This post was originally published on this site.
As demand for AI-literate employees soars, an army of tech giants is partnering with the California State University system and the governor’s office in a large-scale effort to produce an AI-ready workforce for the nation’s most populous state.
“It’s a celebration of innovation, scholarship and a collective commitment to the pursuit of progress—progress and opportunity for all,” CSU chancellor Mildred GarcĂa said at a news conference at San JosĂ© State University Tuesday morning. “This initiative will elevate the CSU student experience, enhancing student success with personalized, future-focused learning tools across all fields of study and preparing an increasingly AI-driven workforce.”
In the coming weeks, CSU will give its 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff across all 23 campuses access to AI-powered tools, including CSU’s entire curated library of training and development resources and ChatGPT Edu, a version of the bot that Open AI built for universities “to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations.”
Most Popular
According to OpenAI, this will be “the largest implementation of ChatGPT by any single organization or company anywhere in the world,” making CSU “the first AI-powered university system in the United States.”
However, it’s not the first university to launch a public-private partnership to advance AI education. In early 2024, Arizona State University partnered with OpenAI to develop hundreds of new projects using ChatGPT Enterprise, including helping to inform the creation of ChatGPT Edu.
In August, Miami Dade College, Houston Community College and the Maricopa Community College District got a grant from the National Science Foundation to launch the National Applied Artificial Intelligence Consortium, which also draws on support from Dell, Intel and Amazon, to help community and technical colleges expand their AI offerings. And last month, Complete College America launched the AI Readiness Consortium, bringing together a group of community colleges and businesses to integrate AI education across disciplines.
In addition to widespread access to ChatGPT Edu, CSU’s public-private partnership will provide students with apprenticeship opportunities at AI technology–enabled organizations.
“We’re still in the early stages of AI adoption in education,” Leah Belsky, vice president and general manager of education at OpenAI, said Tuesday. It’s “critical that the entire ecosystem—education systems, technologists, educators and governments—work together to ensure that all students globally have access to AI and develop the skills to use it responsibly. CSU is setting a bold and powerful example for the education sector.”
Disparities in AI Education
Job applicants with skills and experience using AI are in demand across most job sectors. According to Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trends Index Report, 66 percent of business leaders said they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills, while 71 percent said they’d rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them.
While most college graduates say they wish they’d learned AI skills in college, opportunities to learn them are far from uniform even as they expand. Colleges with wealthier students are more likely than those with lower-income students to offer courses that incorporate AI training, according to a 2023 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
And living in close proximity to tech hubs doesn’t necessarily translate into more opportunity, either. Although more than 30 of the top 50 AI firms in the world are based in California, more than 50 percent of the AI workforce in the United States is international, according to a news release from CSU.
Concerns about disparities in AI education within CSU’s 23-campus system was one of the motivations for the partnership, according to Nathan Evans, deputy vice chancellor for academic and student affairs. Last week, he told the CSU Board of Trustees, “We cannot afford to leave some of our institutions behind during this time of dramatic change.”
Editors’ Picks
In one example of how this had played out, the Los Angeles Times reported that CSU Channel Islands, which is one of the smallest campuses in the CSU System, couldn’t afford to pay $500,000 for campuswide access to AI tools. So while some CSU faculty were using the latest technology to improve teaching, learning and research, others “barely dabbled,” according to Jill Leafstedt, dean for extended university and digital learning.
As adoption of AI tools continues to surge, Ed Clark, CSU’s chief information officer, said CSU’s “unprecedented” approach could serve as a model for other states and universities.
“We know that the AI revolution is here,” Clark said. “It is imperative for us to provide leadership, while ensuring equitable access to these tools and the skills required to use them.”
Shalin Jyotishi, managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at the left-leaning think tank New America, said that public-private partnerships like the one CSU announced Tuesday can help ensure not only that students develop quality, employer-aligned AI-related knowledge and skills, but that institutions build their own capacities for using AI tools.
Such partnerships help institutions avoid the risk of “leaning too heavily on faculty and staff expertise alone to navigate the hype cycles around AI or overindexing on a singular employer partner or vendor,” Jyotishi said. Neither approach is “optimal to navigate the hype cycles, use cases or labor market needs relating to AI.”