Can the Liberal Arts Save Higher Ed in the Age of AI?
What happens to higher education when the skills universities have traditionally taught—numeracy, literacy, and analysis—can increasingly be performed by machines? In this episode, Joe E. Ross talks with Ben Wildavsky, senior advisor to the Harvard Project on Workforce and author of the forthcoming Know How: The Global Rise of Hands-On Higher Education, and Pano Kanelos, founding partner of The Athos Group, former president of St. John's College and senior fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. They explore an increasingly important question for higher education: How can colleges prepare people for work without losing sight of the broader purpose of education? Ben makes the case for a "both/and" approach—combining broad, durable skills with targeted career skills and the social capital students need to navigate the workplace. Pano argues that AI may fundamentally change what universities are for, shifting their focus away from skills that machines can increasingly perform and toward questions of meaning, purpose, judgment, and what it means to be human. In this episode: Why higher education could become smaller, shorter, and more focused Whether college degrees are actually losing their value—or whether the evidence tells a different story Why a liberal arts education could become more important, not less, in an AI-driven economy How apprenticeship and work-embedded learning can bring theory and practice together More resources: The new core curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin: https://catalog.utexas.edu/general-information/academic-policies-and-procedures/core-curriculum/ More about Ben and his forthcoming book: https://pw.hks.harvard.edu/post/ben-wildavsky-team-profile Music by PaulYudin from Pixabay .
