Just after 1 a.m. on a Friday morning, James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation and founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan, returned to Ann Arbor from the QS Back to School Summit in New York. For three days at the summit, university leaders, workforce development experts, and investors converged around a shared imperative and a common concern for the artificial intelligence era: higher education must do significantly more throughout the undergraduate experience to prepare students for the modern workforce. The focus extended beyond merely securing a first job, pointing instead toward entering a lifetime of learning and continuous adaptation.
Just a few hours later, DeVaney walked into the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation to welcome students, faculty, and industry professionals from Epic Games, Rivian, Volkswagen Group Technologies, Ford, General Motors, Bombardier, and Omnicom.
In New York, educational leaders spent three days talking about the problem. In Ann Arbor, a tangible version of the solution was taking shape.
While one immersive industry day cannot resolve the massive, systemic challenges facing higher education on its own, it provides the essential building blocks for a new model. In this emerging framework, career preparation is seamlessly woven into the undergraduate experience, positioning industry as an active partner in education rather than simply a terminal destination waiting at the end of a degree.
A New Test of Value
A central message resonating throughout the QS Summit was that the modern college degree increasingly has to prove its economic and practical value. As students and their families pay greater scrutiny to educational outcomes, affordability, and economic opportunity, the overarching question from the public is becoming much more direct: What does an undergraduate education actually enable someone to do next?
That critical question deserves a thoughtful, nuanced answer from academic institutions.
The fundamental value of higher education cannot and should not be reduced to a single starting salary, a singular employment outcome, or the immediate, short-term hiring needs of a particular corporate employer. Universities bear much broader, societal responsibilities. Academic institutions help students develop deep intellectual capacity and lead lives of meaning and consequence. They advance foundational knowledge, strengthen local and global communities, and cultivate informed, active citizens.
At the same time, universities must not hide behind the broad scope of their mission to evade hard questions about how education expands economic opportunity. Students deserve to emerge from college with far more than a transcript and a credential. Universities owe students concrete opportunities to develop capabilities they can actively apply, produce verifiable evidence of what they can actually do, and build the confidence and judgment required to continue learning as their work and the world change around them.
This imperative matters all the more because career readiness is no longer a one-time achievement.
Technologies are evolving at an unprecedented pace. Industries are constantly reorganizing their operations. Entire categories of work are being automated, augmented, or newly created almost overnight. Preparing someone for an initial job still matters, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. The deeper responsibility for modern universities is to cultivate what can be described as continuous readiness: the enduring ability to keep learning, adapting, contributing, and creating opportunity throughout an entire professional career.
Anxiety Without Fatalism
Students today increasingly express palpable anxiety about entering the workforce. They are bombarded with daily headlines about artificial intelligence eliminating early-career jobs, corporate employers scaling back entry-level hiring, and established career paths becoming far less predictable. Many undergraduates openly doubt whether the professional opportunities they expected when they enrolled will still exist by the time they graduate.
Their concerns are entirely legitimate. The institutional responsibility is neither to dismiss those worries nor to amplify them into a sense of fatalism. The global labor market is undergoing a profound transformation, and universities must respond to this shift with genuine urgency. However, students do not need to wait passively for large academic institutions to evolve. Today, undergraduates have more ways than ever to engage with authentic problems, master professional tools, contribute to real-world work, build a robust portfolio, develop meaningful relationships beyond the traditional classroom, and make their emerging capabilities visible to employers.
Career readiness no longer has to wait until graduation day, and the good news is that it simply doesn’t have to.
Information Is No Longer Scarce. Judgment Is.
The pressing urgency for a different educational model is also driven by a fundamental shift in humanity’s relationship with information.
Higher education constructed much of its traditional architecture in a historical era when high-quality information, specialized expertise, and academic resources were relatively scarce. Today, generative artificial intelligence enables new knowledge to be generated much faster than any individual human being can possibly absorb it.
Consequently, universities must equip students with the critical ability to determine what information actually matters, what sources can be trusted, how disparate ideas connect to one another, and precisely when specific knowledge should be put into practical use.
This reality is a primary reason why the future of education must extend far beyond simple content consumption. Universities create distinct, irreplaceable value when they provide the contextual framework, supportive community, expert guidance, iterative feedback, and authentic experiences through which raw information transforms into genuine judgment and knowledge translates into capability.
The rise of artificial intelligence makes this pedagogical transition even more vital. As routine, repetitive tasks become increasingly easy to automate, uniquely human capabilities—such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, and ethical judgment—become vastly more valuable in the marketplace.
This does not mean that technical capabilities are unimportant. Rather, it means technical skills must be developed in tandem with essential human capabilities. The future labor market will reward individuals who can understand powerful technological tools, exercise sound judgment about when and how to deploy them, collaborate effectively across diverse areas of expertise, and connect complex technology to meaningful human and organizational challenges.
