To Prepare for a Future With AI, We Must Educate Differently

For decades, the United States has relied on an educational system that, despite improvement over the years, still operates in the shadows of its post-war purpose, when a high school diploma was sufficient to earn enough to buy a house and offer a better life. Since those days, with technological advancements and globalization redefining which skills are needed to earn a living wage, a diploma has been replaced with the college degree as a new standard of success. But today, even a college degree might not be enough, with rising college debt and the affordability of housing and healthcare outside the reach of many. This is due to a growing gap between education and economic outcomes. Adding a new technological advancement to the landscape, like AI, something already replacing entry-level and medium-skilled jobs in customer service, data analysis, retail, marketing, and countless other fields, poses a formidable challenge. To meet this challenge, we need to rethink how we educate for the world to come.  

To be clear, this is not meant as a call for AI literacy programs. Rolling out a curriculum to teach high school students how to use AI, while necessary and important, is only part of the answer. This isn’t just about working with AI; it’s about working in a world changed by AI.  

On the education front, we must place greater emphasis on developing those durable, or transferable, skills like critical and creative thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, continuous learning, emotional intelligence, and technical literacy that leverage the value of human experience and optimally create separation between people and the future capabilities of AI. Academic and hard skills are important, but it’s the ability to continually acquire those skills throughout a lifetime that will be critical, and transferable skills offer the foundation for that possibility.   

To accomplish this, we need a systemic approach, but from the bottom up, not from the top down. As well-intentioned as policy-based remedies are, they often fail to foster ownership at the implementation level and tend to fade away after a few election cycles. What we need is an approach that takes what we currently have and emphasizes experience-based learning that not only builds those transferable skills, but also puts an intense focus on education beyond high school – whether it be college, trade school, certifications, or some other pathway – specifically in those fields and professions most likely to offer opportunities for growth in a new AI age.  

At Junior Achievement, this is the work we are currently doing. We are reaching more than 4.8 million students annually with experiential learning offerings that promote those transferable skills, while providing guidance on what education and training can look like after high school. In the process, we are promoting economic mobility, the ability of this and future generations to do as well or better than those who came before, by giving students clear direction and access to opportunities after high school.  

But the reality is, more needs to be done. Much more, and now. The advantage of the bottom-up approach is that things happen in real time. The disadvantage is, many of these efforts can spread out limited resources and fail to scale in a meaningful way. It’s time for those concerned about this issue to begin working together to support those initiatives that show the most promise, treating the transformation of education the way they would an emerging technology like AI…focusing on what works, investing in it, and rising to the challenge of our age.