Preparing for a Precarious Future
How AI and Anxiety Will Reshape the Demands of Post-Secondary Learners
This week I’m preparing to lead a strategy session with the senior leadership team of a university faculty, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how artificial intelligence (AI) and a growing precarity mindset are converging to reshape what students need and what our post-secondary system must become.
We’ve spent years talking about digital transformation in universities, but something deeper is happening. AI is accelerating technological change faster than our governance, curriculum, and credentialing systems can respond. At the same time, the public mood — particularly among younger Canadians — is increasingly defined by anxiety about cost of living, job stability, and the value of higher education itself. These two forces, one technological and one emotional, are quietly rewriting the social contract between institutions and learners.
The labour market is likely entering what I’d describe as a hybrid revolution — not a sudden collapse of work (although I’m still concerned that could happen), but a recomposition of tasks and value.
Routine analytical and writing work is being automated, while demand for human judgment, collaboration, and adaptation is rising. The slow-burn change is structural: employers are shifting from degree-based hiring toward demonstrable competence. The fast change is already visible: the disappearance of entry-level roles that once served as apprenticeships for graduates. The most likely scenario is a barbell economy — a surge in highly technical, high-skill roles on one end, and service and care work on the other — with fewer stable middle rungs.
For learners, this creates both opportunity and fear. The AI-literate will thrive; the rest risk being left behind. For universities and colleges, this means the mission cannot just be about knowledge transfer but resilience building. Our job will be to prepare learners not just for a first job, but for a volatile life.
The new unmet needs of learners
Future learners will come with three unmet needs.
First, they will need speed and adaptability: pathways that are shorter, stackable, and continuously updated as industries evolve.
Second, they will need purpose and reassurance: to see how what they’re learning connects to real-world problems and social good.
And third, they will need human connection and network building: mentorship, community, and psychological safety in a world that feels increasingly automated and impersonal.
Meeting those needs requires a different architecture for learning — one that combines modular design, human guidance, and AI-enabled personalization.