Debating Education / DAVOS 2025

Summary

This discussion focused on the future of post-secondary education, exploring its purpose, challenges, and potential for reform in light of technological advancements. Participants debated the core objectives of universities, with some emphasizing character formation and others prioritizing cognitive development. The panel discussed obstacles to reform, including the conservative nature of academic institutions and their resistance to large-scale changes.

The impact of emerging technologies, particularly AI, on education was a key topic. While seen as potentially revolutionary, participants noted the continued importance of human skills like critical thinking and interpersonal communication. The discussion highlighted the need for universities to adapt to changing labor market demands while maintaining their role in fostering democratic values and cultural competence.

Concerns were raised about learning gaps exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in developing countries. The panel stressed the importance of investing in public education and addressing socioeconomic inequalities that affect educational outcomes. They also discussed the potential of AI to personalize learning and close achievement gaps, while acknowledging the need to balance technological integration with maintaining human connections in education.

The discussion concluded with reflections on the challenges of adapting education systems to incorporate AI while preserving essential human elements. Participants expressed cautious optimism about the future of education, emphasizing the enduring importance of humanities and social sciences in an AI-driven world.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– The purpose and goals of post-secondary education, including developing “virtuous humans” vs. focusing on workforce skills

– Obstacles to reforming higher education, including faculty resistance to change and the cooperative structure of universities

– The impact of new technologies like AI on education and how quickly changes need to be made

– Addressing learning gaps and inequalities in education, especially post-pandemic

– Balancing personalized/online learning with in-person community building

Overall purpose:

The goal was to examine fundamental questions about the future of post-secondary education, including its purpose, obstacles to reform, and how to adapt to new technologies and societal needs.

Tone:

The tone was thoughtful and analytical, with panelists offering differing perspectives in a respectful manner. There was a sense of cautious optimism about education’s ability to adapt, balanced with concern about challenges like inequality and the pace of technological change. The tone became slightly more urgent when discussing post-pandemic learning gaps.

Speakers

– Michael Spence: President and Provost of University College London

– Sian L. Beilock: President of Dartmouth College

– Lawrence H. Summers: Professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Governance

– Raquel Bernal: Professor at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia

Additional speakers:

– Audience members: Various unnamed audience members who asked questions or made comments

The Future of Post-Secondary Education: Challenges and Opportunities

This discussion brought together prominent figures in higher education to explore the future of post-secondary education, examining its purpose, challenges, and potential for reform in light of technological advancements and societal changes. The panel, consisting of Michael Spence, Sian L. Beilock, Lawrence H. Summers, and Raquel Bernal from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, along with audience members, engaged in a thoughtful and analytical dialogue that revealed both areas of consensus and divergent perspectives on key issues.

Purpose and Goals of Higher Education

A central point of contention amongst the speakers was the fundamental purpose of higher education. Raquel Bernal emphasised the role of universities as “labs for democracy”, stressing the importance of developing virtuous, democratic citizens who understand their role in the world. This view contrasted with Lawrence H. Summers’ assertion that the primary objective of universities should be cognitive and intellectual development rather than character formation. Summers argued that universities should focus on teaching students to better understand the world and enhance their capability to gain further understanding.

Sian L. Beilock offered a perspective more aligned with workforce preparation, highlighting the need to equip students with skills relevant to the job market. She also emphasized the importance of dialogue and turn-taking in developing collective intelligence. Michael Spence advocated for a balanced approach, emphasising the importance of fostering critical thinking and communication skills alongside workforce preparation.

This divergence in views underscores the complex challenge universities face in defining their core mission and balancing multiple objectives in an ever-changing landscape.

Obstacles to Reform in Higher Education

The discussion revealed significant obstacles to reforming higher education institutions. Lawrence H. Summers provocatively noted that while major corporations have undergone multiple reorganisations in recent decades, universities have remained largely unchanged. He pointed to faculty control and resistance to change as primary barriers to reform.

Michael Spence acknowledged the challenge of balancing tradition with innovation, while Sian L. Beilock emphasised the need to adapt to new technologies. Raquel Bernal highlighted the additional challenge of addressing learning gaps exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in developing countries. She provided statistics about school closures in Latin America during the pandemic, illustrating the severity of resulting learning gaps.

The panel agreed that the conservative nature of academic institutions and their resistance to large-scale changes pose significant hurdles to reform. However, they differed on the role of faculty, with Summers viewing faculty control as a barrier and Beilock seeing faculty as potential drivers of innovation, especially in adapting to new technologies.

Impact of AI and Technology on Education

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies in education emerged as a key topic of discussion. The panel generally agreed on the potential for these technologies to revolutionise education, while also acknowledging the continued importance of human skills.

Raquel Bernal highlighted the potential for AI to enable personalised learning, potentially helping to close achievement gaps. Sian L. Beilock provided a concrete example of AI integration, describing the implementation of AI-powered technology in first-year writing classes at Dartmouth to teach students how to “co-create and think with these new technologies”.

Lawrence H. Summers cautioned about the unpredictable effects of AI on job roles, using the example of ATMs and bank tellers to illustrate how technology can have counterintuitive impacts on employment. Michael Spence stressed the importance of balancing online and in-person education to maintain human connections while leveraging technological advantages. He also mentioned a class action lawsuit against universities for online teaching during the pandemic, highlighting the perceived value of in-person education.

The discussion revealed a consensus on the need to incorporate new technologies into education, but differences emerged on the extent and manner of implementation. An audience member raised the issue of using AI in assignments, prompting a discussion on how professors are adapting to this new reality by requiring specific tasks that demonstrate understanding and critical thinking.

