The Most Valuable Thing I Teach Has Nothing to Do With Economics
In the age of AI, the educator’s job isn’t getting smaller. It’s getting harder — and more important.
Summer is a great time to rest and evaluate what we do. We’re doing that at Decode Econ, and I’m doing the same thing in my career and teaching.
I just got back from the Conference on Teaching and Research in Economics Education (CTREE). It helped facilitate a lot of reflection. One thing I left with is the power of trust and community in education. This is always an important question but especially in the era of AI, where content is easy to find, but someone still needs to bring it to life. My view is that the role of the educator is more important than ever, not less, as some might argue. But the work we do has to be reshaped.
Here is what I want you to keep in mind:
The content is not the job. The content is the vehicle. The job is helping the person sitting across from you grow.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN EDUCATION
AI has dramatically reduced the cost of accessing information. A student can ask an AI to explain comparative advantage, get a worked example, and move on. That part of the traditional educator’s job, content delivery, is being commodified fast. What is missing is the teaching. AI is not a good teacher, at least not in its current form.
There’s a difference between access to information and teaching, and we’ve started to confuse them. Information tells you what. Teaching shows you how to think, how to sit with a hard problem, how to know when your answer is wrong, how to build the confidence to try again when it is. A language model can give you the answer. It cannot give you the moment of genuine struggle that makes the answer stick. What I have called productive struggle and what I believe makes up good learning.
The education system spent two decades chasing scale. Bigger classes. More online courses. MOOCs that promised to democratize learning for millions. Completion rates on those courses are still sitting below 10%. The content was fine, most of the time excellent.
But most people didn’t finish because finishing requires more than access to information. It requires someone who notices when you’re stuck. Someone who adjusts. Someone who pushes back when you’re wrong and encourages you when you’re close. That is teaching. And it does not scale the way a video lecture does.
The answer is not more technology. It is a return to quality teaching. Those two things are in tension, and we need to stop pretending they’re not. Do not get me wrong, good teaching can happen in large courses, but it requires a whole lot more work. The institutions that figure out how to provide quality teaching will be the ones still standing when the enrollment cliff hits. The ones that don’t will find that no amount of AI integration saves a model built on the wrong premise.
WHAT EMPLOYERS ARE ACTUALLY ASKING FOR — THE BLS DATA
Here’s where the data gets interesting, and where a lot of educational institutions are looking in the wrong direction.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics published its 2024–34 employment projections alongside a new dataset: the top skills required across every major occupation group. I went through all of it. Not one of the top skills is content-focused.
Across all 170 million workers in the U.S. economy, the top three skills employers need are Adaptability, Detail-Oriented, and Interpersonal. Not coding. Not subject-matter expertise. Not technical credentials. The skill that ranks #1 across 22 of 22 major occupation groups- management, healthcare, construction, education, sales, you name it- is Adaptability.
Think about what that means for a moment. The fastest-growing occupations- nurse practitioners, wind turbine technicians, solar installers- all list adaptability and interpersonal skills ahead of technical knowledge. Even computer and mathematical occupations, where you’d expect hard skills to dominate, rank adaptability second, right behind technical computing skills.
The labor market is not asking for more content delivery. It is asking for humans who can navigate uncertainty, read a room, and work with other humans. Those are teachable skills. But they are not taught in a lecture. They are not learned from an AI. They are developed through relationships, through feedback, through being pushed by someone who actually knows you and cares.
The skill employers need most across every sector of the economy — from management to healthcare to construction — is adaptability. You don’t learn that from a textbook. You learn it from someone who challenges you and cares.
This is the argument I wish more deans and provosts were having: if the labor market is pricing human skills above content knowledge, and AI is eating content delivery, what exactly is the justification for large lecture halls, 200-student courses, and transactional faculty relationships? The data doesn’t support that model. The economy doesn’t support it. And increasingly, students aren’t supporting it either; they’re voting with their feet at enrollment time. They are looking for apprenticeships and guides to facilitate their next steps and growth.
Education is getting a bad name because we are refusing to adapt and revisit exactly what we do. We are more than just subject-matter experts; we are educators. Teaching requires more than what we are currently providing.
THE POWER OF COMMUNITY AND TRUST
The future of education relies more on mentorship and trust. Deeper connections. Think coaches and personal trainers, not mass fitness gyms. It requires faculty to invest in their own interpersonal and relationship-building skills. It also means we need to rethink enrollment, class sizes, and most importantly, the business model of education. This will also have implications for equity and who receives quality education. That’s a discussion for another time.
Today, I want to focus on what I mean by quality teaching. I referenced it in a previous post when I discussed the “Commodification of Everything”: education needs to shift back to the local, personalized level.
That means educators need to focus on building trust, a sense of belonging, and connections. This is my area; I have built my career on programs centered on exactly this point. Although I’m an economics professor, I see my role as mentor and coach. When students come to my class for the first time, I think of it as a lifelong relationship, and I invest in it as such. Not every connection will be of that type, but my intentions have to be set. Because intentions impact every other aspect of how you and I show up.
Al-Bahrani, A. (2022). Classroom management and student interaction interventions: Fostering diversity, inclusion, and belonging in the undergraduate economics classroom. The Journal of Economic Education, 53(3), 259–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2022.2075507
If you can’t access the paper and want a copy, email me
THE OFFICE HOURS PROBLEM
This week, my post on office hours blew up, relatively speaking. I heard from educators and administrators. I was hoping to hear from more students, but some chimed in.
My post covered something I hear often:
Students don’t come to office hours; it feels like a waste of time. How do you get students to show up?
If you walk down the halls of Haile College of Business, you know my office hours are loud and packed. Students just hang out; sometimes they linger beyond my scheduled hours, and I have to tell them I need to go.
But it doesn’t start that way. At the beginning of every semester, things start slowly, and I have developed an approach to inviting students that I want to share with you. The method is simple, but you have to genuinely believe that office hours matter and truly want to connect with students. Dr. Jeni Al Bahrani followed my blueprint and improved on it. Her office hours are even better than mine now. Maybe I’ll have her on the podcast to discuss her approach.
Here’s How it Works:
Invite them. Repeatedly. The first two weeks, no one shows up. That’s normal — students aren’t used to being genuinely invited. Keep inviting anyway. I am not beyond sounding desperate. Here is an Instagram post where I creatively express that office hours are underutilized. It worked! I am not saying you have to create your own Instagram plea, but I am saying that your initial invites will seem desperate. You have to be ok with that.
