tools to enhance learning and improve student outcomes.
For now, such experimentation is limited to colleges and universities with the resources for scaling the benefits of the technology and developing the guardrails necessary for mitigating risks to learners.
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According to a new report from the Brookings Institution, many of the nation’s most selective and affluent colleges and universities are clustered in the same coastal metro areas long home to Big Tech — and now to AI innovation and job growth.
That’s unfortunate. Access to new technology — and the ability to play a role in shaping its design — should not be limited by geography or institutional type. A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.
That’s why the newly convened Complete College America Council on Equitable AI plans to bring together organizations representing over 1,000 access-focused two-year and four-year colleges and universities in January. We hope to influence and initiate policies and practices to encourage equitable engagement of AI technologies.
We hope that college leaders, policymakers and technologists will join us to make sure that AI helps to realize, rather than hinder, higher education’s promise as an engine of equity, prosperity and hope.
Yolanda Watson Spiva is president of Complete College America.
Vistasp M. Karbhari is a professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he also served as president from 2013 to 2020, and is a fellow and board member of Complete College America.
This story about AI in higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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