As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in higher education and the workforce, colleges and universities are grappling with how to prepare students for a future in which the skills and knowledge they need to succeed are becoming more difficult to predict.
While institutions work to equip students with the technical skills they need to navigate emerging technologies, questions remain about how administrators can also cultivate the critical thinking, creativity and human judgment that remain central to a college education.
Christa Acampora, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia, joined Inside Higher Ed student success reporter Joshua Bay on Voices of Student Success to discuss how AI is clarifying the purpose of higher education, what meaningful AI literacy looks like and why intellectual agency and student belonging remain essential as institutions rethink teaching, learning and career preparation.
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Here are five key takeaways from Acampora on how colleges can navigate the rise of AI while supporting students’ intellectual, personal and professional development.
- AI is clarifying the purpose of a college education.
Acampora said the rise of artificial intelligence isn’t necessarily changing the purpose of a college education, but rather clarifying it. While higher education institutions have a responsibility to prepare students for the workforce, they also play an important role in providing rich social experiences and opportunities for intellectual and personal development.
“AI is increasingly capable of doing the kinds of things that … students should be acquiring and developing for that first job,” Acampora said. “It’s really clarifying about what our purpose is and it’s giving us an opportunity to refine what our promise is to students.”
She said that in addition to imparting the traditional skills of a liberal arts education—critical thinking, curiosity, judgment and the ability to navigate complexity—colleges and universities should focus on the broader process of personal development. She emphasized the importance of formation, or helping students develop the capabilities needed to exercise judgment, engage with others and make meaningful decisions.
“In order for a person to exercise good judgment, to discern what truly matters, to be a curious, creative, engaged member of society, you have to have a fully formed person holding developed capabilities,” Acampora said. “We are at a great moment in time where we can shift from thinking about skills … and really focus on capabilities—formed capabilities—and how we help students catch that for themselves.”
- AI literacy requires more than knowing how to use the tools.
Before defining what it means to be AI literate, Acampora said it’s important to understand what artificial intelligence actually encompasses. While much of today’s conversation centers on generative and agentic AI and large language models, the technology has been developing for decades.
She pointed to advancements in robotics, including technologies that help robots navigate human-built environments, as well as developments in sensors and imaging. More recently, large language models have brought AI to the forefront of higher education and public discourse.
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“What’s different about AI as an emerging and developing technology is that at this particular moment in time, we’ve reached a point of maturation in those separate streams of development and their integration,” Acampora said. “That has meant that this thing we call AI is able to do a lot of things.”
For students, AI literacy requires more than familiarity with the tools themselves, Acampora said. It also involves understanding how the technology works, recognizing its capabilities and limitations, and developing the technical knowledge needed to critically evaluate its outputs.
Acampora said those considerations also extend to questions about cognitive offloading, or relying on external tools to perform mental tasks. While the extent to which AI contributes to cognitive offloading and affects learning remains an open question, she pointed to a UVA English professor who incorporates AI into his first-year writing courses to help students recognize when they may be relying on the technology to do their thinking for them.
“He makes heavy use of AI in his classes, specifically to help students observe in themselves when they’re using AI for cognitive offloading,” she said. “We have a very steep learning curve we need to climb in terms of being able to discern when is AI a helpful and productive tool and when, in fact, it might be disruptive to the learning process.”
- Policing AI use could undermine student belonging.
Acampora pointed to a recent report from Qualtrics and Buro Happold that raised questions about how students’ use or avoidance of AI might influence their sense of belonging on campus.
She drew parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic, when institutions implemented surveillance and other measures to enforce public health protocols. Those efforts, she said, had consequences not only for teaching and learning but also for students’ sense of community and connection.
“We were really fixated on ‘How are we going to keep students the appropriate distance apart and keep them masked?’” Acampora said. “We saw on our campus at the time … the more that you implemented surveillance, the lonelier and more isolated people felt in what was a pretty alienating environment.”
“We should learn something from that experience with respect to AI,” she added. “The more we try to surveil students’ use of AI, implement policies, implement detection devices … the more we do to undermine our institutional values and students’ experience of [college] as a place where they belong.”
- Career preparation must evolve alongside AI.
Acampora reflected on how higher education has historically served as an avenue to professional opportunities, particularly in the decades following World War II. But as artificial intelligence reshapes the labor market, colleges face growing uncertainty about the jobs and skills students entering college today will need when they graduate in 2030.
“What will be the important workforce needs at the time is very hard to predict, even just four years out,” Acampora said. “Coming back to formation … it also sharpens what kind of promise we can make to our students if it’s not the hot job or the certain level of income.”
Those questions also extend to doctoral education, Acampora said, where advances in AI are prompting institutions to reconsider the role of traditional academic requirements, including dissertations, and how graduate students prepare for professional careers.
“What’s going to happen with the dissertation when Claude or whatever your favorite frontier model is can write a better one?” she said. “Our answer at UVA is more integrated experiential learning opportunities [and] taking serious opportunities for industry-integrated doctoral training.
“If we see it as an opportunity instead of something to be terrified of, and if we keep our eye on what our core purpose is instead of trying to just predict where the puck is going to go, we can do some pretty innovative things,” she said.
- Human agency remains essential in the age of AI.
As AI becomes increasingly capable of performing complex intellectual tasks, colleges must consider how to help students develop the capacity to think independently, exercise judgment and engage meaningfully with others, Acampora said. She pointed to a recent paper by a UVA mathematics professor examining the importance of intellectual agency in the age of AI.
“The question is really not if AI continues to get better and can replace more and more things, [but] what will become important?” Acampora said. “Even when artificial intelligence—artificial agency—is increasingly more capable, it will still be the case that human agency is going to matter to human beings.
“As we think about our promise to students here at the University of Virginia … it’s an encounter with their own humanity that allows that intellectual agency to become vibrant and enduring throughout their life,” she said.
Acampora described intellectual agency as encompassing technical competence, the development of judgment and a growing understanding of one’s capabilities, often through experiences of frustration, intellectual discussions and learning alongside others.
“That’s how my mathematics professor described it, and I think he’s right,” she said. “This is characteristically a social experience that’s just as important as the excitement that we experience at the football game.”
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