Just after 1 a.m. Friday morning, I returned to Ann Arbor from the QS Back to School Summit in New York. For three days, university leaders, workforce development experts and investors had returned to a common concern and a shared imperative for the AI era: Higher education needs to do more throughout the undergraduate experience to prepare students for work—not only to secure a first job, but to enter a lifetime of learning and continuous adaptation.
A few hours later, I walked into the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation to welcome students, faculty and professionals from Epic Games, Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, Ford, General Motors, Bombardier, and Omnicom.
In New York, we spent three days talking about the problem. In Ann Arbor, I saw one version of the solution taking shape.
One immersive industry day cannot resolve the massive challenges facing higher education. But it gives us the building blocks of a new model—one in which career preparation is woven into the undergraduate experience and industry is a partner in that education rather than simply a destination after it.
A New Test of Value
A central message from the QS Summit was that the degree increasingly has to prove its value. As students and families pay greater attention to outcomes, affordability and opportunity, the question is becoming more direct: What does an undergraduate education enable someone to do next?
That question deserves a thoughtful answer.
The value of higher education cannot be reduced to a first salary, a single employment outcome or the immediate needs of a particular employer. Universities bear broader responsibilities. We help students develop intellectual depth and lead lives of meaning and consequence. We advance knowledge, strengthen communities and cultivate informed citizens.
But we must not hide behind the breadth of that mission to avoid questions about how education expands opportunity. Students deserve to emerge from college with more than a transcript and a credential. Universities owe students opportunities to develop capabilities they can apply, produce evidence of what they can do and build the confidence and judgment to continue learning as their work and the world change around them.
This matters all the more because career readiness is no longer a one-time achievement.
Technologies are evolving. Industries are reorganizing. Entire categories of work are being automated, augmented or newly created. Preparing someone for a first job matters, but it is no longer sufficient. The deeper responsibility is to cultivate what we might call continuous readiness: the ability to keep learning, adapting, contributing and creating opportunity throughout a career.
Anxiety Without Fatalism
I increasingly hear students express anxiety about entering the workforce. They see headlines about AI eliminating early-career jobs, employers reducing entry-level hiring and established career paths becoming less predictable. Many doubt whether the opportunities they expected will exist when they graduate.
Their concern is legitimate. Our responsibility is neither to dismiss it nor amplify it into fatalism. The labor market is changing and universities need to respond with urgency. But students need not wait for institutions to evolve. They have never had more ways to engage with authentic problems, learn professional tools, contribute to real work, build a portfolio, develop relationships beyond the classroom and make emerging capabilities visible.
Career readiness cannot wait until graduation. The good news is that it doesn’t have to.
Information Is No Longer Scarce. Judgment Is.
The urgency for a different model is also driven by a fundamental change in our relationship with information.
Higher education developed much of its existing structure in a world where high-quality information and expertise were relatively scarce. Today, generative AI enables knowledge to be generated faster than any individual can absorb it.
And now we must equip students with the ability to determine what matters, what can be trusted, how ideas connect and when knowledge should be put to use.
This is one reason the future of education must extend beyond content. Universities create distinctive value when they provide the context, community, expert guidance, feedback and authentic experiences through which information becomes judgment and knowledge becomes capability.
AI makes this transition even more important. As routine tasks become easier to automate, human capabilities such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration and ethical judgment become far more valuable.
This does not mean that technical capabilities are unimportant, but rather that they must be developed alongside human capabilities. The future will reward people who can understand powerful tools, exercise judgment about when and how to use them, collaborate across areas of expertise, and connect technology to meaningful human and organizational challenges.
Those capabilities cannot be developed through content consumption alone. They require practice. A lot of practice.
From Handoff to Partnership
For too long, the journey from college to career has been treated as a handoff that occurs near graduation.
Universities provide education. Career centers help students prepare résumés and interviews. Employers arrive to recruit the finished product. Internships offer students a valuable bridge between these worlds, but academic and professional experiences often remain disconnected. That model is now inadequate.
Students need ongoing opportunities to move between knowledge and application. They need to work on authentic problems, encounter professional expectations, receive feedback from multiple sources and learn to communicate the value of what they have created.
That was the idea behind Designing an Unreal Future: An Epic × Michigan Industry Day.
Real-time 3-D technology provided the organizing theme, but the event was not simply about learning to use the technology. Students explored how the technology is transforming work across automotive design, aerospace, advertising, media, simulation and other fields. They participated in hands-on demonstrations, learned about emerging professional pathways, discussed actual industry use cases and received direct feedback on their portfolios from experienced professionals.
The range of experts mattered. Students encountered engineers, designers, artists, educators, technologists and business leaders. They could see that the future of mobility, visualization and immersive experience will not emerge from a single discipline, but from the intersection of engineering, design, technology, business, communication and storytelling.
Most importantly, students were not being asked merely to listen.
The day concluded with the launch of the Epic Games and Future of Mobility Early Talent Competition, created in partnership with Podium Education. The competition invites students to engage with an authentic industry challenge, work across disciplines, demonstrate their capabilities and explain what they can contribute.
This is where experience, evidence and expression come together.
Students need authentic experiences that move them from knowing to doing. They need opportunities to produce credible evidence of what they can do. And they need to articulate not only what they know, but how they can contribute.
More Pathways Than Students Realize
The changing labor market can make the path into a career feel narrower. However, the pathways through which students can prepare have become more varied.