Addressing Inequality in Education

The panel expressed shared concern about educational inequality, particularly in light of learning gaps exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they proposed different approaches to address this issue.

Raquel Bernal advocated for providing vocational education options alongside traditional academic paths, especially in developing countries. Sian L. Beilock emphasised the importance of closing socioeconomic gaps early through interventions in early childhood education. Michael Spence suggested expanding access to higher education while also offering vocational options.

An audience member from Mongolia raised the issue of improving public education to make it more equitable, particularly in comparison to private education. The panel agreed on the importance of investing in public education and addressing socioeconomic inequalities that affect educational outcomes. This led to a more in-depth discussion about the role of government investment in education and the challenges faced by developing countries in this regard.

Unresolved Issues and Future Challenges

The discussion highlighted several unresolved issues and future challenges for post-secondary education:

1. Balancing personalised, AI-driven education with building a sense of community among students

2. Effectively evaluating individual performance in group work settings

3. Understanding the long-term impact of AI on academic research and the role of human researchers

4. Closing significant learning gaps caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in developing countries

5. Adapting grading systems to reflect achievement fairly, with Dartmouth’s use of median grade point on transcripts mentioned as an example

The panel suggested potential compromises, such as allowing students to use AI tools in assignments while requiring specific tasks that demonstrate understanding and critical thinking, and maintaining a mix of online and in-person education to balance technological advantages with human interaction.

Conclusion

The discussion concluded with reflections on the challenges of adapting education systems to incorporate AI while preserving essential human elements. Participants expressed cautious optimism about the future of education, emphasising the enduring importance of humanities and social sciences in an AI-driven world. Michael Spence highlighted the need to invest more in human capital as AI advances, noting this as a positive aspect of discussions at forums like Davos.

The dialogue revealed a moderate consensus on the need to adapt education to new technologies, address educational inequality, and maintain the importance of human skills in the face of AI advancements. However, significant differences remained regarding the primary purpose of education and the best approaches to reform.

This complex landscape suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach to higher education reform may not be effective. Instead, institutions may need to find ways to balance multiple objectives and approaches as they navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by technological advancements and societal changes.

Michael Spence: Hello, I’m Michael Spence. I’m President and Provost of University College London and I’m joined today by Professor Raquel Bernal from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, by Professor Larry Summers from the Harvard Kennedy School of Governance and by Sian Belloch from Dartmouth in the United States. And we’ve been set the rather daunting topic, debating education. And I’m going to use something of a chair’s prerogative to say given the expertise of the people who are here, we’re probably going to limit it to post-secondary education, to post-16 education, but 16 as it were to the grave. Over the last couple of days at Davos, every time education has been mentioned, somebody in the room has said education needs disrupting, education needs disrupting, education needs changing. And the theory is that if the needs of the labour market, if people’s personal needs as they navigate more complex societies, as we navigate the new technologies, as we need increased inter-cultural competence, that the way we’ve been doing it since the Middle Ages, which in lots of ways is the way we do it still, probably won’t survive. Now I’m not sure that I believe that, but that’s the assumption in lots of the Davos conversations. And so the organisers of today thought it would be good if we took a step back and asked a few fundamental questions. What does success look like in post-secondary education? What’s the point of the activity in any case? What obstacles might there be to reform? And in particular, as we think about reform required by the new technologies, how quick is the pace of change going to be? How quickly do we need to sort this out, or do we have a little bit of time to think about it? Now this is an experiment with a new format for Davos, the town hall, and the idea is that the people in the room and indeed the people online are every bit as expert as the people sitting with me in these chairs and have just as much to contribute. And so what we’re going to do before we start is ask you those very questions. If you go to slido.com at hashtag WEF25, there are those three questions. What’s success? What are the obstacles to reform? And how quickly are the new technologies going to require change? And what we’d like you to do is in relation to the first two questions, if you could give us just three words and we’ll form a word cloud from them just to get a sense of what the feeling is in the room and online. And then the last one, it’s a simple vote for how quickly you think the change will happen. So I’m going to give you a moment just to do that on Slido and we’re going to do that before we ask the panellists in to make sure as it were that you’re setting the agenda. So I’ll give you a second. I’d sing you a song now by way of music, but you probably wouldn’t want that. So let’s see, do we begin to have some results? We put them up. Becoming a virtuous human. Well, that’s cost, tradition as barriers, leadership, that’s a challenge. Inclusion, access. So I’m going to give you a moment to think about that. So I’m going to give you a moment to think about that. So I’m going to give you a moment to think about that. Inclusion, access. Well, so these give us some really good ideas to start off with. But Raquel, what’s your response to this? And I suppose in general, what’s success for you at the University of

Raquel Bernal: the Andes? What are you looking for? So I liked from the answers of the audience becoming a virtuous human. So this is what I prepared to answer to this question. I think it’s very important that universities are labs for democracy, especially in this turbulent times for democracy. We should be the environment where they become the best people they can be. They understand the world broadly so that they can have an impact and understand their role in this world. And I think this is the most important thing. I worry a little bit that we focus too much in workforce oriented competencies. And I fear this is the trend in the future because I really think that our primary objective as universities is that, that virtuous human being being a good democratic citizen and having an impact on the societies where they reside. And how do we do that in practice? So, you know, there’s a lot of histories written about

Michael Spence: the university as an institution that suggests that this whole person formation was very much there at the beginning, survived through the 19th century, even the beginning of this century, when I suppose in many countries, we were much more sure about what a virtuous human looked like. And then after the second world war, universities retreated, they became much more technocratic. And it’s really only been in the last 10 years or so that universities have started to talk about character formation, about whole person formation again. How do you do that in your institution?

