Debating Education

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Michael Spence: Well, hello, I'm Michael Spence, I am President and Provost of University College London, and I'm joined today by Professor Raquel Bernal from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, by Professor Larry Summers from the Harvard Kennedy School of Governance, and by Sian Beilock from Dartmouth in the United States.

And we've been set the rather daunting topic, debating education, and I am going use something of a chess prerogative. To say given the expertise of the people who are here, we're probably going to limit it to post-secondary education, to post 16 education, but 16 as it were to the grave. Over the last couple of days at Davos, every time education has been mentioned, somebody in the room has said education needs disrupt, education needs disruption, education needs changing. And the theory is... That if the needs of the labour market, if people's personal needs, as they navigate more complex societies, as we navigate the new technologies, as we need increased intercultural competence, that the way we've been doing it since the Middle Ages, which in lots of ways is the way we do it still, probably won't survive. Now, I'm not sure that I believe that. But that's the assumption in lots of the Davos conversations. And so the organisers of today thought it would be good if we took a step back and asked a few fundamental questions. What does success look like in post-secondary education? What's the point of the activity in any case? What obstacles might there be to reform? And in particular As we think about reform required by the new technologies, how quick is the pace of change going to be? How quickly do we need to sort this out? Or do we have a little bit of time to think about it? Now, this is an experiment with a new format for Davos, the town hall. And the idea is that the people in the room, and indeed the people online, are every bit as expert as the people sitting with me in these chairs and have just as much to contribute. And so what we're gonna do before we start is ask you those very questions. If you go to slido.com at hashtag WEF25, there are those three questions. What's success? What are the obstacles to reform? And how quickly are the new technologies going to require change? And what we'd like you to do is in relation to the first two questions. If you could give us just three words and we'll form a word cloud from them just to get a sense of what the feeling is and in the room and online. And then the last one, it's a simple vote for how quickly you think the change will happen. So I'm gonna give you a moment just to do that on Slido and we're going to do that before we ask the panellists in to make sure as it were that you're setting the agenda. So I'll give you second. I'd sing you a song now, by way of music, but you probably wouldn't want that. So let's see, do we begin to have some results? We put them up. Becoming a virtuous human. Well that's- cost, tradition as barriers. Leadership, that's a challenge. Inclusion, access. Well, so these give us some really good ideas to start off with. But, Raquel, what's your response to this? And I suppose, in general, what's success for you at the University of the Andes? What are you looking for?

Raquel Bernal: So I liked, from the answers of the audience, becoming a virtuous human. So this is what I prepared to answer to this question. I think it's very important that universities are labs for democracy, especially in these turbulent times for democracy. We should be the environment where they become the best people they can be. They understand the world broadly So that they can have an impact and understand the role in this world. And I think this is the most important thing. I worry a little bit that we focus too much in workforce-oriented competencies. And I fear this is a trend in the future, because I really think that our primary objective as universities that virtuous human being being a good democratic citizen and having an impact on the societies where they reside.

Michael Spence: And how do we do that in practise? So, you know, there's a lot of histories written about the university as an institution that suggests that this whole person formation was very much there at the beginning, survived through the 19th century, even the beginning of this century, when I suppose in many countries, we were much more sure about what a virtuous human looked like. And then after the Second World War, universities recreated, they became much more technocratic. And it's really only been in the last 10 years or so that universities have started to talk about character formation, about whole person formation again. How do you do that in your institution?

Raquel Bernal: So first of all, I think it's very important to have a diverse student body, so we have to be similar to the societies we serve. And I think we have to teach our students to be tolerant, respectful, to really listen to each other, to be empathetic, to understand the circumstances of people that are different from them. And this happens not only in the classroom, it happens in many things that occur in universities. So I really believe in off the classroom curriculum, things that happen in the gym, things that happened in cultural activities that we provide, but guaranteeing diversity is the first step. Second thing is I really believe in socio-humanistic education. So trying to understand the world with an ample vision. Interdisciplinarity. I think it's very important that they cross, go across disciplines, that they have to understand the artist but also the scientific but also, the sociologist and providing those spaces I think is very important and tweed through the curriculum many of those soft skills, durable. Capabilities, they call them now, that are going to be very important for the future. So adaptability, flexibility.

Michael Spence: And are academic staff ready for that? So, you know, I love academics. I've spent almost all my working career in the university. I have eight children. I love them. I'm not sure that I'd choose all my academic colleagues to teach my children about virtue. Is the academic community ready for their job?

