The debate over how AI will impact higher education has narrowed into a single and well-worn groove: in a world where machines can think, how do we make sure students still learn to think?
This is an important question, but this debate is based on a faulty assumption that the only purpose of college is to develop intelligence. Missing from the debate are the unique human qualities that really do define us, such as curiosity, the search for meaning, and inner growth. These aren’t extracurriculars—they’re a core part of what true education is about.
Universities are now forced to ask what should define higher education: information or formation?
The word “education” descends from the Latin educare—to nourish, to bring out. Education, at its root, was never only about filling a mind with information. It was about drawing out and nourishing all the unique qualities that define us.
From their medieval origins, universities understood their mission as being the formation of the whole person, what 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas called capax universi. But over the years, the ambition of the university has been narrowed, and the most essential questions about the meaning of life have been expelled from the classroom.
Some see AI as a threat to be managed. I would counter that it is precipitating a pivotal opportunity to reinvent higher education and embrace the broader scope it once had.
Curiosity
When we have a technology that can give instant answers to any question, the questions take on more importance. We’re born naturally curious. As Aristotle put it, “all men by nature desire to know.” One study found that pre-school children ask about 100 questions a day. But that plummets as they get older, roughly disappearing by middle school.
Even though curiosity is one of our defining qualities—and one that AI can’t replicate—it’s an aptitude that grows the more we use it. The point isn’t just in seeking answers, but in seeking growth and expansion. Curiosity is the precursor to both questions and the wisdom that follows.
With AI, the danger is not just outsourcing the task of finding answers but in generating the questions altogether. The friction of sitting with mystery, puzzling through ambiguity and complexity, can be waved away with a prompt. Offloading cognition can lead to offloading the appetite for wonder.
In the age of AI, the capacity not just to ask questions but to want to ask questions is a core skill to teach. So how could a university do that? One way: make question-asking, instead of answer-giving, the explicit goal of a course. It could be a first-year seminar built entirely around inquiry. The students could be graded on the quality of the questions they learn to pose—not the answers.
Another: a “follow the question” requirement, which is the converse of a thesis. Here, students could choose a question when they arrive at campus and pursue it across all their time at the university. These should be big, open-ended questions. Why is there suffering? What is beauty? What makes for a good life? Students could examine the question through the different lenses of their different courses: through science, art, literature, etc. There’s no final answer, but rather an accounting of how the question deepened, or changed, or impacted the student’s thinking and growth.
Meaning and purpose
To help students find the meaning and purpose they’re seeking as they come into university life, it is essential that schools support students’ desire to define meaning.
This is the opportunity AI presents universities with: to meet the longing of students who arrive on campus hungry for meaning, purpose, and something larger than themselves—and at the very moment in their lives when it matters most.
One way to do this is to build meaning and purpose into the vocational core. In a study by Stanford’s William Damon, he found that over half of the students were in college to find purpose, not just to be trained to make a living. And yet he also found that most colleges weren’t providing resources to help students find their purpose. So career advising could be reframed around purpose and calling—not just credentials and salary. Damon recommends hands-on learning, often through volunteering that connects students’ passions to the real world, and providing mentors or “spark coaches.”
Inner growth
Meanwhile, AI is increasingly capable of recursive self-improvement. But what about nurturing that same impulse in humans, and instilling in students the skill of continuous self-improvement and inner growth?
To do this, universities could add a “capstone of the self” alongside a thesis. In addition to a traditional capstone project, schools should give seniors a chance to produce a reflective synthesis of who they’ve become and who they want to be—an examined-life portfolio. It recognizes inner development as an essential outcome of a degree and gives students the opportunity to make sense of their years of growth and to have more clarity about what really matters.
Reclaiming the mission of the university isn’t about going back to the past—it’s about connecting to what’s always been there in order to go forward. To educate has always been about nourishing the whole person, not just the intellect.
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