I have the great honor of serving as the 10th president of the nation’s very first community college. That distinction has afforded me opportunities to participate in fascinating conversations about higher education’s past, present and future. These conversations are intellectually stimulating and energizing, but I’ve noticed they tend to focus on systems, structures, trends, and increasingly, technology. Far less attention is given to something I believe has shaped higher education just as profoundly and will ultimately determine its future: our humanity and our leadership.
Higher education has never been particularly good at predicting its future. We are, after all, institutions built around semesters, traditions and structures that sometimes measure their longevity in decades rather than years. Yet the world around us changes by the month, the week and sometimes the hour.
Artificial intelligence has only accelerated these changes. It is already changing how students learn, how faculty teach, how employees work and how institutions operate. The question before higher education is no longer whether artificial intelligence will transform our institutions. It will. The more important question is whether we will be ready to transform with it.
More than a decade ago, I wrote about the need for community colleges to embed themselves more deeply in their communities and anticipate changes in the ecosystems around them. That argument feels even more relevant and urgent today. I have also come to understand something else during my years as a college president: The faster technology moves, the more important distinctly human leadership becomes.
Technology will not save higher education
There is a temptation whenever a transformative technology emerges to believe the technology itself is the strategy. It isn’t.
Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly make colleges more efficient. It can help us analyze data, automate routine processes, personalize student support, redesign administrative workflows, strengthen advising, accelerate research, and rethink how knowledge is created and shared.
Those possibilities are extraordinary.
But efficiency is not the same thing as effectiveness, and innovation is not the same thing as progress. A college can deploy the most sophisticated technology available and still fail the student who cannot figure out how to register for classes. We can create AI-powered advising systems and still lose the student who needs another human being to tell her, “You belong here.” We can automate processes while inadvertently exacerbating inequities. And we can become extraordinarily efficient at things we should perhaps no longer be doing at all.
From reactive institutions to predictive institutions
One of the ideas that has followed me throughout my career is that colleges must become better at anticipating what comes next. The traditional model of institutional change is often reactive. Enrollment declines, so we develop an enrollment strategy. Employers report a workforce shortage, so we create relevant programs of study.
Students struggle, so we step in and offer support.
Increasingly, that will not be enough. The colleges that thrive in the next decade will become predictive institutions. They will use data, artificial intelligence, labor-market intelligence, and relationships with employers and communities to identify needs before those needs become crises.
Imagine a college that can identify a student at risk of stopping out before the student ever considers it, or that can determine which programs will experience significant employer demand three years from now, or that can use AI to remove the bureaucratic friction that makes navigating college unnecessarily difficult. None of this is science fiction. Much of it is already possible. While technology may show us what is coming, leadership is what determines how we act on that information. The future will belong not to the institutions that predict change most accurately, but to those that address change before they have to.
Leadership is still about people
In my writing, I have argued that extraordinary leadership requires strength, compassion, vision, empathy, courage and kindness. I believe that even more strongly today. Artificial intelligence does not diminish the need for those qualities. It makes them more valuable.
There is a trend emerging in higher education: As our institutions become more technologically sophisticated, our students crave greater human connection. That matters. Community colleges, in particular, educate students whose lives rarely fit neatly into institutional systems. They are people before they are students. They are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, caregivers, veterans, first-generation students, recent immigrants, displaced workers, high school students and adults returning to education after years away. They arrive carrying aspirations, but also responsibilities, anxieties and financial pressures. At times, they might even voice uncertainty about whether they belong in college at all.
Technology tools can help us identify those students. They cannot replace our obligation to care about them. The future, therefore, cannot simply be high-tech. It must also be high-touch.
Our greatest opportunity may be to reinvent work
There is another dimension of artificial intelligence that higher education leaders cannot ignore: AI will change the labor market our students are preparing to enter. For generations, colleges have organized education largely around occupations and disciplines. However, when technology can perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks, the durability of specific job functions becomes harder to predict.
Technical knowledge will, of course, remain essential. But adaptability, communication, ethical reasoning, creativity, collaboration, curiosity and the ability to learn continuously are likely to matter even more. Perhaps the most important skill we can teach students in an age of artificial intelligence is how to remain valuable when the technology around them changes. That requires us to reconsider curricula, credentials, workforce partnerships, faculty development and even our assumptions about what constitutes a college education.
For community colleges, this moment presents an extraordinary opportunity. We sit at the intersection of education, workforce development, economic mobility and civic life, and we exist to respond to the complex, varied needs of our communities. Adaptability is already embedded in our DNA. That fact may soon become our greatest competitive advantage. In 1901, a pair of educators in Joliet, Illinois, imagined something that did not yet exist in American higher education: a new form of college accessible to all. They believed that students should be able to study in their own communities and that higher education should adapt itself to better serve the people and places around it. From that idea came Joliet Junior College (JCC) and, eventually, an entire community college movement.
More than 125 years later, that movement is ours to uphold.
As we continue to innovate and implement new strategies, we must do so in the interest of those we serve. Technology will become more powerful. Data will become more predictive. Artificial intelligence will become more capable. Together, these things will undoubtedly shape the role of higher education. Students will still need mentors who believe in them. Communities will still need institutions they trust. Society will still need places where human potential is recognized and developed with intention.
The leaders who founded JJC in 1901 could not have imagined the world we inhabit today. Nor can we fully imagine the world our successors will inherit 125 years from now. But our responsibility as educators is the same no matter the era: to embrace the future with open arms and to take an active part in its sculpting. Whether the developing tools of this era will result in the cultivation of a more equitable, more humane and more hopeful future for our students is up to us.