Those sophisticated capabilities cannot be developed through content consumption alone. They require extensive, rigorous practice.
From Handoff to Partnership
For far too long, the traditional journey from college to career has been treated as a simple handoff that occurs near the very end of graduation.
Universities provide classroom education. University career centers help students polish résumés and practice interviewing techniques. Corporate employers arrive on campus to recruit the finished product. While internships offer students a valuable bridge between these two distinct worlds, academic learning and professional experience have frequently remained disconnected from one another. That legacy model is now wholly inadequate for the modern economy.
Students need ongoing, regular opportunities to move fluidly between theoretical knowledge and practical application. They need to work on authentic problems, encounter real professional expectations, receive constructive feedback from multiple diverse sources, and learn how to communicate the tangible value of what they have created.
That exact philosophy inspired Designing an Unreal Future: An Epic × Michigan Industry Day.
While real-time 3-D technology provided the organizing theme for the gathering, the event was not merely about learning how to use a specific software tool. Students explored how immersive technology is actively transforming work across automotive design, aerospace, advertising, media, simulation, and numerous other fields. They participated in hands-on technical demonstrations, learned about emerging professional pathways, discussed actual industry use cases, and received direct, personalized feedback on their student portfolios from experienced industry professionals.
The diverse range of participating experts mattered immensely. Students interacted directly with engineers, designers, artists, educators, technologists, and business leaders. They could clearly see that the future of mobility, visualization, and immersive experience will not emerge from a single academic discipline, but rather from the intersection of engineering, design, technology, business, communication, and storytelling.
Most importantly, students were not simply asked to sit and listen.
The event concluded with the launch of the Epic Games and Future of Mobility Early Talent Competition, created in active partnership with Podium Education. The competition invites students to engage directly with an authentic industry challenge, collaborate across academic disciplines, demonstrate their actual capabilities, and clearly explain what they can contribute to an organization.
This is the exact point where experience, evidence, and expression come together.
Students need authentic experiences that move them effectively from knowing to doing. They need opportunities to produce credible evidence of what they can accomplish. And they need to articulate not only what factual knowledge they possess, but how they can apply it to create real value.
More Pathways Than Students Realize
The shifting landscape of the labor market can sometimes make the path into a sustainable career feel narrower than before. However, the actual pathways through which students can prepare themselves have become remarkably varied.
Traditional internships remain important, but they are no longer the sole avenue for gaining meaningful professional experience. Opportunities are now everywhere: industry challenges, applied research projects, project-based courses, complex simulations, student-run organizations, entrepreneurial ventures, community-engaged projects, freelance work, online learning modules, and interdisciplinary competitions. Students can also contribute directly to open-source software projects, create original creative work, earn industry-recognized digital credentials, and seek out mentorship from professional communities.
At the QS Summit, Kemi Jona from the University of Virginia shared a promising institutional example. Through an initiative known as AI4VA, University of Virginia students work directly with local businesses to explore how artificial intelligence might help address real organizational needs. Students gain hands-on experience applying an emerging technology within a real-world context, while local businesses gain access to fresh ideas, technical insights, and valuable capabilities. It serves as a useful reminder that authentic learning can create simultaneous value for students and the surrounding community.
Not every worthwhile experience must resemble a formal corporate job to hold deep professional value. What truly matters is whether an activity requires a student to apply theoretical knowledge, navigate operational constraints, work collaboratively with others, respond constructively to feedback, and produce an outcome that demonstrates tangible personal and professional growth.
A student equipped to answer foundational questions about their experiences repeatedly over the course of an undergraduate education will graduate with far more than a standard diploma. That student will possess a rich body of experiences, a comprehensive portfolio of evidence, a supportive network of professional relationships, and a compelling account of how they can create value in the workplace.
None of this guarantees a completely frictionless path into employment. Nor should the heavy responsibility for navigating a rapidly changing labor market be shifted entirely onto the shoulders of students. Universities and corporate employers still have significant work to do to improve the system.
Yet, students retain far more agency and far more viable 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 campus-wide extended-reality initiative based out of the Center for Academic Innovation. From its inception, the initiative’s promise extended far beyond any single piece of technology. The university embraced an opportunity to improve the overall quality of a Michigan education, build a vibrant interdisciplinary community of practice, and develop new, forward-thinking forms of public-private partnership.
An early Epic MegaGrant helped the university recruit and train a dedicated cohort of 50 student fellows in Unreal Engine and professional real-time workflows. Working side-by-side with faculty members and professional staff, those students developed storyboards, wrote complex code, built immersive virtual environments, and created sophisticated simulations. They quickly transitioned from merely learning about technology to deploying it within consequential, real-world work.