Raquel Bernal: So first of all, I think it’s very important to have a diverse student body. So we have to be similar to the societies we serve. And I think we have to teach our students to be tolerant, respectful, to really listen to each other, to be empathetic, to be able to understand the circumstances of people that are different from them. And this happens not only in the classroom, it happens in many things that occur in universities. So I really believe in off the classroom curriculum, things that happen in the gym, things that happen in cultural activities that we provide. But guaranteeing diversity is the first step. Second thing is I really believe in socio-humanistic education. So trying to understand the world with an ample vision and interdisciplinarity. I think it’s very important that they go across disciplines, that they have to understand the artist, but also the scientific, but also the sociologist. And providing those spaces I think is very important. And tweed through the curriculum many of those soft skills, durable capabilities they call them now, that are going to be very important for the future. So adaptability, flexibility. And are our academic staff ready for that? So I love academics. I’ve spent almost all

Michael Spence: my working career in the university. I have eight children. I love them. I’m not sure that I’d choose all my academic colleagues to teach my children about virtue. Is the academic community ready for that job? I wish to think we are. We after religion

Raquel Bernal: are the second most rigid institution in the world, as you mentioned earlier. And I think change hurts. And we’re just very used to pouring knowledge over our students, and less so in being guides of our students, being mentors. So I think we have a ways to go, but these are very committed people, really academics, really have a mission in the world. And I think that’s a very good start. But we’re used to our old ways. and it’s gonna take a bit to move into different ways of learning, into different ways of interacting within the university. So that leads naturally to Larry, what are the obstacles to moving?

Michael Spence: You know, we have some issues here that people have raised, particularly around tradition and cost and entrenched belief and misaligned values and funding. But what do you think are the big obstacles to reform in universities? I just, I’ll answer that in one second, but I just wanna register that I have a rather different view as to what the objective is. Sure.

Lawrence H. Summers: My view is that the objective is to teach our students to better understand the world in all of its aspects and to have greater capability to gain further understanding of the world in all of its aspects. And I think our mission is fundamentally cognitive and intellectual rather than characterological for a variety of reasons, including the one that you mentioned, which is that our faculty are selected for their excellence in transmitting and generating new knowledge and not for their excellence in character improvement. And I know of no evidence for the moral superiority of the professoriate relative to the remainder of the population and have some amount of evidence to suggest that there’s not a large gap. I have a very unfashionable view about the biggest barrier to change. There is a well-developed economic theory of the cooperative, of the employee-owned firm. Kubitzes in Israel are an example. Classically, cooperatives were in the Yugoslav firm. And what that theory basically says is that if you let all the workers control the firm, the firm will privilege job security over all else, be reluctant to expand because it will be diluting of what is existent and will have difficulty because of various solidarity aspects, making painful and difficult choices to change. And universities stand out as institutions that are run by their, not by all their employees, but by the large group of employees who are involved in providing instruction and doing research. And I think that is the root of their profound conservatism. There is no major corporation in the United States that has not fundamentally reorganized itself seven times in the last 50 years. There is no major university in the United States that has undergone a major reorganization once in the last 50 years. If you look at the overlap of the departmental structure of Harvard University today, and when I first came as a graduate student in 1975, it is fundamentally the same thing with a little bit of renaming and one or two smaller departments that have been added. And that is exactly what is predicted by a structure in which the institution is run as a cooperative with the extra feature that an institution run as a cooperative will tend to gravitate towards maximizing job security, which goes to the various issues that are raised around tenure. So there are reasons in terms of expertise and so forth why it might make sense for universities to be run as cooperatives, but their nature of being run as a cooperative is, I think, the fundamental reason for their extreme resistance to large-scale change. So I totally get that.

Michael Spence: When I’m asked about my job, I sometimes say I’m part CEO of a two billion pound turnover organization, part chief worker in a workers’ collective. 20 of my colleagues have to write a petition for me within two weeks to be statutorily required to have a meeting of 1,700 of my colleagues to discuss anything they want with papers prepared in a week. So I get that, but you could also argue that the flat structure and the polycentricity of universities actually leads to their creative genius because it’s all those little groups of academics who are looking at the horizons of their disciplines and that it’s been precisely that fecundity of a flat structure that means that many universities, when people in business would look down on those who ran the university when I was vice-chancellor at the University of Sydney, I’d gently point out that there was no Australian company as old as the University of Sydney that was still in business. And part of the reason we were still in business was because we had constantly adapted, and we’d constantly adapted because people at the edges of their discipline were looking into the future.

Lawrence H. Summers: So you raise a very important question, which is it is certainly correct that universities last for huge long times, and a further observation would be true that if you looked at a list of the top 15 universities in the United States today and in 1960, that list would be remarkably similar, and that would not be true in any other industry. And you offered one theory in terms of the fecundity of the organizational structure. I would offer a different theory, which is that it has a profound amount to do with network effects that induce stickiness. The faculty wanna go where the best other faculty are, the students wanna go where the best other faculty are and where the best students are, and everybody, and the more successful the institution, the more money it raises. So I always summarize that point by saying that if the main reason people chose hotels was because of the other people they met in the lobby, it would turn out that leadership in the hotel industry was very inertial and sticky, and that is a crucial feature of how universities operate. I think there is a very difficult question about whether security and autonomy may lead to fecundity. It may also lead to the perpetuation of mediocrity, and that is the very difficult question. I find it hard to believe that if there were not more capacity for central decision-making and central reallocation of resources,

