Are universities preparing students for a future of automated jobs?

President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the decline of the working class blames trade, immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs overseas for the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector.

But the bigger culprit is rarely acknowledged by politicians or the media: automation. Nearly nine in 10 jobs that have disappeared since 2000 were lost to automation, according to a study by Ball State University. As former President Barack Obama said in his farewell speech in Chicago earlier this year, the next wave of economic dislocations “will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.”

And that includes many jobs that today require a college diploma. Nearly half of American jobs are at risk of being taken over by computers within the next two decades, an often-cited report from Oxford University predicted in 2014. On that list were occupations long seen as stable careers, such as accounting, insurance underwriters and personal financial advisers.

For centuries, the answer to advancing technology was education. The belief was that additional schooling and more educational credentials would keep workers one step ahead of automation in almost any job. In the race between education and technology, education has always won.

But it’s not clear that simply adding education, particularly early in one’s life, will be enough to keep up in this new era.

“If a job can be automated in the future, it will be,” Joseph Aoun, the president of Northeastern University, said. “Very few are talking about the implications for higher education. We owe it to our students to be thinking about how to prepare them for the coming sea change to the future of work.”

Aoun is the author of an engaging new book, Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, about how colleges need to not only reform their curriculum but also their entire approach to education. Only a few universities, he maintained, have started to plan for what’s next in the economy. In the book, Aoun suggests three approaches that higher education needs to adopt to prepare students for the automated future.

First, is a new learning model that Aoun calls “humanics.” It blends technical and social skills, and in the process, develops “higher-order mental skills” in students that will allow them as workers to easily toggle between various jobs and tasks. “It is the purposeful integration of technical literacies, such as coding and data analytics,” Aoun said, “with uniquely human literacies, such as creativity, entrepreneurship, ethics, cultural agility and the ability to work in diverse teams.”

Second, colleges need to invest in experiential education, which includes activities such as internships, undergraduate research and study abroad. “These experiences impart independence, problemsolving skills, teamwork and deepen understanding from what into why,” Aoun told me.

The book lays out a compelling argument that education will no longer be something that ends with college or graduate school in our 20s, but is a lifelong pursuit because the know-how to succeed in a career will increasingly churn at a faster rate. It’s already happening. When more than 5,000 working adults were surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2016 about the future of work, nearly nine in 10 said it would be essential for them to get training and develop new job skills throughout their work life to keep up with changes in the workplace.

“We know the changes that are necessary to innovate and adapt,” he said. “Just as higher education stepped up to meet the demands of the agricultural and industrial revolutions in generations past, I’m confident institutions can prepare the learners of today for the artificial intelligence revolution of tomorrow.”