In a Spring 2024 Training Subsequent article, I argued that, regardless of the standard knowledge that college students had been all in on synthetic intelligence (AI), many in highschool and faculty felt deeply anxious about its impacts on the longer term jobs accessible to them and what they need to be studying now.
A brand new survey suggests that oldsters even have massive issues—round their kids’s future job prospects, what they study at school, and whether or not they need to even go to school.
Faculty Steerage Community, which offers AI-powered professional steerage to oldsters round schools and careers (and for which I host reside exhibits for fogeys on the subject of careers), carried out the survey of 602 mother and father of U.S. excessive schoolers that had been nationally consultant primarily based on family revenue, scholar gender, area, and faculty kind.
In an period when the college-going fee of highschool graduates has dropped from an all-time excessive of 70 p.c in 2016 to roughly 62 p.c now, AI appears to be heightening the anxieties concerning the worth of faculty.
In line with the survey, two-thirds of fogeys say AI is impacting their view of the worth of faculty. Thirty-seven p.c of fogeys point out they’re now scrutinizing faculty’s “career-placement outcomes”; 36 p.c say they’re a school’s “AI-skills curriculum,” whereas 35 p.c reply {that a} “human-skills emphasis” is necessary to them.
This echoes what I more and more hear from faculty management: Mother and father and college students demand to see a distinction between what they’re getting from a school and what they may very well be “studying from AI.”
Certainly, mother and father are not less than cognizant of backup choices to school, with 51 p.c saying that, ought to the worth of a four-year faculty erode, group faculty or career-technical faculty can be fascinating, and 20 p.c pointing to apprenticeships. Apparently sufficient, mother and father of kids in non-public and constitution colleges had been 6 proportion factors extra prone to be fascinated about apprenticeships.
Parental issues aren’t muted, both.
The survey discovered that 62 p.c of fogeys mentioned “AI and the way forward for work” within the earlier two weeks, with one-third saying they talk about it on a weekly foundation.