Raquel Bernal: I wish to think, we are, we after religion are the second most rigid institution in the world, as you mentioned earlier. And I think change hurts. And we're just very used to pouring knowledge over our students and less so in being guides over students being mentors. So I think we have a ways to go, but these are very committed people, really. Academics really have a mission in the world, and I think that's a very good start. But we're used to our old ways, and it's gonna take a bit to move into different ways of learning, into different way of interacting within the university.

Michael Spence: So that leads, naturally, to Larry. What are the obstacles to moving? You know, we have some issues here that people have raised, particularly around tradition and cost and entrenched belief and misaligned values and funding. But what do you think are the big obstacles to reform in universities?

Lawrence H. Summers: I'll answer that in one second, but I just want to register that I have a rather different view as to what the objective is. My view is that the objective to teach our students to better understand the world in all of its aspects and to have greater capability to gain further understanding of the world, in all of it's aspects, and I think our mission is fundamentally cognitive and intellectual. Rather than characterological for a variety of reasons, including the one that you mentioned, which is that our faculty are selected for their excellence in transmitting and generating new knowledge and not for their f excellence in character improvement. And I know of no evidence for the moral superiority of the professoriate. Relative to the remainder of, uh, the population and have some amount of evidence, uh to suggest that there's not a large gap. I have a very unfashionable view about the biggest barrier to change. There is a well-developed economic theory of the cooperative, of the employee-owned firm. Kibbutz in Israel are an example. Classically, cooperatives were in the Yugoslav firm. And what that theory basically says is that if you let all the workers control the firm, The firm will. Privilege job security over all else be reluctant to expand because it will be diluting of what is of what is existent and will have difficulty because of various solidarity aspects making painful and difficult choices to change. And universities stand out. As institutions that are run by their, not by all their employees, but by the large group of employees who are involved in providing instruction and doing research. And I think that is the root of their profound conservatism. There is no major corporation in the United States. That has not fundamentally reorganised itself seven times in the last 50 years. There is no major university in the United States that has undergone a major reorganisation once in the past 50 years, if you look at the overlap of the departmental structure of Harvard University today and when I first came as a graduate student in 1975. Fundamentally the same thing with a little bit of renaming and one or two smaller departments that have been added. And that is exactly what is predicted by a structure in which the institution is run as a cooperative with the extra feature that an institution run There's a cooperative will. Tend to gravitate towards maximising job security, which goes to the various issues that are raised around tenure. So there are reasons in terms of expertise and so forth why it might make sense for universities to be run as cooperatives. Nature of being run as a cooperative is, I think, the fundamental reason for their extreme resistance to large scale change.

Michael Spence: Change. So I totally get that, you know, when I'm asked about my job I sometimes say I'm part CEO of a two billion pound turnover organisation, part chief worker in a workers' collective, you know. Only 20 of my colleagues have to write a petition for me within two weeks to be statutorily required to have a meeting of 1700 of my colleges to discuss anything they want with papers prepared in a week. So, I get that. But you could also argue that the flat structure and the polycentricity of universities actually leads to their creative genius because it's all those little groups of academics who are looking at the horizons of their disciplines and that it's been precisely that fecundity of a flat structure that means that many universities, you know, when people in business would look down on those who ran the university when I was Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sydney, I'd gently point out that there was no Australian company as old as the University of Sydney that was still in business. And part of the reason we were still in business was because we had constantly adapted and we'd constantly adapted because people at the edges of their discipline were looking into the future.

Lawrence H. Summers: Today's a very important question, which is it is certainly correct that universities last for huge long times, and a further observation would be true that if you looked at a list of the top 15 universities in the United States today and in 1960, that list would be remarkably similar, and that would not be true in any other industry. And you offered one theory in terms of the fecundity of the organisational structure. I would offer a different theory, which is that it has a profound amount to do with network effects that induce stickiness. The faculty want to go where the best other faculty are, the students want to where the best other, uh, faculty are and where the students are, and everybody, and the more successful the institution, the more money it raises. So I always summarise that point by saying that if the main reason people chose hotels was because of the other people they met in the lobby. It would turn out that leadership in the hotel industry was very inertial and sticky. And that is a crucial feature of how universities operate. I think there is a very difficult question about whether security and autonomy may lead to fecundity. It may also lead to the perpetuation of mediocrity. And that is the very difficult question. I find it hard to believe that if there were not more capacity for central decision making and central reallocation of resources, that... Universities would not be more flexible and even more able to adapt to a changing world. And Sian, you've got that. Can I comment on that? Yeah, please do.

