AI and the Applicant Journey: The Future of Creative Education?
A bewildering world
Few of us wouldn’t empathise with the challenges that smart phones and all enveloping social media have created for young people - a generation living simultaneously in both physical and digital places.
And few educators today would disagree with the fact that the internet has changed learning styles. 24/7 fingertip access to information, the prevalence of short form content, images and video and the power of peer reviews have all changed the way young people experience the world, navigate it and make their decisions.
Add to this a labour market that lacks all the certainties of a pre-AI age and a simultaneous decline in careers advice available to young people in schools and is it any wonder that for the first time in decades, this year we witnessed a 4% drop in university applications?
In their book The Extreme Self (2021), Basar et al describe how many previous norms have been turned upside down for Gen Z/A and how consequently the world has become a bewildering place – throwing young people back on themselves; “It’s about the re-making of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain.”
Basar et al argue that this has changed the way educators, including outreach teams, need to engage with young people.
In the educational context, at least in the mainstream media, AI is often mired in a Daily Mail-type debate about plagiarism and cheating. Is AI part of the problem? Or is AI part of the solution for helping young people make better educational decisions and shape their futures according to their own individual interests and skills?
A crisis within a crisis
With the population of 18 years olds in the UK spiking, the drop in applications to university is troubling, but none more so than for those HEIs offering creative subjects.
For several years, the dominance of STEM in the curriculum has pushed creative subjects ever closer to the edge of the curriculum. 2023 saw a 4% drop in those electing to study art subjects at GCSE, the lowest proportion ever at just 7.1% of all GCSE exam entries. This is against a background of continual decline – total entries to creative subjects at GCSE and A Level have dropped by 42% since 2010. No surprise then that over the last 3 years applications to UCAS JACS Code W, which houses most creative subjects, have fallen by 3.47%.
Frustratingly, the choices we make at 13 or 14 often preclude the options to study creative subjects at A Level and beyond. Universities need to get upstream if they want to help students make more informed choices. The challenge is how to do that when the pressure is on to recruit next year and stretched outreach teams cannot offer the personalised advice that is often required.
And as those that work in Access Teams know all too well – this only makes it harder to attract less advantaged learners to creative subjects. And ultimately consolidates the unrepresentative nature of the creative industries themselves.
This is all despite the booming nature of the creative industries – which have shown consistent growth over the last 15 years, with 2m jobs, contributing £108 billion annually to GDP.
Can AI and machine learning help reverse the creative subject stats?
Existing careers apps and websites invariably involve a traditional word-based search engine and feel more designed for the learning styles of the teacher than the student.
Deep within these sites, they may hide exciting and inspiring information about creative careers.
But there is a blind spot here.
How are young people supposed to research careers which most likely they don’t even know exist? And especially when the existing careers sites seem to make so little effort to engage the curiosity of the audience? Or employ techniques that match the learning styles of Gen Z/Gen A i.e., “meeting the diverse needs of learners”? How do we help this generation build their “interior world”?
WonderWhat.co.uk
WonderWhat was originally developed as a partnership project by Arts University Bournemouth and design agency, Bond and Coyne, but has subsequently grown into an initiative that aims to bring together all providers of creative education, and the creative industries themselves, to tackle the existential challenges facing creative education. Industry partners already on board include some big names such as V&A Dundee, Old Vic and the Association of Independent Music, all of whom respond to the challenge of representing their sectors directly to the next generation.
The original version featured an innovative visual search engine designed to engage a young creative audience. Users select 5 or more images they respond instinctively to, and these choices are then linked to a machine learning tool. The more images chosen, the better the tool understands that individual’s likes and the potential careers they might be interested in. As one image is chosen, the tool refines the next images the student then sees – if you liked this, you might like this and so on. The website then takes them on a personalised journey of discovery linking labour market intel to relevant, inspirational curated content and the potential study routes to those careers.
A new version of WonderWhat, launched in November 2023, compliments this super engaging front end with a LLM Creative Careers Chat Bot – offering each student a fully personalised career information service based on their own individual interests. The user enters as much or as little info as they would like to share about their interests and skills and is then offered bespoke information on possible careers and relevant courses to study. To maintain student safety, the Chat Bot has been programmed to only talk about creative careers.
The combination of an inspiring visual search engine introduction followed by a LLM Creative Careers Chat Bot seems to be exactly what is meant by “enhancing human intuition with machine intelligence”.
The challenge is not AI itself, but how we use it
It goes without saying that WonderWhat is driven by audience-first content and is “university neutral” – it is an impartial tool designed to help young people make more informed life changing decisions, not a sales tool for any one institution. The website is not gated, there is no log on and it is free to use – it is democratic by design.
The big ethical question for marketers working in the education space is how to use AI. We need to see it not as a way of meeting short term university course targets, or indeed more sinister “data-brokering, and other facets of surveillance capitalism” (Selwyn, 2023, p.5). But rather, helping to support HE marketing’s higher purpose of improving decision-making and matching the right student to the right course at the right institution for them.
The crisis that creative education is facing demands we drop our fear around our individual institutional targets and work together to tackle an existential battle to preserve creative education. But it’s complicated and we are only in the foothills of a revolution, so it will be imperative to keep sight of the bigger picture.
As Selwyn says, the proponents of AIED need “to think a little more deeply about the politics of how and where these technologies are being applied – i.e., the politics of the contemporary school or university, the politics of national education systems and education governance.”
AI, and projects like WonderWhat, highlight the inefficiency of competition in the HE recruitment sector, and the urgent need for a more collaborative approach to the challenges creative education is facing, driven by a renewed focus on the student.
More simply, if we put the student first, AI is the most exciting thing to happen to education marketing for decades.
About the author
After a career in advertising, Simon Pride moved in to Higher Education Marketing 12 years ago and has led Marketing, Communications, Recruitment and Outreach teams at two specialist institutions, Harper Adams University and Arts University Bournemouth. He is passionate about using innovation and technology to inspire and form better student decision making.