"University budgets across the country are broken. Overall revenue and accumulated financial support appear to be declining for a wide variety of reasons. New funding policies, administrative reorganizations such as those at the Department of Education, lean fiscal times for states, diminished regard for higher learning, fewer requirements for degrees among employers hiring for entry-level positions and the impact of artificial intelligence all come together to reduce the pool of new students, tuition revenues and grants."
"The cost of developing, designing and teaching classes is often largely determined by the faculty and staff costs. Long-running lower-division classes at some universities may be taught by supervised teaching assistants or adjunct faculty whose salaries are lower than tenure-track faculty's. However, we are now confronted with highly capable technologies that require little to no additional investment and can bring immediate revenue positive opportunities."
"However, few of us in higher ed seem to realize that such technologies are freely available today. The tsunami of new and improving AI technologies has inundated us over the past three years so quickly that many in academe have not been able to keep up. Case in point is the rapidly expanded and enhanced AI app. We know them by the names Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and a few others that we tried out in 2023 or 2024."
University finances are deteriorating as overall revenue and accumulated financial support decline. New funding policies, administrative reorganizations, tight state budgets, diminished respect for higher learning, fewer employer degree requirements for entry-level jobs, and AI impacts reduce student enrollment, tuition revenue, and grants. New initiatives face pressure to cut costs or immediately generate revenue. Course development and delivery costs are dominated by faculty and staff expenses, with lower-division courses often taught by supervised teaching assistants or adjuncts. Rapidly improving AI tools can design and deliver courses with minimal investment and potential revenue upside. Institutions must set policies and oversight for AI use, while many remain unaware of freely available AI advances and persistent issues like hallucinations.
Read at Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]