Michael Spence: that universities would not be more flexible and even more able to adapt to a changing world. That’s it, and you’ve got that. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Sian L. Beilock: Can I comment on that? Yeah, please do. I do agree with you that faculty own the values of an institution in terms of where they are, but I would also point out that different faculties are set up in different ways, and so our medical school looks very different in terms of the tenure and job security in our engineering school and our business school in terms of what they have than our arts and sciences faculty, and I think actually that’s a really important component of how we get change with the different faculties interacting together. As leader of Dartmouth, I like the idea of having central control oftentimes, and I like to think I do have some. autonomy there. Of course, I work in partnership with the faculty, but I think one of the biggest ways to get that kind of innovation is to work across different systems within the university that are different in terms of how they are structured. Our engineering school, for example, has tenured faculty, but also a lot of research faculty

Michael Spence: that push the institution in a different way. So you’ve got, in a sense, the hardest job because people have actually voted ex-ante whether you’re right or wrong. To what degree will next-generation technologies have impact on achieving success in education systems? Overwhelmingly, people either think that they’ll revolutionise or actually create some change. I suppose that’s quite an even balance, really, so take it away.

Lawrence H. Summers: I’ll leave it to Larry whether that’s a statistically significant difference, but it seems pretty balanced. Look, I think technologies have always been interrupting and pushing our education system, and I think we need to push more. I like to remind everyone always that Dartmouth in 1956 coined the term AI in a symposium over the summer, and actually we were seen as the head of technology when we developed BASIC, one of our former presidents, John Kemeny, and it was put in every math class. Every student had to learn to program BASIC in math, and that was thought as really sacrilege, like we were leaving away the common liberal arts, but it turned out to be really important in terms of teaching students how to think, which is what we do, and I think about that as technologies today. Right now, we are implementing AI-powered technology in our introduction to writing classes for our first-year students, and the goal is to teach students how to co-create and think with these new technologies, but then I think that comes back to the purpose of what we do. We teach students how to think, not what to think, and that’s the most important aspect of what we do. We’re teaching students how to take information from the world, make sense of it, and hopefully go out and be leaders and make those changes and adapt and think in the future. So if you think of that technology thing as partly teaching students to use the machines, partly testing some of the same intellectual skills that the machines have, right?

Michael Spence: You know, we didn’t give up teaching math when we got calculators because we thought it was important for cognitive development and because you had to be able to tell whether what the machine said was crazy. But there’s another bit, which is about in the future, a particular kind of set of soft skills are actually going to be quite important. Do universities have a role in teaching those things the machines don’t teach?

Lawrence H. Summers: Yeah. So how do we do it? I mean, I think we are there to teach a common sense of heuristics about how we learn and how we change, but also values and principles, and so I think I differ from Larry a little bit. Students who have a bachelor’s degree, that’s not their goal to teach those sorts of values necessarily. They’re to push on their discipline, but students at university are not just around faculty. A third of our students work with varsity athletes. They work with athletic coaches. Our students do productions, they’re in plays and in other places, and they’re learning how to interact with each other. They’re learning how to have dialogue with each other. They’re learning how to understand a point of view that’s different from their own, and I think that is the ultimate purpose of a university. That ultimate purpose is academic excellence, and you get there by learning to have different

Michael Spence: viewpoints to understand them, to weigh them, to put an argument together, and decide where you ultimately stand on an issue. And interestingly, when I was vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, we did work with employers in Australia, China, India, the UK, the US, France, and Germany, and also spent time in the theoretical literature precisely around this question of what education will you need for the fourth industrial revolution? And interestingly, they all came back and said a deep grounding in a basic discipline, because you have to know something about something to know anything about anything, and it’s the best way of teaching critical thinking and effective oral and written communication. A capacity to step outside your discipline in an interdisciplinary context, so a kind of T-shaped education. Cultural competence and particularly an international perspective, and of course, if you live in London, you don’t need to get on a plane to need an international perspective. And finally, a capacity to bring that together, your discipline together in a team to collectively solve a problem. And that sounds remarkably like what we’ve been trying to do for a long period of time.

Sian L. Beilock: In psychology, we talk about this term collective intelligence, which is the ability of a group of people working together to perform particular tasks and come up with creative ideas. And oftentimes, that collective intelligence is more predictive of outcomes than an individual’s competency on that team. And it turns out, one of the big predictors of collective intelligence is turn-taking, how much you can listen and have a conversation with one another. That’s a basic competency at Dartmouth. We’re focused on dialogue, on teaching our students who often come in communicating through their devices how to listen and have conversations with one another and how to take turns in terms of understanding different perspectives and viewpoints and to see the common humanity in different people. And when you talk to employers, they often talk about how young people don’t know how to necessarily be employees. They don’t want to be in the office at the same time. They don’t know how to capture the informal interactions outside the meeting room. And I think that those are skills that we can teach. I loved the survey that said that 75% of the students of a particular university wanted

Michael Spence: to be self-employed entrepreneurs when they graduated. And you just thought, who’s going to work for them? Like, how are we preparing people to be employees?

Lawrence H. Summers: But I agree with Gary that that’s not necessarily the job of the faculty and that it then forces us to think about the purpose of institutions more broadly in terms of the types of skills and supplements we’re giving them outside of the classroom.

Michael Spence: And smart languages make a better distinction, you know, many of the European languages make a better distinction than English between instruction and education in the fullest sense. And I think we do, we’re thinking about those issues in a new way. So there’s 20 minutes left in this session, which is double the usual amount of time at a Davos panel for engagement with the audience. So, questions, do people have questions either in the room or comments? We’re going to limit the comments to one or two minutes, but if you… I don’t teach at Ivy League. I actually teach at what, you know, basically, you’ll probably never see my student, hopefully you will.

