AI and the Future of Higher Education

Higher education has been “in crisis” for decades. Some observers have sounded the alarm about skyrocketing tuition, decreasing economic return on investment, a loss of open-ended inquiry to ideological rigidity, widening socioeconomic gaps between those with and without a bachelor’s degree, rampant grade inflation, collapsing standards, or ivory tower disconnection from the broader society. Others have decried the decision to market higher ed as glorified career training, or the collapse of humanistic study, in favor of “practical” majors like economics or computer science. And now, into this fraught moment, comes generative AI, which has left some students wondering: what use is learning to read and write when jobs no longer demand that I do so? Why should I labor reading a difficult paper, or writing a sensitive email, when ChatGPT can do it in seconds? As AI has thrown the instrumental value of higher education into question, we are left facing a stark question: is there anything college can offer that is still intrinsically valuable? 

To address this question, in partnership with Noēsis Collaborative and the Intellectual Forum at Jesus College, The Public Culture Project organized a private roundtable titled “AI and the Future of Higher Education”, held March 30–31, 2026 at Jesus College, Cambridge. The roundtable convened about thirty invited leaders from the worlds of AI, higher education, and workforce readiness to examine how generative and agentic AI are reshaping the purpose, value, and practices of universities, and how they should. understand the latest developments in generative and agentic AI, their impact on the purpose, value, and tasks of higher education, and the leadership responses required to lead institutions into a future aligned with human flourishing.