USC and UCLA bet big on AI to meet soaring student, job market demands

USC and UCLA are joining the rush to embed artificial intelligence and new digital technologies into college coursework as the academic year begins, announcing new AI majors and initiatives, betting that degrees built partly or entirely around AI will launch careers and pay off after graduation.

At USC, the Viterbi School of Engineering is launching its inaugural undergraduate artificial intelligence degree. The major is housed in the Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence inside the engineering school. Students will spend four years learning to build the technology and to apply it to fields as far apart as drug discovery, robotics and agriculture.

In Westwood, UCLA is taking a different approach, opening what officials describe as the nation’s first freestanding Department of Digital Humanities. A new bachelor’s degree in digital humanities will teach students how to integrate AI and digital tools into disciplines including sociology, archaeology, history, and the study of race and gender.

These powerhouse Los Angeles institutions join a growing cohort of universities in California and nationwide responding quickly to a technology most undergraduates first encountered in chat bots or social media feeds in middle and high school.

Some campuses — including the new programs at USC and University of San Francisco — are teaching students to build the systems. Others are showing them how to study, and improve upon, what the technology can do for society. Nearly all are requiring ethics courses along the way — as educators continue to grapple with cheating and with fears that heavy AI use will erode critical thinking.

UC Santa Barbara is also launching an AI major this fall. San Diego State started a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence and human responsibility last year, the first of its kind in the California State University system, pairing computer science with courses on AI ethics and on technology and the body.

Not every campus is creating a major. Neither Stanford nor UC Berkeley, the state’s two biggest computer science powers, has created an undergraduate AI degree.

This month, Berkeley announced a new master of artificial intelligence and machine learning two-semester professional degree. Stanford offers artificial intelligence as one of 10 tracks inside its computer science major. Caltech is taking an integrated approach: Rather than create an AI major or minor, the university says it trains students to understand AI and machine learning at a fundamental level so they can apply the tools across many fields.

Three of the nation’s most selective private schools also grant an undergraduate AI degree: Carnegie Mellon, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Northwestern’s degree begins in fall.

Digital humanities is scarcer. No Ivy League school, and no flagship public such as the universities of Michigan or Virginia, grants a digital humanities degree or houses a department. The University of Pennsylvania offers a minor. Princeton and Johns Hopkins run digital humanities research centers.

Delivering what students and employers want

Michael Horn, a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who studies education trends, said the campuses are trying to meet the changing demands of their students and future employers.

“They’re meeting market demand,” Horn said. Universities are getting “a signal from both students and families” that what students learn needs to be relevant, he said.

The two kinds of programs make for different pitches to attract diverse students. At engineering schools, Horn said, an AI major is “signaling, ‘Hey, this isn’t just coding.’” On the humanities side, he said, the idea is broader. “Liberal arts has never been more important in this era of AI — figuring out who are we and what are we meant to do.”

Whether new degrees in AI or digital humanities pay off, or result in concrete careers, is unsettled. Horn said the real risk is that any new educational program now will age badly. By the time a course is written and approved through a typically slow academic review, the teaching could be “out of date or in a different direction from the field,” Horn said.

Learning to build the models

Duncan Deng, a robotics competitor from Beijing, is an incoming AI major at USC. He had planned to study mechanical engineering, but quickly realized that algorithms, not the hardware, decide how robots behave.

Deng conducted an experiment in China applying image recognition to strawberry pollination, work he said could theoretically cut the labor the crop demands. Some indoor farms do not have bees, and growers pay workers to pollinate flowers by hand. AI software can identify each open blossom and direct a robotic arm — or a worker — to release pollen with the precision needed to avoid deformed fruit.

Deng wants to put AI to work on farms and start his own company.

Erik Johnson, Viterbi’s vice dean for academic programs, said USC’s work on AI degrees began with a joint program with the business school. The university “started looking at that about six or seven years ago, well before ChatGPT popped on the scene,” he said.

In that program, students split their coursework roughly half and half between the two schools, Johnson said. The new degree is different, meant to teach students not just to use AI systems but to design and build them.

Johnson said he expects an eventual cohort of about 50 new students each year, and 200 students enrolled in the major at a time.

Teaching the ethics of AI is “absolutely essential,” Johnson said, describing how every student must take a semester-long course on ethics, which is also folded into other major courses.

According to the course syllabus, students examine questions such as: Who is responsible when a self-driving car injures someone or damages property? How does bias enter algorithms used in policing? What is the hidden human labor behind tech systems advertised as automated?

Murali Annavaram, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, likened AI to a calculator. It frees a student from memorizing all formulas, such as pi to the fourth decimal, but not from knowing whether an answer is right, he said. When data come out of a model, students have to ask, “does it make sense? Is this validated?” Employers want engineers who can use AI to move faster while also checking what it produces, Annavaram said.

Bridging AI and humanities at UCLA

At UCLA, the new department is an outgrowth of a longstanding minor. The digital humanities minor launched in 2011, built to handle about 25 students a year. It has since grown into one of the most popular minors at the university with more than 200 students.

Launching a new department is a bigger commitment than the earlier program. Professors are shifting a share of their appointments — not just time but funding — into the major.

Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA Humanities Division, said growing demand justified the new department especially in Los Angeles, a hub where media, tech and the arts meet. She expects the major to eventually enroll 150 to 300 students.

She said the point is not to sell or condemn AI. It is not “woohoo, let’s all learn AI,” she said. Nor is it “oh no … AI is the new dreaded tool.”

The course work can include classes that take a critical and historical approach to AI, said Todd Presner, a professor of European languages and transcultural studies who examines how Holocaust history is presented online. Presner said his classes will show students that AI has a past students are rarely taught.

“We didn’t just get large language models in 2022 out of nowhere,” he said. “There was about seven decades of work that had to happen,” he said, tracing the origins to the late 1940s and early 1950s and studies on the statistics of language.

One of Presner’s class exercises has students use language models to build historical narratives, then manipulate them. The exercise exposes “tremendous possibilities for misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, distortion,” he said.

Another digital humanities faculty member, Wendy Kurtz, said students will get to “work with messy data and think about what we do with gaps.” Kurtz said the aim is to prepare students “not just to navigate and use technology ethically, but to critically shape it as they move into the workforce.”

Cynthia Gong, a 2023 graduate in the minor, saw her studies pay off while working in real estate private equity. One of her UCLA courses covered how to display data so they are readable for people with disabilities. When she learned a colleague could not tell the reds from the greens in a presentation, she stepped in with a colorblind-friendly palette.

Kedaar Sridhar, who finished a computer science degree at UCLA in 2022, said the digital humanities minor was what set him apart in the job market.

During job interviews, he said, recruiters at Microsoft, Google and Uber asked about the handful of courses he took in technology and the humanities. He now runs Grantlytics, a company he founded that uses AI to help nonprofits find funders.

“I remember in one of my interviews, the hiring manager said, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what we do in our role today,’” he said.