In the 1900s, U.S. higher education imported knowledge and best practices from European universities in order to build a national educational and research industry that is now the envy of the world. It is no surprise that U.S. universities are currently recognized as the best with more top-100 universities than any other country. And of course U.S. universities improved upon the European model, for example, by creating the liberal arts curriculum in the early 20th century, which quickly became a defining feature of the American university education. In addition, the creation of the National Science Foundation after WWII fueled a post-war research program that made the United States the dominant global leader in research.
The unparalleled stature that top US research universities hold in the world today is predicated on their ability to drive discovery and innovation, but this ability to create a high proportion of the most important research discoveries does not extend to cultivating an inventive mindset as an intentional part of the undergraduate educational experience. And it is this trend that is leading our universities to neglect fulfilling the full promise of US undergraduate education today.
In pursuit of excellence and global recognition, American universities have inadvertently failed to build into
their learning environments the methods and practices that encourage inventive problem- solving from the moment a student walks onto campus. As a result, students graduate after fulfilling the requirements for a bachelor’s degree, but the university’s commitment to building an inventive mindset in all students is nowhere to be found in graduation requirements.
The full educational responsibility of the nation’s universities is to prepare students not only to occupy the workplace as they find it upon graduation but to lead change by making the discoveries that will drive transformation, lead to new industries, and develop elegant solutions to grand challenges. In this task, American universities are clearly falling short of optimal performance.
This oversight is creating a particularly acute crisis in the age of our AI enabled workforce. There is broad consensus across the business sector that employers value creativity as the single most important skill needed in the era of AI. For example, the IBM Institute for Business Value report “The CEO’s Guide to Generative AI” concludes that ‘creativity is the musthave generative AI skill,’ and the World Economic Forum, relying upon Consumer Vision’s 2035 report, concluded that nurturing an inventive workforce adept at creative problem solving is crucial in our future driven by AI technologies.
I spoke at this year’s WEF in Davos, where, once again, the focus was on AI’s impact on every aspect of the future of work and wellbeing, across all industry sectors. The shared optimism about AI’s potential to transform work, accelerate research discoveries, and revolutionize society was only equaled by the concern about finding a workforce inventive enough to make the most of AI—to drive AI rather than be driven by it.
If the U.S. wants to continue to be the global leader in innovation, as well as the dominant player in the global economy, our universities need to commit to bringing creative capability building into the center of the undergraduate curriculum. Invent Ed provides simple examples of how university leaders, faculty, and students can do so, and it offers national and state political leaders a roadmap for partnering with universities in this shared project.
In short, over the last three years, the quickly accelerating power of AI to transform how we work and live, combined with U.S. universities’ failure to intentionally educate students to develop creative as well as critical thinking skills, has led to a crisis not only in our educational system but for our country as a whole. University, political and industry leaders need to recognize the magnitude of the crisis and work together. But fundamentally, universities need to take ownership of this process and take responsibility for building an education that will continue to be the envy of the world in the era of AI.
© 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
