Chicago tests in its community colleges which jobs will survive AI: a first degree and a national commission

By GovTech · September 23, 2026.

City Colleges of Chicago, the largest community college system in Illinois (public two-year higher education centers geared toward direct entry into the workforce or as a bridge to a four-year university), announced in August its first for-credit degree in artificial intelligence. The program began this fall at Wilbur Wright College, in the Dunning neighborhood, with in-person and virtual classes, according to Ayoka Noelle Mota Samuels, the institution's associate vice chancellor for tech sector strategy, in remarks reported by the Daily Southtown and republished by GovTech.

It is not an isolated move. Wright College already offered an advanced certificate in artificial intelligence and machine learning development, and Kennedy-King College, in Chicago's Englewood, trains students in information technology through its Tech Launchpad initiative. The new degree adds to a catalog that, according to Mota Samuels, seeks to ensure students "have the skills and abilities needed to be more employable."

On the city's outskirts, Moraine Valley Community College (Palos Hills) is making a different but complementary move: its vice president of academic affairs, Ryen Nagle, has been appointed to the Commission on the Future of Work of the American Association of Community Colleges, an organization that represents and advocates for these institutions across the United States. His term runs from July 2026 to June 2029, and the commission will meet for the first time in November with a specific charge: to map which AI tools employers actually demand in each field —from cybersecurity to IT— and how to give faculty and students access to them before they reach the labor market.

Nagle wants the conversation to go beyond the user manual. He wants the commission to address the "human side" of work as well: what role AI plays in people's sense of purpose, not just in their productivity. It is an idea that connects, though Nagle does not frame it in these terms, with the underlying argument we hold at Zendoric: if AI frees up time and generates abundance, the question that matters in the long run is not how much a person produces, but what they choose to do with their talent when necessity no longer dictates it.

Moraine Valley psychology professor Laura Lauzen-Collins is already bringing that debate into the classroom. Her message to students is not to avoid AI tools, but to master the fundamentals of their discipline well enough to detect when the tool gets it wrong. And it is she who offers the most honest warning in the whole article: anyone preparing for a career that will be spent entirely behind a computer faces greater risk as AI keeps improving. She neither softens it nor dramatizes it: she openly admits that nobody knows for certain what is going to happen.

Our take: the relevant fact in this piece is not technical, it is institutional. While the debate over AI's impact on employment is often waged in consultancy reports and lab announcements, it is community colleges —the cheapest and fastest gateway to the labor market in the United States— that have to decide, curriculum by curriculum, which profiles still lead somewhere. It fits with what we have already seen sector by sector: in education, those who orchestrate AI as a tool win and those who merely delivered content by rote lose, and here the pattern repeats in the technical and administrative training these centers produce en masse.

The article provides no employability or enrollment figures for the new degree at Wright College, and it is best not to fill that gap with borrowed optimism: it is too early to know whether these programs place their graduates or simply prepare them for an exam whose questions change every semester. But the underlying instinct —teaching students to use AI without ceasing to teach them to doubt it, and doing so while the industry collectively defines what it wants— is exactly the kind of hard, well-aimed transition we defend at Zendoric: painful for anyone who built a career around a task software already does, but necessary to reach the stage where work becomes a choice again and not an obligation.