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Forbes
07-07-2025
- Health
- Forbes
In The AI Revolution, Medical Schools Are Falling Behind U.S. Colleges
Instead of learning to use the tools that will define tomorrow's care, med school students still ... More memorize biochemistry pathways and obscure facts they'll never use in clinical practice. getty At Duke University, every matriculating student now has access to a custom AI assistant. At Cal State, more than 460,000 students across 23 campuses are equipped with a 24/7 ChatGPT toolkit upon enrollment. These aren't pilot programs. They're part of a full-scale transformation in the way higher education is preparing students for their future careers. Meanwhile, most U.S. medical schools remain stuck in the last century. Instead of learning to use the tools that will define tomorrow's care, students still memorize biochemistry pathways and are tested on obscure facts they'll never use in clinical practice. Following the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, college deans and department chairs responded with caution. They worried about plagiarism, declining writing skills and an overreliance on artificial intelligence. Since, most have since shifted from risk avoidance to opportunity. Today, universities are integrating generative AI into tutoring, test prep, research, advising and more. Many now expect faculty to teach AI fluency across each of their disciplines. Medical education hasn't kept pace. A recent Educause study found that only 14% of medical schools have developed a formal GenAI curriculum compared with 60% of undergraduate programs. Most medical school leaders continue to view large language models as administrative tools rather than clinical ones. That's a mistake. By the time today's students become physicians, they'll carry in their pockets a tool more powerful and important to clinical practice than the stethoscope ever was. In seconds, GenAI can surface every relevant medical study, guideline and precedent. And soon, it will allow patients to accurately evaluate symptoms and understand treatment options before they ever set foot in a clinic. Used wisely, generative AI will help prevent the 400,000 deaths each year from diagnostic errors, the 250,000 from preventable medical mistakes and the 500,000 from poorly controlled chronic diseases. Despite GenAI's potential to transform healthcare, most medical schools still train students for the medicine of the past. They prioritize memorization over critical thinking and practical application. They reward students for recalling facts rather than for effectively accessing and applying knowledge with tools like ChatGPT or Claude. Historically, physicians were judged by how well they told patients what to do. In the future, success will be measured by medical outcomes. Specifically, how well clinicians and AI-empowered patients work together to prevent disease, manage symptoms and save lives. The outdated approach to medical education persists beyond university classrooms. Internship and residency programs still prioritize applicants for their memorization-based test scores. Attending physicians routinely quiz trainees on arcane facts instead of engaging in practical problem-solving. This practice, known as 'pimping,' is a relic of 20th-century training. Few industries outside of medicine would tolerate it. How To Modernize Medical Training Generative AI is advancing at breakneck speed, with capabilities doubling roughly every year. In five years, medical students will enter clinical practice with GenAI tools 32 times more powerful than today's models — yet few will have received formal training on how to use them effectively. Modernizing medical education must begin with faculty. Most students entering medical school in 2025 will already be comfortable using generative AI, having leaned on it during college and while preparing for the MCAT exam. But most professors will be playing catch-up. To close this gap, medical schools should implement a faculty education program before the new academic year. Instructors unfamiliar with GenAI would learn how to write effective prompts, evaluate the reliability of answers and ask clarifying questions to refine outputs. Once all faculty have a foundational understanding of the new applications, the real work begins. They need to create a curriculum for the coming semester. Here are two examples of what that might look like for third-year students on a clinical rotation: Exercise 1: Differential diagnosis with GenAI as a co-physician In a small-group session, students would receive a clinical vignette: A 43-year-old woman presents with fatigue, joint pain and a facial rash that worsens with sun exposure. Students would begin by first drafting their own differential diagnosis. Then, they would prompt a generative AI tool to generate its own list of potential diagnoses. Next, participants would engage the AI in a back-and-forth dialogue, questioning its reasoning, testing assumptions and challenging conclusions. To reinforce clinical reasoning in collaboration with GenAI, each student would also submit written responses to these questions: Is lupus or dermatomyositis the more likely diagnosis, and why? What additional data would help rule out Lyme disease? Cite three high-quality studies that support your diagnostic ranking. The goal of this type of exercise isn't to identify a 'right' answer but to strengthen analytical thinking, expose cognitive biases and teach students how to use GenAI to broaden diagnostic reasoning (not limit it). By the end of the exercise, students should be more confident using AI tools to support — but not replace — their own clinical judgment. Exercise 2: Managing chronic disease with GenAI support In this scenario, students imagine seeing a 45-year-old man during a routine checkup. The patient has no prior medical problems but, on physical exam, his blood pressure measures 140/100. Students begin by walking through the clinical reasoning process: What questions would they ask during the patient history? Which physical findings would be most concerning? What laboratory tests would they order? What initial treatment and follow-up plan would they recommend? Then, students enter the same case into a generative AI tool and evaluate its recommendations. Where do the AI's suggestions align with their own? Where do they differ (and why)? Finally, students are tasked with designing a patient-centered care plan that incorporates medical therapy, lifestyle changes and as many GenAI-powered applications as possible. These might include analyzing data from at-home blood pressure monitors, customizing educational guidance or enabling patients to actively manage their chronic diseases between visits. Training Physicians To Lead, Not Follow Colleges understand that preparing students for tomorrow's careers means teaching them how to apply generative AI in their chosen fields. Medicine must do the same. Soon, physicians will carry in their pocket the entirety of medical knowledge, instantly accessible and continuously updated. They'll consult AI agents trained on the latest research and clinical guidelines. And their patients, empowered by GenAI, will arrive not with random Google results, but with a working understanding of their symptoms, potential diagnoses and evidence-based treatment options. If medical schools don't prepare students to lead clinical application of these tools, for-profit companies and private equity firms will focus solely on ways to lower costs, even when these approaches compromise medical care. As medical school deans prepare to welcome the class of 2029, they must ask themselves: Are we training students to practice yesterday's medicine or to lead tomorrow's?
