In May 1995, a few weeks after I graduated from Ithaca College, I packed up my brother’s Saturn and drove cross-country with him to Phoenix to start a summer reporting fellowship at The Arizona Republic.

I was assigned to the business desk. The Republic’s tech reporter was on leave for the summer. The business editor took one look at me and said something about me being young and knowing something about technology. All I heard was: “You’re now our tech reporter.”

That summer of 1995 was when the commercial Internet took off. I often landed on the front page of the business section—and even the main paper—simply by writing about how we used this thing called the Internet and what it could do. I wrote about the growth of Internet cafes. What the letters WWW meant. How Southwest put its schedule on the web but you still had to call to make an actual flight reservation.

Little did we know that this thing I was writing about would disrupt every industry including the very thing I was writing for—the daily newspaper.

The Internet in 1995 was certainly a thing—although we really didn’t know what it was at the time or what it could become. But I recall everyone I met that summer talking about the possibilities about how we might use the web some day. No one talked about streaming a movie or online classes or social media; they just wanted to read a newspaper on the other side of the globe or book a flight.

Those conversations from the early days of the Internet remind me of the discussions we’re having now about ChatGPT. It’s about the possibilities for ChatGPT, which is trained on a dataset of conversational text and is capable of generating human-like responses to a wide range of prompts. (It wrote much of that previous sentence, for example.)

A lot of the news coverage in recent weeks has been about the impact of ChatGPT on education. How can professors prevent students from using it to write assignments? How might faculty members rethink how they teach writing? Should ChatGPT be banned on campus networks?

Yes, the discussion about ChatGPT is about possibilities—but it has quickly taken a dark turn about the misuse of technology rather than its use. We knew this day would eventually arrive when automation came for knowledge work in the form of artificial intelligence.

Robots eating jobs is nothing new, of course. Going back to the Industrial Revolution we have worried about tasks being automated. But since the early 1900s, we’ve been told that as long as we got more education—first it was high school and then college—we’d be fine. In the long race between technology and education, it was education that always won.

We often see the battle between technology and humans as a zero-sum game. And that’s how much of the discussion about ChatGPT is being framed now. Like many others who have been experimenting with ChatGPT in recent weeks, I find that a lot of the output depends on the input. In other words, the better the human question, the better the ChatGPT answer.

So instead of seeing ourselves competing with technology, we should find ways to complement it and view ChatGPT as a tool that assists us in collecting information and in writing drafts.

If we reframe the threat, think about how much time can be freed up to read, to think, to write?

As many have noted, including Michael Horn on the Class Disrupted podcast he co-hosts, ChatGPT is to writing what calculators were once to math and other STEM disciplines. Others have compared it to Cliff Notes. And tools like ChatGPT are about to become just as ubiquitous as the calculator with news that Microsoft will build AI capabilities into all its products, like Word, PowerPoint, etc.

The piece of student writing that colleges often see first arrives with the application for admission: the essay. College admissions officers know that students, especially those with means, get help with their essays—from counselors, parents, and professional essay coaches. In some cases, they suspect that someone else wrote the essay, even if they can’t prove it.

One thing I experimented with last week was asking ChatGPT to write an admissions essay. The prompts had to be a lot more specific than what the Common App asks to get any sort of result that might pass muster with an admissions officer. Here’s one result when I asked it to write an essay about a setback a student faced when her mother falls ill:

The writing is coherent but it won’t get someone into a top college (not that the essay alone does that anyway).

Still, I asked some admissions deans who already find the essay susceptible to manipulation what they thought of ChatGPT. One dean at a highly selective private suggested it might accelerate an idea floated by some of his colleagues to turn the essay into an independent assessment proctored by a counselor. In such a case, students would be given a random prompt and asked to answer in a specified time period.

That’s a solution that is difficult to scale, of course. And I told the dean that I can’t imagine counselors will want to do more work in the college application process. “Well, if they really want their students to apply here, then they won’t have much of a choice,” the admissions dean said flippantly.

So, add ChatCPT to the long list of things that will change the admissions process in the coming years along with the rise of test-optional policies and the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision.  

☕️ Good Thursday morning. Thanks for reading Next. If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here.

The End of the Faculty Office?

This image of a faculty office went viral on Reddit a few years ago.

As workers slowly reluctantly come back to the office after the pandemic, the layout and design of the workplace is being reshaped once again.

• College campuses are no exception to this trend—and are often leading it since much of their workforce is back in person compared to many other sectors of the economy.

🏗 20 years ago, colleges went on a building boom. Some 28 million square feet was built on campuses that year according to Gordian, a facilities planning firm—and about half of that was in administrative and academic space.

—Now, with deferred maintenance needs starting to crop up with those spaces, colleges are rethinking their use in an era of smart technology, online learning, and remote work.

What’s happening: Tarrant County Community College in Texas, one of the largest higher-education institutions in the U.S. with nearly 50,000 students, is redesigning faculty and staff spaces on campus as part of $825 million in construction projects approved in a bond issue by local voters.

• I visited the two of the college’s six campuses last week as faculty toured mock-ups of the new spaces. The new buildings will do away with the traditional private office in favor of a “palette of spaces” that include open work areas, huddle rooms, and enclosed focus areas that are private.

Why it matters: Colleges are under increased pressure to raise graduation rates, improve retention, and better engage students.

• In response, they are spending precious budget dollars to beef up their professional advising staffs and invest in technology that constantly tracks student performance.
• Yet most institutions are failing to encourage the one practice that is widely known to boost student success: faculty and student interaction.
• One easy way to do that: office hours with faculty.

🚪But before the pandemic, researchers found that a significant proportion of students— ranging anywhere from a quarter to two-thirds of students, depending on the campus—failed to take advantage of office hours because they were inconvenient or professors didn’t encourage their use.

• I know from reporting on campuses that walking down long hallways of offices with closed doors is intimidating—and I’m a college graduate. I can’t imagine how undergraduates must feel.
• During the pandemic, many faculty moved to virtual office hours and noticed more students showed up.

By the numbers: The cost of faculty offices is one few colleges accurately account for. If the average price of construction of an academic building is $300 a square foot that means the typical faculty office costs $36,000.

• When one Midwestern university installed sensors to automatically turn off lights and air conditioning when offices were empty, the project paid for itself in one year, rather than the expected three, given how little time faculty spent in their offices.

Bottom line: Office space has as much to do with the actual physical layout as it does with how people feel about it. Private offices have been a fact of life for faculty for centuries. Having a private office connotes stature in the campus hierarchy. As a result, expect lots of debates and handwringing as campuses rethink faculty spaces to become more student-centered.

👉 Read more: From the archives, a 2018 paper I wrote, The Future of the Faculty Office.

📈 DATA POINT

The lastest data from Common App through January 1, 2023, shows that applications continue to increase year-over-year since the pandemic. See more stats on how this admissions season is shaping up here. 

A MESSAGE FROM COREBRIDGE

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