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Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” is confronting new challenges in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Not only is much of our curriculum struggling to keep pace with rapidly-changing markets and industry, but AI agents are now poised to disrupt the cognitive, nonphysical work that higher education has traditionally credentialed. Instead of attempting to insulate ourselves from the “AI Shock,” community colleges should realize their open-door mission and use this moment to prepare students for the economic displacements and technological marvels ahead.
The Upside Down
The U.S. economy went “K-shaped” long before the advent of ChatGPT. For the bottom 80% of U.S. households, purchasing power is stagnant and pandemic-era savings are long since depleted. Over forty million Americans have outstanding federal student loan debt, with the average balance topping $40,000. The closely followed University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index Current Economic Conditions Index recently fell for a fifth straight month to the lowest level in its history, and more than 70% of American households now expect unemployment rates to increase in 2026.
In his recent piece, “The Criticisms of Higher Education: A Reply,” Robert A. Scott, President Emeritus of Adelphi University, argues higher education must do more to meet the moment. “One million students drop out of college each year, of which three-quarters are first-generation, two-thirds are from low-income households, and one-half were in associate degree programs.” The financial “interest” accrued by those who make it across the graduation stage is also under stress, as Gen Z men with college degrees now face an unemployment rate virtually identical to their non-degreed male peers. The value of a college education as we’ve long ascribed it — both in dollars terms and in sunk time — is now upside down for tens of millions of Americans.
The People’s Colleges
Current enrollment trends suggest a countervailing flight to utility is already occurring among the next generation of learners. Community college enrollments are seeing the highest growth in the sector. Students are increasingly opting for undergraduate certificates and vocational programs — which recently saw a 11.7% increase — that promise a more direct, transparent return-on-investment. Students are increasingly choosing educational paths that do not require a four-year leap of faith.
When the gap between academic tradition and societal need grows too wide, higher education closes it through radical reinvention. The Morrill Act of 1862 broadened access to scientific knowledge and pushed institutions to adapt to an era of westward expansion and industrialization. A century later, amidst postwar economic reconversion and racial desegregation movements, the GI Bill and the subsequent Truman Commission promoted the establishment of community colleges as a democratic corollary to our state university systems. These institutions were designed to be the “people’s colleges,” centered on open access, built on nimble curriculum, and promoting economic dynamism at the local level. In that same spirit, the colleges of the American future will leverage AI to prepare lifelong learners to excel where machines cannot: at the intersection of technical fluency, data literacy, and the uniquely human capacity for empathy and ethical reasoning.
Easing the Administrative Burden
For many of our community college students, the most challenging moments of their academic career will not be faced in the classroom but will arrive by way of administrative burden. The legwork of securing and maintaining annual financial aid, satisfying complex credit transfer processes, enrolling in the correct program course sequence, and removing academic holds represent both a financial and cognitive tax that working adults increasingly cannot afford, driving perpetual community college retention issues.
In “Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning,” Bowen and Watson offer an enticing question for higher education practitioners looking to ease these burdens — “What new system or program could you now implement that you couldn’t before?” (p. 148). AI now has the potential to serve as a personalized enrollment and retention navigator that can help keep students enrolled and academically on-track, while freeing academic advisers’ energies for coaching and care. Community colleges are already implementing these types of tools — often through existing vendors or student information systems — to centralize processes and reduce bureaucratic friction. AI-enabled chatbots and messaging systems can provide personalized, plain-language (even multi-lingual) guidance on individual learners’ next steps, process deadlines, and campus services when integrated with institutional data tools and single sign-on systems.To make the web of rules, processes, and offices navigable for our increasingly underserved students, we can harness AI agents as “autonomous contractors for electronic tasks” and move our student support systems right into the student’s pocket (p. 24).
The Digital One-Room Schoolhouse
In the classroom, generative AI can support instructors and students alike by serving as learning infrastructure. Bowen and Watson highlight how free tools like Google’s NotebookLM already function as a digital one-room schoolhouse, tapping students’ existing course materials to simulate an infinitely patient supplemental instructor-one with an “open educational test bank” and 24/7 office hours to boot (p. 135). Such retrieval-augmented tools can help learners parse dense syllabi and assignment instructions, gamify low-stakes practice quizzes, generate interactive flashcards, visually represent complex concepts, and deliver verbal feedback through real-time audio interaction (p. 24). Instructors can readily tap AI tools to expand practice opportunities for indirect instruction, with exciting implications for gateway courses. Bowen and Watson explain how de-identified pre-course surveys can now be used to easily generate equivalent practice sets that translate course assessments into individually-personalized contexts — from chemistry to engineering story problem examples, music performance to accounting case studies, etc. designed to motivate each individual learner (p.137) Their excellent new book effectively makes the case that Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem is now solvable with AI.
Still, AI is only as good as the context, prompts, and guardrails we design, and it should be integrated into courses as deliberately as any other learning support. For decades, faculty themselves have offloaded much of their own teaching and assessment work to automated systems via optical mark recognition bubble sheets, online learning platforms, and third-party textbook integrations — and asked students pay the associated costs. The instructor-adopted college textbook itself represents one of the earliest examples of this type of academic labor-saving technology. The longer our discourse remains centered on how to prohibit or police students’ use of new learning technologies, the more likely future learners will struggle to engage responsibly with these tools for their own intellectual and occupational advancement.
Know Your Learners
Community college faculty are uniquely positioned to get to know their learners; there will be no better inoculation against emerging forms of academic misconduct. Immediately upon ChatGPT’s public release, clear-eyed instructors understood how large language model text-generators would necessitate an evolution in our legacy methods of academic assessment. When faculty elevate process over product, forego the convenience of auto-graded examinations, and recommit to authentic assessments, classroom relationships come to the fore, and the threat of “AI-giarism” fades. The alternative — keeping our assessments and outsourcing trust to detection tools — invites exactly what Bowen and Watson warn against: large-scale false accusations that do more harm than good and deepen the student mental-health crisis (p. 160).
The future of AI-powered automation is serving up other inconvenient truths: the half-life of many technical skills and professional roles is shrinking once again. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39% of key skills will change by 2030. Community colleges are well-positioned to respond because they can build new certificates and programs with local partners and communities on demand. With AI on their side, faculty can prototype new curricula more quickly, create customized learning materials across a variety of modalities, and personalize practice for every learner who enters their classroom. By centering our practice on the humans in front of us, we can help prepare students for new types of labor that may well require a lifelong commitment to training and upskilling.
From the Chalkboard to the Chatbot
Overall adoption of generative AI has outpaced that of both personal computers and the internet. The tools of academic inquiry have already shifted to the chatbot, and our institutional strategies must keep pace. As education changes, our open doors will not stay open of their own volition. AI can either widen inequality — by accelerating displacement and further stratifying our society — or it can widen access — by making support systems navigable and learning supports abundant to all. Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism can still hold true, only when we accept that we are the stewards of a system that must continuously evolve to protect those it was designed to empower.