Forbes
16-04-2025
- General
- Forbes
Students Are Backing Away From Online College
View of large group of students as they take an exam in a lecture hall at the University of ... More Maryland, College Park, Maryland, January 28, 1964. (Photo by Warren K Leffler/US News & World Report Collection/PhotoQuest/Getty Images) In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to squeeze and reshape higher education, I wrote that the experiment we were all about to endure might be worth it because it would expose the weakness of trying to teach and learn online. Turns out, I may have been right about that. And wrong. I was wrong because I thought that we'd get answers on the grand exodus to online instruction 'in a year or two maybe.' It's been five. I was also wrong in that I thought a push against the quality, cost, and time sink of online college programs would come from college leaders. I thought they'd look at the data, consider their own largely terrible experiences, and take a step back. Back then, I wrote, 'this virus crisis will force an untold number of college leaders to try going online and most will hate it. They will probably determine it's not worth it. They will talk to one another and write and share reviews. Schools will likely learn in a matter of months what otherwise may have taken years of earned learning to realize – that taking a college course online is not the benefit it can appear to be.' By and large, college leaders didn't absorb that lesson from going online for Covid. I've been surprised that despite the terrible reviews and costly legal consequences, colleges have pushed ahead with online programs. They have even, in some places, expanded online programs in quantity beyond the pace of overall growth, causing individual program sizes to shrink. Nothing, it seems will stop college leaders from chasing an extra dollar. In retrospect, I should have known better than to think that colleges would learn their own lessons and react accordingly. Still, I was right about the bigger picture – that experiencing online education during the pandemic would turn people away from it. I was right about cause and consequence, just had the audience wrong. It's students who are growing to dislike online education. That's according to the recently released 2025 Students and Technology Report from Educause, a nonprofit association that aims to advance higher education through the use of IT. The new report says, 'we continue to see shifts in modality preferences, with increasing numbers of students favoring on-site experiences, despite the post-pandemic expansion of online and hybrid learning.' When compared to their 2023 report, the new version found that, 'Students increasingly prefer on-site course activities. Across categories of synchronous learning activities, students showed an increased personal preference for on-site course modalities.' Educause broke that down a little too. Students strongly preferred some specific kinds of learning activities, lab work for example, be in-person instead of online – 75% to 19%. That's little surprise. But students prefer in-class, on-campus settings for lectures too. The report shows that, 'Similarly, 64% percent of respondents noted that they prefer on-site lectures (an 8-point jump from 2023), while 30% preferred online instructor lectures (a 9-point decrease).' That's a 17-point swing in two years in favor of in-class instruction and a better than two-to-one preference. Only in research and taking exams did students prefer online options. But even here, the trend is in favor of in-class opportunities. 'Research and exams, which were the only two course activities for which more students indicated a preference for online engagement in 2023 and 2025, also saw a shift: Although the preference for on-site research only increased by 2 points in 2025, reported preference for online research decreased by 7 points. When asked about exam preferences, 46% of students indicated that they prefer to complete exams on-site (a 6-point increase from 2023), while 48% preferred online exams (a 5-point decrease),' the survey found. To summarize, for doing research, on-site preference moved 9 points. For exams, the preference is about even – 46% to 48% – but has also moved 11% in the in-person direction. The survey also found strong student preferences in favor of on-site, in-person education for group activities, student presentations, class discussions, office hours with instructor, and peer/tutoring meetings. In other words, just about everything. All those, like the other examples, are moving in the direction of in-person learning. And they are not subtle indicators. As Educause put it in the report, 'Taken together, these shifts in course modality preferences may indicate that students are increasingly interested in on-site experiences, especially for interactive, hands-on assignments and activities. It is interesting that students also indicated an increased preference for on-site engagement in traditionally individualized course activities, such as conducting research and taking exams.' The message is clear. But it will be interesting to see whether school leaders get it. Learning my lesson, this time, I'm not going to bet they do. Even in the report's introduction, Educause says, 'we see institutions continuing to integrate digital tools and technologies and flexible learning formats.' It will also be interesting to see whether all the rhetoric about meeting students where they are, and treating the student as customer, and letting students decide how they want to learn – whether all that will hold true when private education technology companies can't make a profit based on the answers.
