A Brave New World Demands a Brave New College

Shouping Hu*

Florida State University

The need to rethink and redesign undergraduate education is urgent. The arrival of ChatGPT may not be an existential danger for higher education as we know it, but what ChatGPT represents may be a flash point that triggers long overdue structural and substantive change.

Institutions of higher learning are notoriously slow to change, but both the speed and the scope of change in the external environment are accelerating. It is time to reimagine college for the betterment of our students, for higher learning, and for the future of human society. It is time for a new college: College 4.0.

College 1.0 represents higher learning from the founding of the first institution of higher learning in Bologna, Italy in 1088 through the 18^th century. College 1.0 flourished in Europe in the form of residential colleges like Oxford and Cambridge, which was imported to the colonial America and thrived in the new land, though only a small proportion of the population went to college (Trow, 1974). At first, students were mainly young men (many of whom were teenagers) who enjoyed campus life. They were later joined by an even smaller percentage of women (Horowitz, 1987). The liberal arts and development of the whole person comprised the raison d’etre of many College 1.0 institutions. There was a widespread perception that college was for an elite few who likely had a job waiting for them after graduation.

As America was transformed industrially and demographically, the demand for higher education increased exponentially, ushering in College 2.0 at the turn of the 20^th century. Over the decades, college going evolved from an experience for a thin slice of age-appropriate students to mass higher education which, post-World War II, became universal higher education (Trow, 1974). Finally, students from all walks of life were going to college, fueled in no small part by the Morrill Acts and the G.I. Bill. Enrollments and the number and types of institutions grew. At the same time, while the national economy diversified, it also expanded and contracted in unpredictable ways, making it difficult at various times for a college graduate to find a preferred job. By the late 1970s, college students said finding a good job was the primary purpose of college going, cementing vocationalism as a cornerstone of the undergraduate experience (Horowitz, 1987), which continues today as preparation for work is a top priority for policymakers and students alike. College 2.0 is a paradigm where welders trump philosophers (Fain, 2018), and college education for the development of the whole person becomes a historical artifact.

Today’s College 3.0 paradigm doubled down on the vocational ethos of College 2.0. While the purpose of college for better employment prospects persists, the delivery format of College 3.0 is dramatically different from the earlier generations. College 3.0 calls for the end of what many people think of as the traditional college experience where students between the age of 18 and 23 spend four years in full-time study living on or near a campus (Carey, 2016). College 3.0 replaced brick-and-mortar colleges and universities with technologically enhanced postsecondary education everywhere, independent of time and place. Students acquire knowledge and skills through digital and other flexible delivery formats. Students can go to college anywhere, anytime to earn an associate or baccalaureate degree or whenever they need to add a certification, certificate, or badge to advance their career. While College 3.0 is digitalized and differs in format from College 2.0, it is very similar in content. The COVID-19 pandemic gave College 3.0 a test run, as many institutions expanded their online footprints. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be a resounding success story. Many problems arose before the COVID-19 pandemic (Lederman, 2019; Xu & Xu, 2020), and more damning evidence from the pandemic-induced large-scale experiment of College 3.0 (Schroeder, 2020), where students experienced learning loss and mental health crises. That is, College 3.0 may be better than nothing, but may not be better than its predecessors in educating students.

It is undeniable that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are transforming the world as we know it (McKinsey & Company, 2017, 2022b). AI, like ChatGPT, will change teaching and learning, advising, and many other aspects of higher learning (McKinsey & Company, 2022a), harbingers of a world where robots will become increasingly capable of doing the work many college graduates are doing now and in the future. The knowledge and skills of College 2.0 and 3.0 graduates will become less valuable as robots become increasingly capable of performing tasks better, faster, and at less cost.

This new reality calls for College 4.0, which will prepare college graduates to survive and thrive in a world full of robots, ensuring that students can be “economically self-sufficient and civically responsible post college” (Kinzie & Kuh, 2017, p. 20). While College 4.0 students will acquire the knowledge and skills robots can learn, they will also learn and be able to do things robots cannot easily replicate—“empathy, teamwork, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, and the ability to draw connections across disciplines” (Council on Foreign Relations, 2018, p. 14) as well as adaptability, flexibility, capability for life-long learning, and social skills (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017). College 4.0 focuses on students acquiring proficiencies, such as “solving unstructured problems, working flexibly with new information, and working effectively in groups” as advised by the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education (2017, p. 87). The outcomes of college education would not only include the technical competency but also dispositional learning outcomes that are unique to human beings (Kuh et al., 2018). Institutions and learning environments, whatever their form, will emphasize holistic development so that students can develop essential skills and dispositions like generosity, curiosity, empathy, emotional intelligence, effective communication and listening, collaborative problem solving, and egalitarian sensibilities (Kuh, 2018).

Thus, College 4.0 not only upends educational processes but also the goals and purposes of postsecondary education. The ethos of College 4.0 is an inseparable combination of the ethos of previous versions of college. Students may acquire knowledge and skills through digital platforms epitomized by College 3.0, but more importantly, students will have the opportunity for holistic development through human interactions and social contacts as in College 1.0. College 4.0 students will be able to do what robots do, but also what the robots cannot do. In essence, a high-quality undergraduate education is a completely new endeavor that will require institutions to consider what student success should be like and how to support the new conception of student success.

Let the new journey begin!