Sian L. Beilock: I mean, I do agree with you that faculty own the values of an institution in terms of where they are. But I would also point out that different faculties are set up in different ways. And so our medical school looks very different in terms the tenure and job security in our engineering school and our business school in terms what they have than our arts and sciences faculty. And I think, actually, that's a really important component of how we get change with the different facultties interacting together. And so As leader of Dartmouth, I like the idea of having central control, oftentimes, and I like to think I do have some autonomy there. Of course, I work in partnership with the faculty, but I think one of the biggest ways to get that kind of innovation is to work across different systems within the university that are different in terms of how they are structured. Our engineering school, for example, has tenured faculty, but also a lot of research faculty that push the institution in a different way.

Michael Spence: You've got, in a sense, the hardest job because people have actually voted ex-ante whether you're right or wrong. So, to what degree will next generation technologies have impact on achieving success in education systems? Overwhelmingly, people either think that they'll revolutionise or actually create some change. I suppose that's quite an even balance, really. So, take it away.

Sian L. Beilock: I'll leave it to Larry whether that's a statistically significant difference, but it seems pretty balanced. Look, I think technologies have always been interrupting and pushing our education system and I think we need to push more. I like to remind everyone always that Dartmouth in 1956 coined the term AI in a symposium over the summer. And actually we were seen as the head of technology when we developed BASIC, one of our former president's John Kemeny. And it was put in every math class. Every student had to learn to programme basic in math, and that was thought as really sacrilege, like we were leaving away the common liberal arts, but it turned out to be really important in terms of teaching students how to think, which is what we do. And I think about that as technologies today. Right now, we are implementing AI-powered technology in our introduction to writing classes for our first-year students, and the goal is to teach students how to co-create and think with these new technologies. But then I think that comes back to the purpose of what we do. We teach students how to think, not what to think. And that's the most important aspect of what we do, we're teaching students how to take information from the world, make sense of it, and hopefully go out and be leaders and make those changes and adapt and think in the future.

Michael Spence: So if you think of that technology thing as partly teaching students to use the machines, partly testing some of the same intellectual skills that the machines have, right? You know, we didn't give up teaching math when we got calculators because we thought it was important for cognitive development and because you had to be able to tell whether what the machine said was crazy. But there's another bit which is about, in the future, a particular kind of set of soft skills are actually going to be quite important. Do universities have a role in teaching those things the machines don't teach? Yeah. So how do we do it?

Sian L. Beilock: I mean, I think we are there to teach a common sense of heuristics about how we learn and how we change, but also values and principles. And so I think I differ from Larry a little bit. The faculty, I agree, that's not their goal to teach those sorts of values necessarily. They're to push on their discipline. But students at university are not just around faculty. A third of our students work with our varsity athletes. They work with athletic coaches. As our students do. Productions, they're in plays and in other places, and they're learning how to interact with each other. They're learning to have dialogue with each other, they are learning how to understand a point of view that's different from their own. And I think that is the ultimate purpose of a university, that ultimate purpose is academic excellence and you get there by learning to have different viewpoints to understand them, to weigh them, to put an argument together and decide where you ultimately stand on an issue.

Michael Spence: And interestingly, when I was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, we did work with employers in Australia, China, India, the UK, the US, France and Germany, and also spent time in the theoretical literature precisely around this question of what education will you need for the fourth industrial revolution. And interestingly they all came back and said a deep grounding in a basic discipline because you have to know something about something to know anything about anything and it's the best way of teaching critical thinking and effective oral and written A capacity to step outside your discipline in an interdisciplinary context, so a kind of T-shaped education. Cultural competence, and particularly an international perspective. And of course, if you live in London, you don't need to get on a plane to need an international respective. And finally, a capacity to bring that together, your discipline together in a team to collectively solve a problem. Yeah. That sounds remarkably like what we've been trying to do for a long period of time.