Audience: But it’s a two-year college and it’s a feeder to Rutgers and Rutgers has a nursing program and that nursing and allied health can be transferred to Rutgers if they get a certain grade, okay? So our job is kind of like triaging our students to see which ones are going to have the critical thinking, the math skills and that sort of thing. And I think what has happened with COVID, we’re seeing a lot of kids coming in that were just pushed through high school because of COVID. And I think realistically, that may be something that we all have to consider in education as well. Can I say something about that? Please do. Look, I think in thinking about education and your broad approach to education, you

Lawrence H. Summers: have to come to a very fundamental judgment. Do you believe, which of the following sentences do you believe is more accurate? Self-esteem comes for achievement, self-esteem promotes achievement or achievement promotes self-esteem. And you have to decide which one of those things you believe is paramount. I know the answer for me. I believe that achievement promotes self-esteem, but I believe we have substantially lost our way in American education on that point. That’s what’s involved in social promotion. That’s the reason why the most common grade at Harvard University, and I believe in the Ivy League is straight A. That’s the reason why the average grade point average in many places is above 3.7. And I think that you’re right to point to a set of concerns that exist. You’re also right to remind us that while people on the four of us have spoken from our own. own experiences, ultimately, the Duke of Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. That was a very elitist age. And I think that the future of most of our countries will be won or lost in broad public institutions that educate the vast majority of the young people and funnel them wherever they’re going. And can I ask you a question about your intervention?

Michael Spence: Is your point that just at the time as the new technologies are hitting, there’s changes in the labor market, and all other kinds of changes that have dominated Davos have happened, are happening, we actually have a generation of students coming through who, because of the pandemic, you think may be less well-prepared. So it’s not just adapting our current systems, it’s also, I do a little, because I’m a governor of a primary school, and I look at, it’s very socioeconomically mixed, and I look at the difference in achievement between the young people who are in homes with enormous amount of social and educational capital and those who weren’t coming out of COVID. And they’re never going to catch up, really.

Sian L. Beilock: But it’s not just preparation academically. It is also that preparation to interact with others, to understand what information you take in is accurate where it comes from particular sources. It is the social-emotional issues that maybe faculty are not designed to teach about, but those are actually really important to success. And I think there’s lots of ways to do education, and Ivy League Way is one, and by the way, Dartmouth still has median grade point on the transcript, which is the only Ivy to do that, and our faculty had a big fight about that, but it came to that, because I think that information is meaningful. It’s hugely important. Though I do have to say, as a dad, while I hope my kids strive for achievement, I hope that they don’t think that their value as a person depends upon achievement.

Michael Spence: I wanted to say a word on the learning gaps, because it’s really worrisome in Latin America.

Raquel Bernal: So while the average number of days of school closures in the world was 40, it was 160 in Latin America, 160. So it’s said that 60% of students in high school lost pretty much a whole academic year, and we are the best university in Colombia, but we see every single student, it’s not only the vulnerable, all of them, that can’t read, can’t comprehend a text, and math is really critical. So it’s really very complicated, because you cannot build, I don’t know, a programming on math that is very precarious. So it’s really rather an issue for the next gen. I think it’s some generations, but it’s gonna be very hard to help them catch up.

Michael Spence: Yeah, and I think it goes to the themes, doesn’t it? Because while we’re being expected as post-secondary institutions to do all these new things, there’s also a lot of the basics that in much of the world and in large parts of our country, we just need to catch up on. It’s a really good reminder. Other comments, yes. Hi, everyone, my name is Spat from Mongolia. So I wanna ask about public education, right?

Audience: So I think huge problem across the world, especially in the United States. I went to college in the US, and I saw how unequal the difference between public and private education is. And in Mongolia, it’s also the same case, right? So I think the solution is pretty simple, right? Invest in public education. But when it comes to war, money just comes out of nowhere. But when it comes to investing in public education, politicians, universities seem to be reluctant to invest in public education. So how can we make sure that we are more willing to sort of invest more in public education to close this gap between public and private education? Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s just, I think you’re right. We have to invest in education, especially early on.

Sian L. Beilock: But I would say we know from studies in the US that even before students get to kindergarten, for example, their socioeconomic environments are predicting where they’re gonna be and how successful they’ll be. And so I would say it’s not just investing in education, but it’s investing in leveling a socioeconomic playing field even before that. For example, we know that kids get to kindergarten and the number of words they hear from their parents predicts how they’ll do in kindergarten and often predicts how they’ll keep up throughout the rest of their career. And there’s huge socioeconomic gaps, especially in the US, that we have not been successful at closing. I don’t know if it’s just money, though. I think we have to think about how we’re doing education and how we’re thinking about those support systems, especially in less resourced communities. And one of the things I’ve found encouraging about the Davos conversations over the last couple of days is that there’s been whispers of the, as the AI thing takes off, we need to invest more in human capital, not less in human capital. And I think that’s gotta be true. Yes, sorry, that lady here.

Michael Spence: Thank you.

Audience: My name is Hawa Mufti. I’m a global shaper. So as a young person, I’m really excited that we’re having this discussion because for us, education is changing and we are really invested in using technology in education. So I’m thinking, what are your thoughts about the future of education in these times of artificial intelligence? Is it, does it like get better? I want to hear from your own perspective. And what do you think are the challenges that we might face in the future if we keep using AI in education? And that’s one. So the second question is, do you think education can be reformed to accommodate the newer types of jobs that are not conventional? Because for most young people, we do not like, we do not work with the things we study in school. We actually go into the job markets like applying what we learned, trying to like look for the transferable skills within the things that we study.

