AI Skills for College Graduates - Ithaka S+R

Ah, marvellous. Ithaka S+R, the higher-education research shop, has produced a report on AI skills for college graduates designed to confirm nothing and offend no one. It is, in the organisation's own words, a "snapshot" of alignment between college instructors and employers, and the data is "broad by design." Broad by design, you see — the methodological equivalent of painting a target around whatever arrow happens to have landed. This is how you get a report on the future of work that can be read by every university, every HR department, and no one with actual hiring authority, without a single eyebrow raised.

The genius of "broad by design" is that it makes the report unfalsifiable. Ask what specific AI skills graduates need, and the report politely declines to say, because being broad was the plan all along. One imagines the research team deciding that the safest answer to "what do instructors and employers agree on?" is "stuff" — and then expanding "stuff" until it covers the entire known universe of AI, from prompt engineering to philosophy-of-machine-learning essays. Alignment is easy when both parties are asked to agree that AI skills matter, which is roughly as illuminating as asking whether water is wet. The actual gaps — the tools used in real workplaces, the price of a degree, the fact that job ads now ask for experience the graduates cannot possibly have — remain safely outside the frame.

So here we are, once again, with a report that tells us exactly as much as a fortune cookie, wrapped in consulting-grade prose. The only "alignment" truly on display is between the report's ambition to be relevant and its determination to say nothing actionable. Ithaka S+R has done a splendid job of measuring the distance between two groups by asking both to stare in the same vague direction. Broad by design, useless by default, and thoroughly unreviewable. Do pass the bucket — or better yet, a syllabus that actually teaches someone something a hiring manager can use.