Sian L. Beilock: In psychology, we talk about this term collective intelligence, which is the ability of a group of people working together to perform particular tasks and come up with creative ideas. And oftentimes, that collective intelligence is more predictive of outcomes than an individual's competency on that team. And it turns out one of the big predictors of collective intelligence is turn-taking, how much you can listen and have a conversation with one another. That's a basic competency. At Dartmouth, we're focused on dialogue, on teaching our students who often. Come in communicating through their devices, how to listen and have conversations with one another, and how to take turns in terms of understanding different perspectives and viewpoints, and to see the common humanity in different people. When you talk to employers, they often talk about how young people don't know how to necessarily be employees. They don't want to be in the office at the same time. They don't know how capture the informal interactions outside the meeting room, and I think that those are skills that we can teach.

Michael Spence: I loved the survey that said that 75% of the students of a particular university wanted to be self-employed entrepreneurs when they graduated. And you just thought, who's going to work for them? Like, how are we preparing people to be employees?

Sian L. Beilock: But I agree with Gary that that's not necessarily the job of the faculty and that it then forces us to think about the purpose of institutions more broadly in terms of the types of skills and supplements we're giving them outside of the classroom.

Michael Spence: And smart languages make a better distinction. You know, many of the European languages make a bit of distinction than English between instruction and education in the fullest sense. And I think we're thinking about those issues in a new way. There's 20 minutes left in this session, which is double the usual amount of time at a Davos panel for engagement with the audience. So questions, do people have questions either in the room or comments? We're gonna limit the comments to one or two minutes, but if you...

Speaker 5: I don't teach at Ivy League. I actually teach at what, you know, basically, you'll probably never see my student, hopefully you will. But it's a two year college, and it's feeder to Rutgers. And Rutgers has a nursing programme, and that nursing and allied health can be transferred to Rutger's if they get a certain grade, okay. So our job is kind of like triaging our students to see which ones are gonna have the critical thinking, the math skills, and that sort of thing. And I think what has happened with COVID, we're seeing a lot of kids coming in that were just pushed through high school because of COVID. And I Think realistically, that may be something that we all have to consider in education as well.

Lawrence H. Summers: Look, I think in thinking about education. Broad approach to education. You have to come to a very fundamental judgement. Do you believe? Which of the following sentences do you believe is more accurate? Self esteem comes for achievement. Self esteemed promotes achievement. Achievement promotes self esteem and you have to decide which one of those things you believe is paramount. I know the answer for me. I believe that achievement promotes, self esteemed, but I believe we have substantially lost our way in american education on that point. That's what's involved in social promotion. That's the reason why the most common grade at Harvard University, and I believe in the Ivy League, is straight A. That's why the average grade point average in many places is above 3.7. And I think that you're right to point to a set of concerns. That exists. You're also right to remind us that while people on the four of us have spoken from our own experiences, um, ultimately, um the Duke of Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eaton. That was a very elitist age, and I think that the the future of most of our countries will be one or lost. In broad public institutions that educate the vast majority of the young people and funnel them or

Michael Spence: wherever they're going. And can I ask a question about your intervention? Is your point that just at the time as the new technologies are hitting, there's changes in the labour market or all other kinds of changes that have dominated Davos are happening, we actually have a generation of students coming through who, because of the pandemic, you think may be less well prepared. So it's not just adapting our current systems. It's also. I do a little because I'm a governor of a primary school and I look at this very socioeconomically mixed and I looked at the difference in achievement between the young people who are in homes with enormous amount of social and educational capital and those who weren't coming out of COVID and they're never gonna catch up really.

Sian L. Beilock: But it's not just preparation academically. It is also that preparation to interact with others, to understand what information you take in, is accurate, where it comes from particular sources. It is the social emotional issues that maybe faculty are not designed to teach about, but those are actually really important to success. And I think there's lots of ways to do education, and Ivy League way is one, and by the way. Dartmouth still has median grade point on the transcript, which is the only IV to do that, and our faculty had a big fight about that, but it just came to that, because I think that information is meaningful. It's hugely important.

Michael Spence: Though I do have to say, as a dad, while I hope my kids strive for achievement, I hope that they don't think that their value as a person depends upon achievement.

Raquel Bernal: I wanted to say a word on the learning gaps, because it's really worrisome in Latin America. So while the average number of days of school closures in the world was 40, it was 160 in Latin American, 160. So it's said that 60% of students in high school lost pretty much a whole academic year. And we are the best university in Colombia, what we see. Every single student, it's not only the vulnerable, all of them that can't read, can't comprehend a text, and math is really critical. So it's really very complicated because you cannot build, I don't know, programming on math that is very precarious. So it is really rather an issue for the next gen. I think it's some generations that it's going to be very hard to help them catch up.

