Many California college students choose to learn AI theory and its emerging applications while preparing to enter an ever-changing workforce. Simultaneously, colleges and universities across the state are expanding and develop AI courses and degrees to keep up with demand.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced a first statewide partnership with a tech firm to bring AI curriculum, resources and opportunities to California’s public higher education institutions. The partnership with Nvidia, software development company, will bring AI tools to community colleges first. The hope is to add partnerships for California State University and University of California systems.
Natham Lim is a junior studying music and computer science, with a concentration in AI. He sees the potential for AI in both learning how to play instruments and making music more accessible.
“What if there was an AI private teacher to answer questions and provide feedback on playing?” Lim said. “This could make it available to so many more people that can’t afford $50 to $100 an hour for private lessons.”
Lim learned to play the violin, guitar and piano with help from a middle school teacher and YouTube tutorials. He said his family could not afford private lessons, so he is mostly self-taught. While the internet helped him evolve as a musician, he thinks AI will drive society’s next revolution in tech.
In Lim’s data science course this quarter, the program that he uses to complete homework assignments, Google Colab, has AI embedded that will generate the needed code for him if prompted correctly.
Many California colleges are racing to prepare students for AI engineering jobs, but these careers often require a master’s or doctoral degree. Community colleges and universities are working to lay the groundwork to pursue advanced degrees, while finding ways to get students involved in AI at the undergraduate level.
Over the next decade, computer and mathematical jobs, which include AI, are projected to grow by 12.9 percent, the second-fastest of any industry, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At tech companies such as Meta and Google, offer AI-related jobs at six-figure salaries.
Angel Fuentes, the dean of business and workforce development at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, is pushing for community colleges to foster AI literacy. Even if they aren’t pursuing a tech career. He said AI literacy is important because AI will impact fields from medicine to the humanities to business.
Fuentes also said he’s started to see more “blue-collar AI” opportunities popping up — jobs that work with AI, but don’t necessarily develop or innovate with it, and that typically don’t require master’s degrees. One example is a prompt engineer, which is someone who writes the inputs that companies use to get responses from AI platforms such as ChatGPT. Prompt engineers may use AI to help create presentations or streamline a company’s internal processes, for example.
In part to prepare students for those more accessible AI jobs, eight California community colleges now have AI degrees or certificates, with more coming, Fuentes said. These programs focus on skills such as computer programming and entrepreneurship.
The California partnership with Nvidia aims to create AI programs, software and dedicated AI spaces for community college students, educators and workers.
Louis Stewart, the head of strategic initiatives at Nvidia, said the partnership will initially last three years, allowing students to get “AI-enabled.” Stewart emphasized the importance of “upskilling” workers, including people who are returning to school to switch careers, by teaching them about AI.
“The community colleges are a great starting point because it is a great way to get tools and resources into these classrooms that might have a harder time accessing it,” said Stack, with the governor’s office.
Even though only 1 in 5 community college students transfer to a four-year university, officials hope to equip and inspire students to continue their AI studies beyond community college or enter the workforce in AI-adjacent roles.
The idea behind the AI literacy push is “AI is here to stay” and various sectors, not just tech, “should embrace it,” said Nasreen Rahim, a professor at Evergreen Valley College who trains teachers on how to best use technology.
The California community college system now has academic integrity guidelines for AI, which aim to ensure “expectations are clear” for students of what is considered responsible use of AI, and what isn’t.
Brian Sawaya, a biomedical engineering student at Foothill College in Santa Clara County, has found a network of peers at the community college level who, like him, are dedicated to exploring tech fields, including AI.
“Community college students are some of the most driven people you’ll meet,” Sawaya said. “Because community college students are underrepresented in terms of access to opportunities, and companies are trying to diversify their workforce, it’s important to have opportunities for community college students.”
Sawaya is the president of his college’s robotics team, and he said he uses AI to help his club’s robots better detect objects and avoid obstacles. Sawaya is excited to transfer to a four-year university next year to continue studies in wearable technology, which includes prosthetics.
As Newsom noted, the UC and Cal State systems will also benefit from AI industry partnerships in the future. The Cal State Board of Trustees announced in September that the university system is seeking $7 million in its 2025-26 budget request to fund AI infrastructure for students and faculty.
Four universities in the Cal State system have AI programs: Cal State East Bay, San Francisco State, San Jose State and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The CSU Generative AI Committee convened for the first time this fall in response to some CSU campuses’ demand for systemwide guidance on developing AI programs and managing AI use.
At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, students in the Computer Science and AI Club meet every Sunday afternoon in a lecture hall. On a recent Sunday, 80 computer science freshmen, sat in front of two projectors to learn about AI basics from club leaders.
“As the president this year, I’m trying to champion a place where people who know more about AI come to teach people who know less and are very interested,” said Leo Horwitz, a computer science senior at Cal Poly.
The club offers workshops to teach the foundations of AI to students and is working on original AI application projects – for example, one that will research and generate code and another that will automate and referee games of red light, green light. The club partners with local companies to raise funds, and it gets money from the student government, which sponsors clubs, Horwitz said.
Horwitz is excited about the possibility of Cal Poly working with a leading AI developer in the future.
Horwitz’s professor, Franz Kurfess, offers opportunities for his students to work with companies as part of his courses. He is also leading the project that Cal Poly junior Lim is working on to use AI in evaluating students’ senior projects.
“Working with a company is an opportunity for students to learn about practical applications of AI in a context that they might experience later in their career,” Kurfess said.
In another partnership with this news organization, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo faculty and students recently worked with CalMatters to build Digital Democracy – an AI-powered website that tracks lawmakers, legislation, campaign contributions, and congressional hearings and sessions.
Across the UC system, leaders are working to incorporate AI across disciplines, while balancing the pitfalls of the technology. A UC presidential working group chose a list of “responsible AI principles,” which include transparency about AI use, safety and privacy.
Delilah Brumer is a bilingual journalist reports on education/ government at Los Angeles Pierce College. Jeremy Garza, a fellow with CalMatters College Journalism Network and a junior at California Polytechnic State University.
Originally Published: October 30, 2024 at 6:00 AM PDT