Michael Spence: So do you think that education can be reformed in such a manner that it will really answer to the needs in the labor market? Yeah. Raquel.

Raquel Bernal: Yeah, so I think, thank you for the question. Very important question. I think as any disruptive technology, there’s many opportunities and there’s also some risks, but I definitely think that flexibility of education is gonna be very important. Talking about learning gaps, I see a huge opportunity in AI and technologies to close gaps because of more personalized education, allowing the student to follow their own path based on AI. I think this really has a good chance of working, especially in the developed world. So Colombia is one of the 20 more unequal countries in the world, Latin America for that matter, because it’s also Mexico and some of other countries in Latin America. And this inequality has led to a longstanding social conflict in Colombia that is very complicated. I think the only solution is education, but we really need to reach a lot of people. Higher education enrollment is really very low, obviously, as is even in some developed countries. So I think we really need to make it more flexible. We really need our students to be able to handle the opportunities that disruptive technologies will bring to them. But I also wanna talk about the other types of educations and opportunities, because I come from a developing country. And so in Colombia, we have 3 million youth who do not study and do not work. That’s 30% of youth in the countries. That means that the next 10 years, our democracy is not viable because there’s a lot of young people without hope, without opportunities, without a future. And so I think it’s very important to tailor education to the specific needs of the contexts in which we serve. I am a true believer of vocational education, for example, in developing countries, because we prepare people for CEO jobs that do not exist. And there’s a lot of loss in productivity loss in well-being of the youth because we are not matching the jobs with the capacities of people. So I think, you know, being in a university, preparing professionals to be CEOs, I really think that we should be doing more in matching the jobs with the education that people require. I think universities, we’re a little bit pedantic. We know what we need to teach, and we hardly listen to the private sector and to the young students with what they want and what they need. And interestingly, in many countries, governments, as they’ve tried to increase participation in higher education, have actually defunded vocational education of one kind or another. That’s right. And, you know, that’s led to

Michael Spence: real problems. I mean, on this issue of young people wanting to take advantage of the new technologies, there’s a clash here, isn’t there, between what we’ve already identified that the new technologies are not necessarily great at, their potential, and what we said before might be holistic education. So we’re actually being sued as a university by 5,000 of our students in a class action. And we’re being sued because during the pandemic we taught them online. Now, it would have actually been illegal for us to teach them in person, but that’s by the by. And they say very strongly, we did not get a proper education. They say we had fabulous instruction. We met all our learning outcomes. You know, the cognitive activity was terrific, but we didn’t have an education because it’s so much more than that. And part of that is about face-to-face interaction. And I think that’s interesting because there are some people, of course, for whom online learning is going to be a really quick, easy way of upskilling. You can time shift all the rest of it. But I’d hate to think that at every level what young people can teach one another in an in-person context is not something that we’re still going to value. Yes. Will they agree?

Audience: My name is Roberto Patino. I’m a YGL from Venezuela. I wanted to hear your reflections on what we are reading of the appearance this year of a gigantic AI that will be PhD level, capable of doing research, and what impact it will have on the academic community of the universities.

Sian L. Beilock: Yeah. I mean, I think the advances we’re making are going to have huge impact on scientific breakthroughs and where we’re going. I don’t think that lessens the need, though, for humans involved in this and how we both curate that knowledge, think about how it’s applied in value-driven ways, and connect with people. We have, at Dartmouth, we have a virtual patient that our medical faculty are using to teach people how to interact, potential doctors to interact with patients, which I think is kind of odd that we’re using a virtual agent to teach that. But those human connections, how we deploy the knowledge, how we get people to uptake it, whether it’s a cancer therapy or meeting people in rural areas that need particular health care, those are going to be aided by technology, but they are still based on human connection. And I don’t think that’s going away. I think it’s going to be even more important. I’m not sure you can actually talk to that in terms of what we’ve been doing. I mean, you can’t depend on a student to use AI. And what I mean by that, you’ve got to, I mean, you’re not going to learn by using AI exclusively, which, by the way, many of them are trying

Audience: to do. So what we do is in our assignments, we develop tasks, and these tasks are part of something that you, as a professor, you can tell this is AI, because they don’t answer the task that’s in the assignment. So they can use AI all they want, but you’ve got to answer the task in the assignment. So we allow them to use AI, but they’ve got to answer the task. And that’s really hard if you’re not necessarily a PhD.

Michael Spence: Larry, you were going to. I was going to say that it’s a well-established fact that if you look at the number of bank tellers in the United States, after the ATM was invented, you would have thought that

Lawrence H. Summers: ATMs diffused widely, and tens of thousands of ATMs came into being in a decade. You would have thought people didn’t need bank tellers nearly as much. After it, there were 10,000 more bank tellers in the United States than there were before the ATM revolution. Why? It probably had to do with the fact that they were doing somewhat different things. People were going to the bank branch more frequently and more conveniently because of the ATM, and then they wanted to do other things, and they were being sold other services and so forth. So I think it’s very difficult to predict what the implications of these technologies are going to be for the distribution of tasks and for the number of people who are around. I think there are two big dilemmas in all of this that I change my mind about all the time. One is what the AI in all of that makes possible is much more focused and specific education on exactly the aspects I’m interested in, exactly tailored to my weaknesses and strengths, much more personalized education. Everybody getting a much more personalized education and the building of a sense of community are not obviously in concert with each other. If the AI is better at helping me than my friend is, that’s not going to bring me into more contact. How do we deal with that? I don’t quite know the answer to that. The other thing I don’t quite know the answer to is something you talked about that I think is very important. I often remark that the last thing I did in my professional life where success and failure was all about me alone was take my general exam in graduate school, and that everything I did after that more or less depended on my ability to work with others, sometimes for others, sometimes with others. Sometimes they were working with me, but it was all a collective thing. You sure feel like that ought to be a thing we very fundamentally are developing in students. On the other hand, how do you exactly give grades to a group of five people? How do you exactly evaluate individual performance at a group of five people? I don’t quite know the answer to those questions, but I think those two questions are very important as we think about how education develops.

