The Industrial Education Model Just Started Its Collapse — And It's Faculty-Led
Miami University in Ohio just did something worth paying attention to, and the headline undersells it.
Every undergraduate major will integrate artificial intelligence into its curriculum by the 2027-2028 academic year. Not an AI elective. Not a bolt-on tech literacy course. Every major — Accountancy, Anthropology, Art, Chemistry, Speech Pathology, Physics, Statistics, all of it — gets AI competencies built into the discipline itself, taught by the faculty who already teach the discipline.
The rollout is staged. Thirteen departments start this fall, covering roughly 4,925 students. A second cohort of 15 departments and nearly 11,000 students follows in 2027. The final cohort of 21 departments and almost 19,000 students finishes by 2027-2028. By the time it's done, the entire undergraduate population has gone through it.
This isn't a side program. It grew out of Miami's MiamiTHRIVE strategic plan and got folded into a broader overhaul — the Miami Integrated Learning Experience, or MILE, which is replacing the university's general education framework entirely. AI in the Majors isn't an add-on to how Miami teaches. It's becoming how Miami teaches.
WHY THIS IS THE RIGHT MODEL
Here's the detail that matters most: this isn't centralized. There's no single "Introduction to AI" course everyone takes and checks a box. Each department chose how AI shows up in its own curriculum, taught by its own faculty, built around its own discipline's actual practice.
The Speech Pathology and Audiology department's introductory course builds foundational awareness of AI in communication disorders. Their senior-level clinic course teaches accountability for AI use in documenting patient treatment sessions. That's not the same AI training a Chemistry major gets, and it shouldn't be. A one-size-fits-all AI mandate would have been the wrong move, and to their credit, Miami didn't do that.
That's the difference between institutions performing AI adoption and institutions actually doing it. Performance looks like an AI ethics seminar bolted onto a curriculum that hasn't otherwise changed. Doing it looks like a department chair saying "our senior clinic students need to know how to use AI responsibly for patient documentation," because that's the actual job they're training students for.
THIS IS THE COLLAPSE, HAPPENING IN REAL TIME
For a while now, the argument has been that the industrial model of education — standardized curriculum, credentialing based on seat time, degrees as a proxy for competence rather than a measure of it — was heading toward a breaking point. Not because education stopped mattering, but because the world the model was built for stopped existing.
The industrial education model was built for a world where knowledge was scarce, access to information was the bottleneck, and a degree signaled "this person spent four years absorbing what experts know." AI breaks that premise from multiple directions at once. Information access is no longer scarce. The tools that used to require years of training to operate are now operable by anyone who can ask the right question. And the jobs graduates are heading into are being restructured by the same technology in real time, often faster than the curriculum can be updated through normal channels.
Miami's response is instructive because it's not trying to preserve the old model with an AI patch. It's rebuilding the curriculum discipline by discipline, with the people who actually understand each discipline's relationship to the technology, on a real timeline with real numbers attached — 34,856 students moving through this by 2028.
That's not a pilot program. That's an institution rewiring itself while it's still running.
THE PART EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD BE WATCHING
The students getting quoted in the coverage are saying the right things, and it's worth noticing that they are. One junior called AI "a tool to enhance our studies, not something that just spits out answers," and said the real skill is building judgment at a high level. A senior talked about needing "more real experience, risk, and accountability" and said the actual bottleneck isn't access to AI — it's learning to ask the right questions and think across disciplines.
That's the competency that survives whatever comes next. Not "knows how to prompt a model." Judgment. The ability to evaluate an AI's output critically, know when it's wrong, know when the question itself is wrong, and take accountability for what gets shipped with your name on it. That's a harder thing to teach than a tool, and it's exactly what a faculty-led, discipline-specific rollout is positioned to teach that a generic AI literacy module isn't.
WHAT THIS MEANS BEYOND ONE UNIVERSITY
Miami isn't the first school to touch AI in its curriculum, but doing it as a universal, structural, faculty-owned requirement across every single major — with a published multi-year rollout and specific enrollment numbers attached to each cohort — is a different level of commitment than most institutions have made publicly.
If this works, it becomes the template other universities either adopt or get pressured to explain why they haven't. If it doesn't work — if the rollout stalls, if faculty buy-in doesn't hold, if the competencies end up shallow — it's still useful data on what the failure modes look like at scale.
Either way, this is the collapse of the industrial education model happening the way these things actually happen: not with an announcement that the old model is dead, but with institutions quietly rebuilding around a different set of assumptions while most of the public debate is still arguing about whether AI belongs in the classroom at all.
It belongs in the classroom the way electricity belonged in the factory. The question was never whether. It was how fast, and who figures out the "how" before everyone else is forced to copy it.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.
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