Learning in the Age of AI and the Value of Interdisciplinary Education
The question is no longer whether a university degree still matters. It is what education is actually for once AI can perform so much of the work graduates were trained to do. In the latest episode of the 3CL Conversation Series, host Patricia Mallia put three possibilities to her guests, Professor Alex Grech, Associate Professor Valerie Visanich, and Brian Azzopardi. Should learning shift towards the harder-to-automate humanities, arts, and social sciences? Should universities fuse the sciences and statistics with those subjects for a broader scope? Or should students be free to build their own degree from whatever interests them?
Education has never done only one thing
The panel resisted the temptation to choose. Education has always served several goals at once, and some of them compete. A university makes citizens of us, transmits cultural values worth holding for their own sake, and still has to help people find work. The arts and the sciences are best treated as a co-production, each supplying what the other lacks. The interesting question is one of balance: how to hold these goals together in a world that keeps moving.
The China example
China has cut some 12,000 courses in the humanities and social sciences to prioritise AI, robotics, and data science. The industry voice on the panel, well acquainted with the Chinese market, was firm that Malta should not follow. We need the humanities very much, ran the argument, and creativity and curiosity are not their private property. AI is itself a feat of creative engineering. Darwin’s voyage was an act of curiosity and Einstein’s relativity a creative leap. The sciences and the humanities are both creative, and both worth sustaining. China has also stopped publishing its youth unemployment figures, with perhaps a third of its young people idle, which casts the course cuts in a different light.
Interdisciplinary, done well
Combining disciplines only works if it is done properly. One proposal was to blow up the institutionalised silos that stop a sociologist learning alongside a philosopher, replacing them with a mix and match degree where a student assembles the pieces they need. A sharper caution came from the industry side. The last thing anyone needs is “physics for poets,” a curriculum a mile wide and an inch deep. Breadth of knowledge is not the same as the ability to understand, to identify what matters, or to solve a complex problem. What matters is depth of domain married to something generalisable: maths, logic, and causal inference on one side, epistemology and history on the other. Engineers would gain from knowing the contingent history of their own field, since science tends to advance one gatekeeper at a time.
The Maltese classroom
Students in Malta often hold jobs at eighteen and turn up to a lecture as though doing the lecturer a favour, there for the credential, the funny hat earned after three years of a system determined that everyone eventually passes. Government stipends tilt towards STEM, yet students have not moved towards them. The classroom, across thirty-three subjects and four faculties, has barely changed in 150 years. Over all of it sits the attention economy, which has hardwired a generation for the scroll and leaves academics performing tricks to hold a room awake at eight in the morning.
What employers actually look for
From the employer’s chair, a degree by itself says little, roughly the equivalent of checking for a heartbeat. What counts is a real conversation: whether a candidate understands their concepts and can apply them, whether they show adaptability, curiosity, and mastery. AI automates tasks, not jobs. The prize is the person who can look at a plausible AI output and refuse it, seeing past the syntax to whether anything grounds it. Even the most capable models drift after a couple of turns, because the system is fluent yet ungrounded, and catching that is a distinct kind of thinking.
Finding the balance
The strongest answer to what a university is for now was that it should be about the present: debates, conversations, and lifelong learning, with the real risk being a generation alpha that offloads literacy itself to an interface. The skills that matter most are also the hardest to build under the attention economy, namely problem-solving, critical thinking, and the confidence to say what you actually believe. No one offered a formula, and that is rather the point. The balance between forming citizens and equipping workers will not be legislated into being. It will take the bravery to rethink assessment, dismantle the silos, and treat learning as something that never quite finishes.
