Local colleges are preparing students to enter a job market increasingly transformed by artificial intelligence.
“We think about not just like the bits and bytes and the algorithms and things like that, but we're also thinking about the human factor,” said Jeffrey Allan, director of the Institute for Responsible Technology at Nazareth University.
How AI can affect individuals, and the risks, power and ethical considerations of the technology, is a recurring theme in curriculum at Nazareth as well as at Rochester Institute of Technology and University of Rochester.
The coursework has evolved over years, even decades, but taken on greater urgency of late as college students are rethinking and even changing their majors and enrollment decisions because of how AI is or might impact particular job markets and industries. The newly released Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education Study found one in six students changed their field of study based on AI.
Whether it means learning how to work with AI agents as coworkers and liaisons, or building large language models with a mess of data, local education leaders say students need the skills to navigate a workforce and economy increasing shaped by artificial intelligence.
Nazareth began offering AI coursework in 2020 and now has four programs: ethical data science; technology, artificial intelligence and society; and two business courses, one at the master’s level.
“We think about not just like the bits and bytes and the algorithms and things like that, but we're also thinking about the human factor,” Allan said.
“The folks who are implementing this now are oftentimes technical people,” he said. “They might come out of computer science backgrounds, data science backgrounds, areas like that where they don't do a ton of training on the ethical considerations.”
Many students go on to pursue jobs at the intersection of business and technology, Allan said, where they’ll need to be able to successfully navigate challenges and mitigate harm.
“There's many documented cases out there of biased data being used to make bad decisions,” Allan said, “whether it be denying health care coverage or doing other things like denying loans to people who come from traditionally underserved backgrounds like that, not because of anything they did, but because they were part of a particular demographic, and the data used to train the AI was biased.”
Another nuanced intersection of ethics, law, and computation is unfolding at Rochester Institute of Technology, where a new bachelor's in science program in artificial intelligence rolls out this fall.
“We have a specific course called AI and law that looks at ... legal responsibilities that AI may have to society,” said Michael Yacci, senior associate dean of the College of Computing and Information Sciences. “But peppered in ... at least four or five core courses are topics on bias and ethics, sustainability. That came up a lot as we were developing the curriculum.”
Yacci helps develop curriculum at RIT, where he’s worked as a faculty member and then administrator for about 40 years. The newly announced bachelor’s degree was partly his doing.
RIT President William Sanders, who came to RIT last summer from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, gave it a nod, Yacci said.
“They had one of the earliest artificial intelligence bachelor's degrees, Yacci said of Carnegie Mellon. “So as soon as he came here, he was supportive of the effort.”
While the landscape of AI is rapidly changing, Yacci said the basic principles are the same.
“One layer down from what the public sees, things don't change quite as quickly,” Yacci said. “The tools and the products change very, very quickly. They come and go, and they will come and go in the next 5 to 10 years. There will be companies that start that seem to be infallible and then will fail for one reason or the other. ... But the underlying algorithms, systems, theories, models, underlying designs, change a little bit slower.”
With AI, there’s plenty of crossover into other fields as well, he said, especially when it comes to addressing high energy demands of AI data centers.
“I do believe that other fields will also contribute,” Yacci said. “It won't just be, you know, the AI computer programmers who will be figuring this out. ... Energy engineering, civil engineering, a lot of that will also help us solve some of the problems over time.”
