The Best Case Scenario for Christian Higher Education in 20 Years

On the threat of A.I. to schools

Photo by Michael Marsh on Unsplash

Last year around this time,

Samuel D. James

asked me to write about what I thought the future of Christian higher education was. It was a good question and still is. So I wrote this piece, which essentially argues that there are two paths forward, the path of maximizing efficiency at all costs and the path of “shoring up the ruins,” which means seeing the university as a preserving agent in a decaying civilization. I concluded that the most likely scenario will be that some schools will pursue shoring up the ruins while being efficient when it is reasonable. Well, that’s all well and good, and I stand by that article, but it completely failed to predict the game-changing technology of A.I. It accounted for the demographic cliff, the decline in denominations, the closure of colleges, the potential of new governmental pressures—all of these forces, but my article completely missed the possibility of A.I. coming in like a wrecking ball and upending all of higher education. So when

David Miller

asked me to write on Christian higher education in 20 years, I thought it was time to review what I had written. Looking back eleven months later, A.I. seems like one of the most serious threats to Christian higher education. Yes, the demographic cliff is serious, but within twenty years, more serious could be the outsourcing of higher education to A.I. systems which offer to tailor an educational “experience” for a student at their own pace, for a fraction of the cost, without textbooks, without professors or classmates. Such systems could completely revolutionize higher education in general and turn residential education into an elite luxury good. Christian institutions of higher education that survive and flourish will be ones that lean into their humanity, that emphasize their work of whole-person formation, that do the work that A.I. systems can’t do.