Featured academic leader
Dr. Dodjie S. Maestrecampo
President and CEO of Mapúa University, including Mapúa Malayan Colleges Laguna and Mindanao. He leads institutional digital transformation, outcomes-based education, and workforce-ready skills across the Mapúa system.
Rapid-fire takeaway
“The biggest difficulty in digital transformation is making sure that the people in the organization support this transformation. When you do digital transformation, you always focus not just on technology, but on the people, the culture, and continuous support.”
About this conversation
Around the world and across the Philippines, students and parents are asking a sobering question: is a four-year university degree still worth the investment in the age of artificial intelligence?
In this rapid-fire conversation from the C&Education Conversation Series by C&E Adaptive Learning Solutions, Dr. Dodjie S. Maestrecampo, President and CEO of Mapúa University, takes that question head-on. Drawing on Mapúa's work in digital and outcomes-based education, he explains why universities cannot keep responding at a traditional academic pace.
The costliest mistake, he says, is treating digital transformation as a software purchase. The harder work is people, culture, and continuous support. And as AI takes over entry-level tasks, universities have to stop teaching tools that go obsolete before graduation, and start training adaptability as a lifelong meta-skill.
Key takeaways
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1
Address the relevance crisis head-on Parents and learners are asking whether a degree still leads to a career in the AI era. University leaders have to show that the mission still matches how work is changing.
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Shape the future, do not just follow it Universities are often slow. The ones that last will not only adapt to workplace change. They will help shape it, in education and in the country's development.
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Technology is the easy part The biggest failure in digital transformation is buying tools while neglecting people, culture, and ongoing support for faculty and staff.
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AI is taking the entry-level work The jobs graduates used to walk into are being automated. Curriculum has to aim above those baseline tasks, toward higher-order problem solving.
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Adaptability is the meta-skill Specific AI tools will be obsolete before students graduate. Train them to keep learning. That is lifelong learning in practice.
Topics covered
Discussion guide
- The relevance challenge: is a university degree still important in the age of AI?
- Why universities must act fast and help shape workplace change, not only react to it
- The #1 mistake in digital transformation: tools without people, culture, and support
- AI overtaking entry-level roles, and why curriculum has to aim higher
- Adaptability as the meta-skill, and lifelong learning as the habit
Transcript
Read the full interview
00:00 We're facing a problem in terms of relevance. People are now asking, and parents are now asking, if a university degree is still important nowadays given the advent of AI, given the changing work environment. So I think that's the biggest problem that the university president has to address: the relevance of the university, the programs that we offer, and how to make sure that the mission of the university is still relevant.
00:35 Maybe the one that would adapt and the one that would shape the future. I think that will make sure that the university will be successful in the next 5 years. It's always the question that universities are very slow to respond. In fact, they're saying that the work is changing fast and the university is doing nothing about it. So I think it's now time for universities to act fast. Make sure that we are not just adapting to the changes, but we ourselves as a university are actually shaping the changes in the workplace, in education, and how our mission is supporting the development of the country and the region.
01:18 Oh, we learned that the hard way, because we always thought that digital transformation is all about technology: the availability of tools that you can use, the availability of platforms that you can adapt. No. The biggest difficulty actually in digital transformation is making sure that the people in the organization will support this transformation. Otherwise, you will fail. That's the biggest failure that we experienced ourselves. We make sure that when you do digital transformation, you always focus not just on the technology, but also on the people, the culture, and how you will be supporting your people in this transformation.
02:10 Well, right now, we're expecting so much from our graduates. It's extremely difficult now because the entry-level position that is actually targeted for our graduates has now been overtaken by AI. So that means that we'll have to target skills that are beyond or above the entry-level competencies. Now, the problem is that if you teach this to students, more often than not, by the time that they're going to graduate, the technology and the AI tools are already obsolete because it's changing very fast. So I think the biggest and the best way to make sure that our graduates remain successful in the future is that we should train them to be adaptive. Adaptability, I think, is the meta-skill now: making sure that our graduates can adapt to the changes and make themselves ready to learn continuously. This is the idea of lifelong learning. So if they are adaptable and willing to learn continuously, I think they will be very successful in the future.
Continue the conversation
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