At the ASU+GSV Summit this week, university presidents, industry leaders and workforce experts agreed that integrating work-based experiential learning is increasingly important.
“Work must live inside the curriculum, not at the end of it,” Sukhwant Jhaj, Arizona State University vice provost for academic innovation and student achievement, said at a session Tuesday. “Not as a capstone, not simply as an internship, but woven throughout the curriculum.”
Jhaj and other university leaders concurred that integration, not overhaul, should be the end goal of industry-education partnerships. While employers are seeking technical skills and AI experience, they are also commonly citing skills like communication, teamwork and problem-solving as paramount. Overprioritizing narrow skills, university leaders argued, could impede higher education’s ability to respond to change.
“Think about 30 years ago when you were in kindergarten, and if they taught you whatever they thought at the time was the most important skill set,” Kenny Berlin, founder and CEO of the career services platform 12twenty, said. “None of those things today would be important.”
Fisk University President Agenia Clark said higher education's adaptation to change can be stalled by a false binary between technical and durable skills. She pointed out that universities like hers have always sought to train critical thinkers who understand when and why to use the tools of the day, not just how.
“Every graduate leaves fluent in the tools of AI, but also fluent in the questions that those tools cannot answer,” she said. “Critical thinking and creativity are not a general education requirement at Fisk, they are woven into the technical training itself.”
Similarly, at the College of Western Idaho (CWI), industry partnerships have helped identify where to adjust and where to maintain the status quo. CWI President Gordon Jones said local employers co-designed an electric-vehicle technician track at the college after training faculty directly on the factory floor. Another partnership in mining guarantees employment to CWI graduates.
Partnerships like these, Jones said, come from leaders opening doors and reaching out to potential partners, finding the right participants within the institution to connect with industry, then keeping those partners accountable and celebrating successes when they occur.
“That’s the charge to those of us in leadership,” he said.
Radford University President Bret Danilowicz described a different model aimed at rural economies like his, in Virginia. At Radford University, industry partnerships are focused on small businesses at which students can learn both technical and soft skills through 10- to 30-hour project-based work experiences.
“Businesses are providing our faculty with examples of operational challenges that they have,” he said. “These problems may or may not involve AI, but our students are applying AI to the challenges, and this is transferring AI skills to our students.”
For example, an outdoor gear-rental service tasked student workers with creating an email funneling system. Local businesses get cost-effective labor, and students gain important skills, Danilowicz said.
Developing technical skills alongside professional judgment can help protect graduates from being replaced by AI, panelists said.
“The idea that the interns are getting work done for the company like tedious research — that's not a thing anymore,” Berlin said. “I think the internships will look very different, and it’s projects. It’s, 'How does that intern do that same thought work and create those [AI-driven] projects?'”
