Human Skills Can't Be Taught Without Room to Be Human

Some of the country's most influential university leaders shared a stage this week, and their message was clear. In Higher Education Leaders: Colleges Must Adapt to AI and Changing Student Needs, U.S. News reports on a panel at its Future of Higher Education Forum with SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr., Fordham President Tania Tetlow, Virginia Commonwealth University President Michael Rao and NYU President Linda Mills.

They agreed that higher education must adapt to AI and a shifting workforce without losing its core purpose. King described redesigning courses so AI supports learning rather than replacing it. And Tetlow made a compelling case that AI makes a broad education more valuable, because the work that remains will depend on human skills like empathy, emotional intelligence, creativity and leadership.

Mills summed up the moment simply: "The one thing that's predictable is change."

The forum's broader recap reached the same conclusion. Northeastern President Joseph Aoun described his university's "humanics" model, which pairs AI and data literacy with creativity, leadership and cultural agility, and urged higher education to "reaffirm human centrality."

Having worked alongside university leaders for years, I find these the right priorities. But there is a question underneath them that deserves a place at the center of the agenda.

Human Skills Are Not Course Content

If the future belongs to human skills, how do students actually develop them?

Empathy, creativity and leadership are not subjects in the way chemistry or accounting are. You can study them, but you cannot simply be taught them. They grow out of something more personal: knowing who you are, understanding what you bring and having the chance to use it with other people.

In other words, human skills are expressions of identity. A student who has never been invited to discover what makes them distinct will struggle to lead with it, no matter how many courses they complete.

The stakes are real. According to Gallup's July 2026 survey, only 38% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, down from 57% in 2015. Among those with little confidence, a quarter point to poor preparation for the workforce. Families are asking whether college prepares students for what comes next. Human skills are a big part of the answer, but only if campuses are built to develop them.

Who Do You Let Them Be?

In my work on Leadership in the Age of Personalization, one of the five shifts moves organizations from brand identity to individual identities. The question beneath it is: Who do you let them be?

On many campuses, the honest answer is a major, a GPA and a list of completed requirements. Students learn quickly which parts of themselves are rewarded and which are better left out. They optimize for grades, résumés and acceptance. They become very good at fitting the system and much less practiced at bringing their full selves into it.

I call this the edit: the parts of ourselves we learn to leave out in order to fit the room. The edit starts early, and college can either reinforce it or help reverse it.

Standards still matter. Rigor, academic integrity and clear expectations are assets, especially as AI makes shortcuts easier. King's work to redesign how students demonstrate knowledge is exactly the kind of standard worth protecting. The opportunity is to pair those standards with personalization: giving students room to discover what they uniquely bring and to practice using it before they graduate.

Claim It in College

In my work, I describe three doors people walk through in their lives and careers: Claim, Reclaim and Transform. College should be the time to claim, to discover who you are and decide to stand on it.

Too many professionals spend their thirties and forties reclaiming parts of themselves they edited out to succeed. Universities have a rare chance to shorten that journey. When students claim their identity early, the human skills Tetlow describes follow naturally. Empathy comes from knowing yourself well enough to understand others. Creativity comes from trusting your own perspective. Leadership comes from conviction, which I define as the earned capacity to act on what you believe before the outcome is certain.

As I explored in Higher Education Can't Rebuild the Past, institutions that reinvent by choice rather than by crisis will lead the next era. And as I wrote in A Skills-First Economy Needs an Identity-First Foundation, students who know what they solve for find their footing faster.

Three Questions for Presidents and Provosts

Where do our students practice human skills, not just study them? Look for real projects, community work and leadership roles that let students use who they are.

Do our students graduate knowing what they solve for? If they cannot answer in a sentence, their degree describes what they completed, not who they are becoming.

How are we using AI to create more room for human growth? If AI handles more of the routine work, the time it frees should go to mentoring, dialogue and discovery.

The presidents are right that change is the one thing we can predict. What colleges can control is whether students meet that change knowing who they are. Human skills cannot be taught without room to be human.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.