AI Goes to College

Episode 40: How AI Is Changing Entry-Level Knowledge Work How is AI affecting entry-level knowledge work, and what should colleges do to prepare graduates? Craig and Rob compare emerging evidence on employment and earnings, then consider what students need from higher education as technical tasks become easier to automate. Craig Van Slyke and Rob Crossler begin with reports from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies. The findings rais

Episode 39: Assessment and Community in the Age of AI How can faculty assess learning when AI can produce most of the artifacts we used to grade, and what happens to campus community when students turn to chatbots instead of each other? Craig and Rob talk with Dr. Bill McCumber of Louisiana Tech University about both questions. Overview Bill McCumber, Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Research at Louisiana Tech's College of Business, joins the show to describe two efforts: a voluntary,

Episode 38: Building AI Programs While the Ground Is Still Moving Should a business school build AI-specific degree programs, or work AI into the curriculum it already has? Tom Stafford, professor and chair of Management Information Systems at the University of Memphis, made his choice and explains why he made it. Craig and Rob are joined by Dr. Tom Stafford, who came back to Memphis after nine years at Louisiana Tech and is launching a four-course graduate certificate in applied AI this fall,

Episode 37: AI as the Learned Colleague, Not the Ghostwriter What does it look like to write an academic paper with AI without letting AI write a single word of it? Craig and Rob open with that question, then move through a new UK survey on how student AI use is evolving, ChatGPT's shift from Pulse to Scheduled Tasks, and fresh labor market data on what AI is doing to entry-level jobs. Craig describes using Codex to co-produce a 25-page conference paper in about three days, not by asking the t

When Better Models Widen the Gap: AI's Cost Divide in Higher Ed (AI Goes to College, Ep. 36) What happens to students when the best AI models cost ten times more than the basic ones? That is the question Craig and Rob keep circling in this episode, prompted by Anthropic's brief and strange release of Fable 5. Fable 5 arrived as a guardrailed version of Mythos, a model so good at exposing software vulnerabilities that Anthropic had restricted it to a small set of secure organizations. For about

Episode 35: AI's Underused Capabilities and Hidden Risks What happens when a university scrapes faculty lectures from its LMS, feeds them into an AI course builder, and sells the result for five dollars a month without telling the professors whose faces appear in the videos? Craig and Rob cover a packed news cycle in this episode, anchored by two stories about institutional vulnerability. The Canvas ransomware attack that disrupted final exams at thousands of schools opens a conversation about