While technology will undoubtedly continue to evolve, the underlying educational method remains profoundly valuable. Universities must give students real work with real stakes, alongside the professionals who do it for a living.
The primary objective is not simply to train students in the specific software tools currently favored by industry, as those tools will inevitably change over time. The larger, more enduring opportunity is to teach students how to approach an unfamiliar technology, collaborate with people who possess entirely different forms of expertise, respond effectively to professional feedback, navigate operational ambiguity, and translate a raw idea into something genuinely useful.
The ultimate goal is not just to make students ready for their very first workforce entry, but to make them inherently capable of remaining ready as the nature of work continues to change around them.
Designing a Connected University
A single industry day or student competition can provide an invaluable experience, but isolated events are ultimately insufficient. The broader challenge facing higher education is to build a more deeply connected learning ecosystem directly around the student.
This means creating systematic opportunities for authentic work across the entire undergraduate journey—not just sequestered inside a final-year internship or a capstone course. It requires developing sustained, long-term relationships with employers and professional communities rather than relying primarily on episodic, seasonal campus recruiting. It calls for helping students assemble a cohesive body of work that makes their hidden capabilities publicly visible. Furthermore, it involves designing credible ways to assess the technical, human, and disciplinary capabilities developed through these diverse experiences.
Universities must ensure these opportunities are easy to discover and accessible not only to students who already possess the independent time, financial resources, confidence, or social capital to pursue them on their own.
The underlying digital and institutional infrastructure supporting learning therefore matters deeply.
Students increasingly expect their university experiences to be just as intuitive and seamless as the best consumer technologies they use in every other aspect of their daily lives. While universities do not need to imitate every flashy feature of consumer tech, and while productive intellectual struggle remains an essential pillar of true education, learners are entirely right to expect academic experiences that are intuitive, connected, personalized, and easily navigable.
Too often, exceptional educational opportunities remain stubbornly difficult for students to discover, combine, or connect to a larger overarching objective. Institutional systems frequently reflect internal bureaucratic structures far more clearly than they reflect the actual journeys of the people trying to use them.
A more connected educational model would clearly show learners what opportunities are currently available, how different academic experiences relate to one another, what specific capabilities they are actively developing, and what paths they might thoughtfully pursue next. Nor would this support system end abruptly at the moment of degree completion. Platforms like Michigan Online exist precisely to serve this purpose: providing an infrastructure that helps learners engage with the university before, during, and after earning a degree, allowing them to return as their personal goals, careers, and industries inevitably evolve.
If universities genuinely expect their graduates to engage in continuous lifelong learning, the institutions themselves must create meaningful mechanisms for alumni to return throughout their professional lives. The relationship between a university and its students should not simply terminate at commencement, nor should every return require enrollment in another full, multi-year degree program. Learners will increasingly need shorter targeted experiences, new micro-credentials, ongoing professional communities, expert guidance, and continuous opportunities to learn right in the flow of their daily work.
This requires academic institutions to think far beyond individual courses and isolated programs, moving instead toward a coordinated portfolio of learning opportunities and strategic partnerships that supports people at every distinct stage of life.
Urgency, Agency, and Hope
In New York, DeVaney heard a clear, unified call for universities to connect modern education much more intentionally to a rapidly changing world of work. In Ann Arbor, he witnessed students, faculty, and industry professionals rolling up their sleeves to build those vital connections together.
The core lesson is not that every single educational experience should be rigidly designed around the immediate, short-term needs of a corporate employer.
Rather, the lesson is that higher education’s enduring purposes become vastly more powerful when students are given ample opportunities to put their knowledge into active motion. Universities can successfully teach students to exercise sound judgment, engage deeply with authentic problems, collaborate across traditional disciplinary boundaries, produce credible evidence of their capabilities, and discover how they can meaningfully contribute to society.
For universities, the operational imperative is clear. Institutions must move with greater urgency to make applied learning, industry engagement, and lifelong educational access readily available to every single student.
For students, the overarching message is one of profound hope. There is no need to perfectly predict the future or attempt to prepare for a narrowly defined, static job title. Instead, students should actively seek out experiences that require them to create, collaborate, solve complex problems, utilize new tools, and clearly articulate their thinking. They should collect verifiable evidence of what they can do, build genuine relationships with people whose professional work inspires them, and learn how to tell the evolving story of what they can contribute to the world.
The future of work remains inherently uncertain. But uncertainty does not eliminate human agency; it simply makes the foundational capacity to learn, adapt, and demonstrate personal value more critical than ever before.
The college degree should open a vital door and fully prepare graduates for everything that lies beyond it. Career readiness cannot wait until graduation—and fortunately, neither students nor universities have to wait either.