Michael Spence: Yeah, and I think it goes to the themes, doesn't it? Because while we're being expected as post-secondary institutions to do all these new things, there's also a lot of the basics that in much of the world and in large parts of our country we just need to catch up on. It's a really good reminder. Other comments? Yes.

Speaker 6: Hi, everyone. My name is Pat from Mongolia. So I want to ask about public education, right? So I think huge problem across the world, especially in the United States. I went to college in the US, and I saw how unequal the difference between public and private education is. And in Mongolia, it's also the same case, right. So I the solution is pretty simple, right, invest in public education. But when it comes to war, money just comes out of nowhere. But when comes to investing in public education, politicians, universities. Seem to be reluctant to invest in public education. So how can we make sure that we are more willing to sort of invest more in public education to close this gap between public and private education?

Sian L. Beilock: Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's just, I think you're right. We have to invest in education, especially early on. But I would say, we know from studies in the US that even before students get to kindergarten, for example, their socioeconomic environments are predicting where they're gonna be and how successful they'll be. And so I would just say it's not just investing in education but it's investing in levelling a socioeconomic playing field. Even before that. For example, we know that kids get to kindergarten and the number of words they hear from their parents predicts how they'll do in kindergarten and often predicts how they will keep up throughout the rest of their career. And there's huge socioeconomic gaps, especially in the U.S., that we have not been successful at closing. I don't know if it's just money, though. I think we have to think about how we're doing education and how we're thinking about those support systems, especially in less resourced.

Michael Spence: And one of the things I've found encouraging about the Davos conversations over the last couple of days is that there's been whispers of the, as the AI thing takes off, we need to invest more in human capital, not less in human capital. And I think that's got to be true. Yes, sorry about that.

Speaker 7: My name is Hawo Mufti. I'm a global shaper. So as a young person, I'm really excited that we're having this discussion, because for us, education is changing, and we are really invested in using technology in education. So I'm thinking, what are your thoughts about the future of education in these times of artificial intelligence? Does it get better? I want to hear from your own perspective. And what do you think are the challenges that we might face in the future if we keep using AI in education? And that's one. So the second question is, do you think education can be reformed to accommodate the newer types of jobs that are not conventional? Because for most young people, we do not like, We do not work with. The things we study in school, we actually go into the job market like applying what we learned, trying to like look for the transferable skills within the things that we study. So do you think that education can be reformed in such a manner that it will really answer to the needs in the labour market?

Raquel Bernal: Yeah, so I think, thank you for the question, very important question. I think as any disruptive technology, there is many opportunities and there is also some risks. But I definitely think that flexibility of education is gonna be very important, talking about learning gaps. I see a huge opportunity in AI and technologies. To close gaps because of more personalised education, allowing the student to follow their own path based on AI. I think this really has a good chance of working, especially in the developed world. So Colombia is one of the 20 more unequal countries in the world, Latin America for matter because it's also Mexico and some of other countries in Latin America. And this inequality has led to a long-standing social conflict in Colombia that is very complicated. I think the only solution is education. But we really need to reach a lot of people. Higher education enrollment is really very low, obviously, as is even in some developed countries. So I think we really to make it more flexible. We really need... Our students to be able to handle the opportunities that disruptive technologies will bring to them. But I also want to talk about the other types of education and opportunities because I come from a developing country. So in Colombia we have 3 million youth who do not study and do not work. That's 30% of youth in the country. That means that in the next 10 years our democracy is not viable. Because there's a lot of young people without hope, without opportunities, without a future. And so I think it's very important to tailor education to the specific needs of the contexts in which we serve. I am true believer of vocational education, for example, in developing countries, because we prepare people for CEO jobs that do not exist. And there's a lot of loss in productivity and loss in well-being of the youth because we are not matching the jobs with the capacities of people. So I think, you know, being in a university, preparing professionals to be CEOs, I really think that we should be doing more in matching the job with the education that people require, I think. Universities were a little bit pedantic. We know what we need to teach and we hardly listen to the private sector and to the young students what they want and what they need.