Internships remain important, but they are no longer the only way to gain meaningful experience. The opportunities are everywhere: industry challenges, applied research, project-based courses, simulations, student organizations, entrepreneurial ventures, community-engaged projects, freelance work, online learning and interdisciplinary competitions. Students can also contribute to open-source projects, create original work, earn industry-recognized credentials and seek feedback from professional communities.
At the QS Summit, my friend Kemi Jona from the University of Virginia shared a promising example. Through AI4VA, UVA students work with Virginia businesses to explore how AI might address real organizational needs. Students gain experience applying an emerging technology in context, while businesses gain access to fresh ideas and capabilities. It is a useful reminder that authentic learning creates value for students and the communities around them at the same time.
Not every experience must resemble a formal job to be valuable. What matters is whether it requires a student to apply knowledge, navigate constraints, work with others, respond to feedback and produce something that demonstrates growth.
Three questions separate worthwhile opportunities from the rest:
- What experience will help me practice something that matters?
- What evidence will I be able to produce?
- How will I express what I learned and what I can now contribute?
A student equipped to answer these questions repeatedly over the course of a college education will graduate with more than a credential. That student will possess a body of experiences, a portfolio of evidence, a network of relationships and a stronger account of how they can create value.
None of this guarantees a frictionless path into work. Nor should responsibility for a changing labor market be shifted entirely onto students. Universities and employers have significant work to do.
But students retain more agency and more options than pessimistic accounts of the future of work might suggest.
Technology Is Not the Point
Seven years ago, the University of Michigan announced a campuswide extended-reality initiative based at the Center for Academic Innovation. From the beginning, its promise extended beyond any particular technology. We embraced an opportunity to improve the quality of a Michigan education, build an interdisciplinary community of practice and develop new forms of public-private partnership.
An early Epic MegaGrant helped us recruit and train a cohort of 50 student fellows in Unreal Engine and professional real-time workflows. Working alongside faculty and staff, those students developed storyboards, wrote code, built environments and created simulations. They moved from learning about the technology to using it in consequential work.
The technology continues evolving, but the underlying method remains valuable. We give students real work, with real stakes, alongside people who do it professionally.
The objective is not simply to train students in the tools currently used by industry. These tools will inevitably change. The larger opportunity is to teach students how to approach an unfamiliar technology, work with people who possess different forms of expertise, respond to feedback, navigate ambiguity and translate an idea into something useful.
The goal is not just to make students ready for the workforce but to make them capable of remaining ready as work changes around them.
Designing a Connected University
An industry day or student competition can provide an important experience, but isolated experiences are insufficient. The larger challenge is to build a more connected learning ecosystem around students.
That means creating more opportunities for authentic work across the undergraduate experience—not only during an internship or capstone. It requires developing sustained relationships with employers and professional communities rather than relying primarily on episodic recruiting. It calls for helping students assemble a body of work that makes their capabilities visible. And it involves designing credible ways to assess the technical, human and disciplinary capabilities developed through these experiences.
Universities must ensure these opportunities are easy to find and available not only to students who already possess the time, confidence, resources, or social capital to pursue them.
The infrastructure supporting learning therefore matters.
Students increasingly expect their university experiences to be as intuitive and seamless as the best technologies they use in the rest of their lives. Universities need not imitate every feature of consumer technology, and learning should not be designed solely around convenience. Productive struggle remains an essential part of education.
But learners are right to expect experiences that are intuitive, connected, personalized and navigable. Too often, exceptional educational opportunities remain difficult to discover, combine or connect to a larger objective. Our institutional systems frequently reflect internal structures more clearly than they reflect the journeys of the people trying to use them.
A more connected model would show learners what opportunities are available, how different experiences relate to one another, what capabilities they are developing and what they might pursue next. Nor would it end at the degree. Michigan Online exists exactly for this: an infrastructure that helps learners engage with the university before, during and after a degree—and return as their goals, careers and industries evolve.
If we expect graduates to engage in continuous learning, universities must create meaningful mechanisms for them to return throughout their careers. The relationship between a university and its students should not end at commencement, nor should every return require enrollment in another full degree. Learners will need shorter experiences, new credentials, professional communities, expert guidance and opportunities to learn in the flow of work.
This requires institutions to think beyond individual courses and programs toward a coordinated portfolio of learning opportunities and partnerships that supports people at different life stages.
Urgency, Agency and Hope
In New York, I heard a clear call for universities to connect education more intentionally to a rapidly changing world of work. In Ann Arbor, I watched students, faculty and industry professionals building those connections together.
The lesson is not that every educational experience should be designed around the immediate needs of an employer.
The lesson is that higher education’s enduring purposes become more powerful when students have opportunities to put knowledge into motion. We can teach students to exercise judgment, engage with authentic problems, collaborate with people beyond their disciplines, produce credible evidence of their capabilities and discover how they can contribute.
For universities, the imperative is clear. We must move with greater urgency to make applied learning, industry engagement and lifelong engagement in education more accessible to every student.
For students, the message is hopeful. You do not need to predict the future or prepare for a narrowly defined job. Seek experiences that require you to create, collaborate, solve problems, use new tools and explain your thinking. Collect evidence of what you can do. Build relationships with people whose work interests you. Learn how to tell the evolving story of what you can contribute.
The future of work is uncertain. But uncertainty does not eliminate agency. It makes the capacity to learn, adapt and demonstrate your value more important.
The degree should open a door and prepare graduates for everything beyond it.
Career readiness cannot wait until graduation. Fortunately, neither students nor universities need to.
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