affirmative action gainful employment and student loan forgiveness are side shows; the main attraction is artificial intelligence

By Dr. Jim Castagnera, Esq.

Partner, Portum Group International, LLC

June came to a close with the U.S. Supreme Court doing what it always does every year: announcing its most headline-grabbing decisions at the tail-end of the Court’s term... presumably just before Justices Thomas and Alito go off to join their billionaire buddies on whatever hunting, fishing or yachting excursion they are invited to this time.

This year, the news media were all agog about the “end of affirmative action” and the blocking of President Joe Biden’s wrongheaded effort to forgive almost half a trillion dollars in student loans. In my view, neither decision is anywhere near as earth-shaking as the Supremes and Uncle Joe would like us to think.

Chief Justice Roberts, who penned the majority opinion in the consolidated cases involving admissions policies at Harvard and UNC, signaled loud and clear: nothing in the decision prevents university admissions officers from considering applicants’ life experiences, including experience of racism, with which they successfully grappled. This crack in the seemingly-slammed affirmative action door has already been labeled by thoughtful Court observers as “the Adversity Score.” Additionally, Texas and California offer models for ensuring diverse student bodies without using the approach condemned by the Court last week. Note that California voters outlawed affirmative action nearly 30 years ago; California universities learned to live with the electorate’s mandate while still striving successfully for diversity and inclusion.

As for the student-loan decision, well, call me old-fashioned. But my wife and I paid off our student loans. So what’s changed? Well, it could be that universities over-charge for a product that doesn’t have the same ROI as it did back in my heyday. Or is it the American economy itself that is failing us? In less developed nations, it’s axiomatic that many well- educated young people are unable to find employment appropriate to their training; that’s no reflection on the quality of their educations. Could it be that it’s happening here? Or, last but not to be ruled out, are America’s younger generations suffering from a mis-placed and unearned sense of entitlement? Perhaps it’s some combination of all three.

 The issue of a diploma’s ROI is being addressed by the U.S. Department of Education, which last month promulgated proposed rules on Gainful Employment. The Obama Administration issued such regulations, only to have them rescinded by Mr. Trump and Ms. DeVos, his education secretary. Now the Dems are back with a beefed-up version of those GE rules. Some 7400 comments were received by the DOE, which now gets to consider that mountain of input. The department hopes to get the final rules out in 2024. Then will come the litigation phase. The Obama GE regs survived courtroom challenge. Presumably, this new round of regs will also weather the litigation storm. If so, then their long-term survival will depend upon Uncle Joe being reelected.

 The regs, should they become the law of the land for more than a few months in ’24, will apply to degree and non-degree programs of for-profit colleges and non-degree programs of private, non-profit institutions. If rigorously enforced, they should go a long way in ensuring that graduates are able to repay their loans, while not needing to live on canned cat food.

Of course, the GE regs won’t achieve their goal, if no well-paid jobs, commensurate with the graduates’ levels of education, are available in the American job market. This is where Artificial Intelligence enters this disquisition. While the hand-wringing over the Supremes’ two term-climaxing decisions proceeds apace, not nearly enough of us are paying a suitable amount of attention to what’s happening with A.I.

 You might question that last comment. You might observe that stories about A.I., especially chatbots like ChatGPT, are ubiquitous. The trouble is that most of these commentaries and articles “can’t see the forest for the trees.” The EEOC and most law firms offering webinars on A.I. seem to be fixated on A.I.’s potential to violate Title VII and the ADA by engaging in disparate-impact discrimination. Gaga techies and HR consultants are overheated about ChatGPT’s apparent ability to enhance workplace efficiency. They don’t seem to consider that efficiency is just a nice way of labeling worker redundancy.

 Redundancy? Indeed. One source of realistic comment is a recent article from Goldman Sachs.

 “AI is still a very new and developing technology. How it will impact labor productivity in the future depends on its capability (how fast it improves) and adoption (how quickly people and businesses begin using it).

“Adoption rates are unlikely to be the same around the world, as survey results have shown that some countries are more optimistic towards AI than others.

“Under the most aggressive scenario, Goldman Sachs believes that AI automation could impact up to 300 million jobs globally and potentially result in a 7% increase in annual GDP (equal to about $7 trillion).”

[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/ranking-industries-by-their-potential-for-ai-automation/]

Of course, Goldman’s concern is with its investors... how best to capitalize on the coming workforce redundancy... how to grab a slice of that $7 trillion pie. Yummy! Never mind that the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is already as wide as during the Gilded Age.

 No doubt the wealthy will happily pay their fair share of taxes, so that Uncle Sam can provide a Uniform Basic Income, while also retraining as many redundant workers as are needed to staff the increasingly-robotic world of work.

Or might the wealthy, true to form, decide to let the rabble eat cake, there being no bread? Well, you tell me.