Michael Spence: So, 27 seconds left. Raquel, are you hopeful about the future of education and our capacity to adapt? Yes, yes, I am hopeful. I think because of the people that live in universities, we are really so committed to this mission of serving our communities and really protecting democracy. I think I’m very hopeful that we’re able to, and I want to say, I want to close by saying that in the face of AI, it becomes even more important those things that are mostly human. So, the social sciences, the arts, the humanities, I think they should be the main actor in this revolution to bring up what we will offer above and beyond AI. So, a statement of confidence in the creative capacity of the remarkable people involved in the education system at every level. That’s not a bad place to finish. So, thank you very much for joining us today for this PowerPoint.

Agreement Points

The importance of adapting education to new technologies

speakers

– Sian L. Beilock
– Michael Spence
– Raquel Bernal

arguments

Adapting to new technologies

Balancing online and in-person education

Potential for personalized learning

summary

The speakers agree on the need to incorporate new technologies into education while maintaining core educational goals and human interaction.

Addressing inequality in education

speakers

– Sian L. Beilock
– Michael Spence
– Raquel Bernal

arguments

Closing socioeconomic gaps early

Expanding access to higher education

Providing vocational education options

summary

The speakers agree on the importance of addressing educational inequality through various means, including early intervention, expanding access, and providing diverse educational options.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasize the importance of developing well-rounded individuals who can contribute to society and adapt to future changes.

speakers

– Raquel Bernal
– Sian L. Beilock

arguments

Developing virtuous, democratic citizens

Preparing students for the workforce

Unexpected Consensus

The continued importance of human skills in the face of AI advancements

speakers

– Lawrence H. Summers
– Sian L. Beilock
– Michael Spence

arguments

Unpredictable effects on job roles

Need to teach AI-human interaction

Fostering critical thinking and communication skills

explanation

Despite differing views on the primary purpose of education, all three speakers unexpectedly agree on the continued importance of human skills and adaptability in the face of AI advancements.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement include the need to adapt education to new technologies, address educational inequality, and maintain the importance of human skills in the face of AI advancements.

Consensus level

Moderate consensus with some diverging views on the primary purpose of education. This implies a need for a balanced approach in reforming education systems to address technological advancements, societal needs, and individual development.

Different Viewpoints

Purpose of higher education

speakers

– Raquel Bernal
– Lawrence H. Summers
– Sian L. Beilock

arguments

Developing virtuous, democratic citizens

Teaching cognitive and intellectual skills

Preparing students for the workforce

summary

Bernal emphasizes character development and civic engagement, Summers focuses on cognitive and intellectual skills, while Beilock stresses workforce preparation.

Role of faculty in shaping university values

speakers

– Lawrence H. Summers
– Sian L. Beilock

arguments

Faculty control and resistance to change

Adapting to new technologies

summary

Summers views faculty control as a barrier to change, while Beilock sees faculty as potential drivers of innovation, especially in adapting to new technologies.

Unexpected Differences

Value of collective vs. individual learning

speakers

– Lawrence H. Summers
– Michael Spence

arguments

Teaching cognitive and intellectual skills

Fostering critical thinking and communication skills

explanation

While both emphasize cognitive skills, Summers unexpectedly questions the value of collective learning experiences, which contrasts with Spence’s emphasis on interdisciplinary and team-based learning. This difference is significant as it impacts how universities structure their curricula and learning environments.

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement revolve around the fundamental purpose of higher education, the role of faculty in driving change, the balance between technology and traditional learning methods, and approaches to addressing educational inequality.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among the speakers is moderate. While there are clear differences in perspectives, there are also areas of partial agreement. These differences reflect the complex challenges facing higher education in adapting to technological changes and societal needs. The implications of these disagreements suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to higher education reform may not be effective, and that institutions may need to find ways to balance multiple objectives and approaches.

Partial Agreements

All speakers agree on the importance of incorporating new technologies in education, but they differ on the extent and manner of implementation. Bernal sees AI as a tool for personalized learning, Beilock emphasizes teaching students to interact with AI, while Spence highlights the need to balance online and in-person education.

speakers

– Raquel Bernal
– Sian L. Beilock
– Michael Spence

arguments

Potential for personalized learning

Adapting to new technologies

Balancing online and in-person education

All speakers agree on the need to address educational inequality, but propose different approaches. Bernal advocates for vocational education, Beilock emphasizes early intervention, and Spence suggests balancing higher education access with vocational options.

speakers

– Raquel Bernal
– Sian L. Beilock
– Michael Spence

arguments

Providing vocational education options

Closing socioeconomic gaps early

Expanding access to higher education

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasize the importance of developing well-rounded individuals who can contribute to society and adapt to future changes.

speakers

– Raquel Bernal
– Sian L. Beilock

arguments

Developing virtuous, democratic citizens

Preparing students for the workforce

Key Takeaways

There are differing views on the primary purpose of higher education, ranging from developing virtuous citizens to teaching cognitive skills to preparing students for the workforce

