In a Spring 2024 Education Next article, I argued that, despite the conventional wisdom that students were all in on artificial intelligence (AI), many in high school and college felt deeply anxious about its impacts on the future jobs available to them and what they should be learning now.
A new survey suggests that parents also have big concerns—around their children’s future job prospects, what they learn in school, and whether they should even go to college.
College Guidance Network, which provides AI-powered expert guidance to parents around colleges and careers (and for which I host live shows for parents on the topic of careers), conducted the survey of 602 parents of U.S. high schoolers that were nationally representative based on household income, student gender, region, and school type.
In an era when the college-going rate of high school graduates has dropped from an all-time high of 70 percent in 2016 to roughly 62 percent now, AI seems to be heightening the anxieties about the value of college.
According to the survey, two-thirds of parents say AI is impacting their view of the value of college. Thirty-seven percent of parents indicate they are now scrutinizing college’s “career-placement outcomes”; 36 percent say they are looking at a college’s “AI-skills curriculum,” while 35 percent respond that a “human-skills emphasis” is important to them.
This echoes what I increasingly hear from college leadership: Parents and students demand to see a difference between what they are getting from a college and what they could be “learning from AI.”
Indeed, parents are at least cognizant of backup options to college, with 51 percent saying that, should the value of a four-year school erode, community college or career-technical school would be desirable, and 20 percent pointing to apprenticeships. Interestingly enough, parents of children in private and charter schools were 6 percentage points more likely to be interested in apprenticeships.
Parental concerns aren’t muted, either.
The survey found that 62 percent of parents discussed “AI and the future of work” in the previous two weeks, with one-third saying they discuss it on a weekly basis.
