Should Adaptability Depend On Who Can Afford To Wait?

If breadth is the durable protection against automation, then a funding model that penalises it is an equity problem rather than an academic one.

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The advice arriving from universities abroad is sensible, and it is not free. Students are being told to specialise later, to build breadth before depth, to keep options open while the labour market rearranges itself. Every one of those instructions is denominated in time, and in this country time is the resource most unequally distributed among students.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Two academics at the University of Auckland Business School argue that there may be no such thing as an AI-proof degree, and that the degrees which endure will combine deep disciplinary expertise with the breadth to work across fields and the adaptability to keep learning. They are careful about what they are not saying, namely that disciplines should be abandoned or that everyone should study computer science. Their point is that universities should reconsider how early students are made to specialise, because generative AI makes it easier to draw on knowledge from neighbouring disciplines while making superficial understanding easier to disguise, since a polished answer can conceal weak reasoning, missing evidence or invented facts.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

Applied here, that recommendation collides with policy. Funding under the National Student Financial Aid Scheme is governed by the N rule, under which a student who no longer complies may not be funded; the calculation is based on the number of years a student has been registered in the higher education sector, and the additional funded period is applied once across an entire academic career. The design intent is sound, since public money should not fund indefinite study. The consequence is that a funded student who explores, switches direction or arrives at a discipline late spends a margin intended for illness or failure, and may exhaust it before graduating. A self-funded student carries no such constraint. Breadth is available to both. Only one of them pays for it out of a fixed allowance.

IMPLICATIONS

The stakes are not academic. Unemployed South Africans aged 15 to 34 rose by 264,000 to 5.0 million in the second quarter of this year, pushing the youth unemployment rate up 1.5 percentage points to 47.4 per cent, while formal-sector employment fell. If adaptability is the durable protection against automation, and if the capacity to acquire it is rationed by household income, then the labour market outcome of the next decade is being allocated now by a funding formula rather than by ability. The department approving those criteria and the researchers recommending breadth are addressing the same problem from opposite ends, and nobody appears to have introduced them.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

There is a version of this that costs almost nothing. A student who changes direction early, in a first year, is not the same as one who has failed repeatedly, and a funding rule that treats them identically is blunt rather than principled. Distinguishing between the two would preserve the fiscal discipline and remove the penalty on exploration. For employers, the implication is more immediate. Companies complaining that graduates lack breadth should look at who is able to acquire it, and consider that a bursary structured to permit a change of direction may produce a better hire than one that punishes it. Adaptability is being described as the skill of the age. It should not also be a purchase.

Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net