Joe Wilkins reports a sharp reversal in what one finance firm wants from new graduates:
As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.
The risk begins when familiarity with a tool gets mistaken for the ability to think through the work the tool produces. Wilkins points to what students lose when the shortcut replaces the practice:
Over the past few years, a veritable tidal wave of headlines, studies, and think pieces have flooded the internet with horror stories about the decline in literacy rates, social skills, and critical thinking abilities of the country’s college students. While there’s a kernel of truth that these factors had already been slowly dwindling prior to the widespread adoption of AI, the tech only seems to be accelerating the drop-off in real-life abilities, particularly among young people for whom it can serve as a cognitive crutch.
The state of higher education is so bad that many of today’s higher ed students are not only offloading their coursework to AI chatbots like ChatGPT — a shortcut, educators say, that’s even impacting their ability to participate in face-to-face discussions.
AI fluency can expand what someone is capable of producing. It cannot supply the close reading and judgment needed to recognize whether that production is any good, or the communication skills needed to explain why. Early in a career, doing the work is how people learn to judge that output and explain their decisions.
While plenty of thought leaders have waxed lyrical about the importance of “AI literacy” — an understanding of how to effectively use AI tools, basically — the businesses these future students are heading toward are still heavily reliant on literacy literacy. For all its revolutionary potential, there’s ample evidence that AI has yet to meaningfully impact productivity in the US, meaning that students who go all-in on AI at the expense of other skills will likely find themselves ill-prepared for the actual demands of life after college.