Universities face significant obstacles to reform, including faculty resistance to change and the need to balance tradition with innovation

AI and new technologies present both opportunities and challenges for education, with potential for personalized learning but also concerns about maintaining human connections

Addressing inequality in education remains a major challenge, with calls for increased investment in public education and early interventions to close socioeconomic gaps

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated learning gaps, particularly in developing countries, creating additional challenges for education systems

Resolutions and Action Items

Universities should focus more on teaching students how to interact with and utilize AI technologies

Higher education institutions need to adapt to prepare students for new types of jobs and changing labor market needs

More investment is needed in public education and early childhood interventions to address inequality

Unresolved Issues

How to balance personalized, AI-driven education with building a sense of community among students

How to effectively evaluate individual performance in group work settings

The long-term impact of AI on academic research and the role of human researchers

How to close significant learning gaps caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in developing countries

Suggested Compromises

Allowing students to use AI tools in assignments, but requiring them to complete specific tasks that demonstrate understanding and critical thinking

Maintaining a mix of online and in-person education to balance technological advantages with human interaction

Incorporating more vocational education options alongside traditional academic paths to better match education with job market needs

I think it’s very important that universities are labs for democracy, especially in this turbulent times for democracy. We should be the environment where they become the best people they can be. They understand the world broadly so that they can have an impact and understand their role in this world.

speaker

Raquel Bernal

reason

This comment shifts the focus from job preparation to the broader role of universities in shaping citizens and society. It challenges the trend of focusing solely on workforce-oriented competencies.

impact

It sparked discussion about the purpose of higher education beyond career preparation, leading to exploration of character formation and civic engagement.

My view is that the objective is to teach our students to better understand the world in all of its aspects and to have greater capability to gain further understanding of the world in all of its aspects. And I think our mission is fundamentally cognitive and intellectual rather than characterological

speaker

Lawrence H. Summers

reason

This comment presents a contrasting view to Bernal’s, focusing on intellectual development rather than character formation. It challenges the idea that universities should be responsible for moral development.

impact

It created tension in the discussion and led to deeper exploration of the core purpose of universities and the role of faculty.

There is no major corporation in the United States that has not fundamentally reorganized itself seven times in the last 50 years. There is no major university in the United States that has undergone a major reorganization once in the last 50 years.

speaker

Lawrence H. Summers

reason

This comment highlights the resistance to change in universities compared to other institutions, providing a provocative perspective on institutional inertia.

impact

It shifted the discussion towards examining the structural reasons for universities’ resistance to change and sparked debate about the benefits and drawbacks of this stability.

Right now, we are implementing AI-powered technology in our introduction to writing classes for our first-year students, and the goal is to teach students how to co-create and think with these new technologies

speaker

Sian L. Beilock

reason

This comment introduces a concrete example of how AI is being integrated into education, moving the discussion from theoretical to practical considerations.

impact

It steered the conversation towards the specific ways AI can be used in education and the skills students need to develop in response to technological changes.

Do you believe, which of the following sentences do you believe is more accurate? Self-esteem comes for achievement, self-esteem promotes achievement or achievement promotes self-esteem.

speaker

Lawrence H. Summers

reason

This comment introduces a fundamental philosophical question about education and motivation, challenging assumptions about how to best support students.

impact

It deepened the discussion by prompting reflection on the underlying principles guiding educational approaches and policies.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by introducing tension between different views of the purpose of higher education, from character formation to intellectual development. They also highlighted the challenges of institutional change in universities and the need to adapt to technological advancements like AI. The discussion moved from broad philosophical questions about the role of education in society to specific examples of how universities are evolving. Throughout, there was an underlying theme of balancing tradition with innovation and considering how to best prepare students for a rapidly changing world.

How can universities effectively teach character formation and whole person development?

speaker

Michael Spence

explanation

This is important as universities are returning to the idea of character formation after a period of being more technocratic, but it’s unclear how well-equipped academic staff are for this task.

How can universities balance the need for central decision-making and resource allocation with the benefits of a decentralized structure?

speaker

Lawrence H. Summers

explanation

This is crucial for understanding how universities can become more flexible and adaptable while maintaining their creative strengths.

How can universities better prepare students for the realities of being employees in addition to potential entrepreneurs?

speaker

Michael Spence

explanation

This is important for ensuring graduates are prepared for various career paths and workplace expectations.

How can education systems address the learning gaps and social-emotional issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic?

speaker

Audience member and panel

explanation

This is critical for understanding how to support students who may be less prepared academically and socially due to pandemic disruptions.

How can public education be improved and made more equitable, particularly in comparison to private education?

speaker

Audience member

explanation

This is important for addressing educational inequality and ensuring quality education for all students.

How can education be reformed to better match the needs of the labor market and accommodate non-conventional jobs?

speaker

Audience member

explanation

This is crucial for ensuring that education remains relevant and prepares students for the evolving job market.

How will the development of PhD-level AI impact academic research and the academic community?

speaker

Audience member

explanation

This is important for understanding the potential disruptions and opportunities that advanced AI may bring to higher education and research.

How can universities balance personalized, AI-enhanced education with the need for community building and interpersonal skills development?

speaker

Lawrence H. Summers

explanation

This is crucial for leveraging the benefits of AI in education while maintaining important social aspects of learning.

How can universities effectively evaluate and grade collaborative work while still assessing individual performance?

speaker

Lawrence H. Summers

explanation

This is important for developing students’ teamwork skills while maintaining fair and accurate assessment practices.