Michael Spence: And interestingly, in many countries, governments, as they've tried to increase participation in higher education, have actually defunded vocational education of one kind or another. And that's led to real problems. I mean, on this issue of young people wanting to take advantage of the new technologies, there's a clash here, isn't there, between what we've already identified that the technologies are not necessarily great at. Their potential and what we said before might be holistic education. So we're actually being sued as a university by 5,000 of our students and in a class action. And we're being sued because during the pandemic we taught them online. Now, it would have actually been illegal for us to teach them in person, but that's by the by. And they say very strongly, we did not get a proper education. They say we had fabulous instruction. We met all our learning outcomes. The cognitive activity was terrific. But we didn't have an education, because it's so much more than that. And part of that is about face-to-face interaction. And I think that's interesting, because there are some people, of course, for whom online learning is going be a really quick... Easy way of upskilling, you can time shift, all the rest of it, but I'd hate to think that at every level what young people can teach one another in an in-person context is not something that we're still going to value.

Raquel Bernal: We'll be agreeing.

Speaker 8: My name is Roberto Patiño, I'm a YGL from Venezuela. I wanted to hear your reflections on what we are reading of the appearance this year of a genetic AI that will be PhD level, capable of doing research, and what impact it will have on the academic community of the universities.

Sian L. Beilock: I think the advances we're making are going to have huge impact on scientific breakthroughs and where we're going. I don't think that lessens the need, though, for humans involved in this and how we both curate that knowledge, think about how it's applied in value-driven ways, and connect with people. At Dartmouth, we have a virtual patient that are. Medical faculty are using to teach people how to interact, potential doctors to interact with patients which I think is kind of odd that we're using a virtual agent to teach that. But those human connections, how we deploy the knowledge, how we get people to uptake it, whether it's a cancer therapy or meeting people in rural areas that need particular healthcare, those are going to be aided by technology. But they are still based on human connection. And I don't think that's going away. I think it's going to be even more important.

Speaker 5: That in terms of what we've been doing. I mean, you can't depend on a student to use AI. And what I mean by that, you've got to, I mean they're not gonna learn by using AI exclusively, which by the way, many of them are trying to do. So what we do is in our assignments, we develop tasks. And these tasks are part of something that you, as a professor you can tell. This is AI because they don't answer the task that's in the assignment. So they can use AI all they want, but you gotta answer the tasks in the assignments. So we allow them to use AI, but they gotta answer to the tasks. And that's really hard if you're not necessarily a PhD.

Michael Spence: Larry, you're going to.

Lawrence H. Summers: I was going to say that it's a well-established fact that if you look at the number of bank tellers in the United States after the ATM was invented, you would have thought that ATMs diffused widely and tens of thousands of ATMs came into being in a decade, you would have though people didn't need bank tellers nearly as much. 10,000 more bank tellers in the United States than there were before the ATM revolution. Why, it probably had to do with the fact that they were doing somewhat different things, people were going to the bank branch more frequently and more conveniently because of the ATM and then they wanted to do other things and they were being sold other services and so forth. So I think it's very difficult to predict what the implications of these technologies are going to be for the distribution of tasks and for the number of people who are around. I think there are two big dilemmas in all of this that I change my mind about all the time. One is what the AI and all of that makes possible is much more focused and specific education on exactly the aspects I'm interested in. Exactly tailored to my weaknesses and strengths, much more personalised education. Everybody getting a much more personalised education and the building of a sense of community are not obviously in concert with each other. And if the AI is better at helping me than my friend is, that's not gonna bring me into more contact. And how do we deal with that? And I don't quite know the answer to. The other thing I don't quite know the answer too is something you talked about that I think is very important. I often remark that the last thing I did in my professional life where success and failure was all about me alone was take my general exam in graduate school. And everything I did after that more or less depended on my ability to. Work with others, sometimes for others, sometimes with others. Sometimes they were working with me, but it was all a collective thing. And so you sure feel like that, what to be a thing we very fundamentally are developing in students. On the other hand, how do you exactly give grades to a group of five people? How do you actually evaluate individual performance at cooperating. And I don't quite know the answer to those questions. But I think those two questions are very important as we think about how education develops.

Michael Spence: 27 seconds left. Raquel, are you hopeful about the future of education and our capacity to adapt?

Raquel Bernal: Yes, yes, I am hopeful. I think because of the people that live in universities, we are really so committed to this mission of serving our communities and really protecting democracy. I think I'm very hopeful that we are able to. And I want to close by saying that in the face of AI, it becomes even more important. Those things that are mostly human. So the social sciences, the arts, the humanities, I think they should be the main actor in this revolution to bring up what we will offer above and beyond AI.

Michael Spence: So a statement of confidence in the creative capacity of the remarkable people involved in the education system at every level. That's not a bad place to finish. So thank you very much for joining us today for this time.