How does teaching Generation Z at university call for different pedagogical approaches? What impact is artificial intelligence having on university life? What are the job prospects for new graduates in Hungary today? These are among the questions answered by Tamás Bokor, Head of the Institute of Marketing and Communication Studies at Corvinus University.
What has been your experience with the current young generation at the university? How do they differ from previous cohorts?
Based on media-use patterns, several generational classifications are in circulation; according to the most widespread approach, those born after 2010 already count as Generation Alpha, and those born before that as Generation Z. The Alphas are not yet of university age, so at present our fresh experience in higher education concerns Generation Z.
We hear a lot that younger people can’t sit through long classes and can’t sustain concentration. This is a real phenomenon, because focused attention span is genuinely shrinking as a byproduct of the attention economy – and not only for this particular generation, but “further up” as well. Ten years ago, you could easily screen a five-minute video in a university lecture hall; today restlessness sets in after a minute and a half. There’s a negative reading of this, but also a positive one: today’s students are far more open to a wide variety of stimuli, more resilient under load, and much more capable of multitasking.
The other common accusation is that they don’t respect authority and struggle to sense the boundaries of formality. But this too has a positive side: someone who doesn’t see authority as a constraint can collaborate far more collegially, participate as a more equal partner in professional and academic work, and share creative ideas more freely. Nowadays we sometimes see collaborations between students and instructors so close that they would have been almost unimaginable ten years ago.
I see the so-called “inhibition to ask questions” (that is, audiences not daring to ask questions during a lecture) as less a generational issue than one rooted in the education system: Western students ask questions just as confidently as their elders do. That’s the product of their own school systems, whereas the Hungarian system has, in many places and for a long time, trained students instead to sit quietly and listen. (It’s rather strange, isn’t it, that in Hungarian the word for ‘student’ literally means ‘listener’…!) That’s why, in our programs at Corvinus, we’re working to bring back oral exams and workshop-style teaching – a shift also justified by the spread of large language models: traditional written assignments make less and less sense, while oral exams and project-based assessments are gradually creeping back into our methods. Generation Z, incidentally, is more active in voicing its own opinions than in asking questions, which from the standpoint of debate culture is in part a clearly favourable development.
At Corvinus, you have a relatively high proportion of international students. Do you see any meaningful differences between domestic and international students?
Across the university, the share of international students is roughly around 30%; in certain year groups, such as our communication program, it reaches as high as 70% in some cohorts. It’s not nationality or region but family and school socialization that determines how communicative someone is: a person from a mixed-nationality family, or from an East Asian school system modeled on British or American lines, switches between cultures and styles more easily; someone who hasn’t had that exposure (say, arriving from a more traditional Central Asian secondary school) is the one who experiences real culture shock here – and in that case collaboration with classmates plays an important role, speaking up in front of others is a key skill to build, and individual opinions get a hearing.
This difference is obviously connected to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: in individualist societies, differing individual opinions are valued; in collectivist ones, they’re seen more as a source of risk. Among East Asian and Central Asian students we often see that they find it harder to voice an individual opinion, but behind the scenes they work with great persistence. The underlying values and professional humility are there – they just show up differently, and in different places, than among their European classmates.
The group dynamics are interesting too: where international students are in the majority, Hungarians can’t form cliques; but where they make up only five to ten percent, exclusion becomes a serious problem (here I’m speaking strictly about cultural separation), because the Hungarian majority slips back into Hungarian more easily. I experienced this myself once, teaching a group with a French majority: they too regularly switched to French, which left me, as the instructor, feeling somewhat excluded. And it’s genuinely not easy to turn into a habit the constant awareness of the linguistic-minority members of the group.
In the age of AI, how do you see the job prospects for young people entering the communication profession?
Corvinus’s mission, as the university itself states it, is to educate the leaders of the future – and a “leader” doesn’t only mean a company executive; it can also mean a team lead, or even someone whose leadership potential, as an employee, will only emerge years down the line. The university offers a great deal of support for development, but only if the student steps up proactively and seizes it: we don’t serve it up on a plate, we assist.
Proactivity is a broad soft skill, valuable everywhere and always: those who practice it typically become employed even before graduating. Those who instead need constant direction bring that same passive habit into the workplace as employees – and they are the ones most easily replaced by some AI-based system.
Starting this September, a one-semester foundational AI course will be mandatory in all our bachelor’s programs, covering not only the technique of using the tools but also ethical and copyright questions, as well as the basics of how AI actually works. This is necessary, among other reasons, so that students avoid amateurish mistakes such as pasting an AI chatbot’s entire response straight into an email to an instructor. Responsible, conscious use of AI is, in essence, a media-literacy and media-awareness competency.
We teach that anyone who treats AI as a tool rather than as their own replacement cannot easily be replaced. We also try to help students recognize and accept that conscious use of AI doesn’t necessarily save time – the time spent on a task simply shifts from routine work to prompting, iteration, and fine-tuning – but it does raise the quality of the work. The bitter pill sweetened: there won’t be less work, just work of a different kind. And the sweetener in the bitter pill: anyone who doesn’t lose the willingness to think and to connect with others will, degree in hand, be guaranteed a job – AI or no AI.
Specifically, how is generative AI reshaping teaching itself: assessment, curriculum, the way the university operates?
The university’s decision-making bodies have deliberately not touched the examination regulations because of the rise of artificial intelligence, since the technology evolves so quickly that by the time a regulation was updated it would already be outdated. Instead, the decision was to develop recommendations for instructors and students on the responsible use of AI tools, though these currently focus mainly on language models, as AI agents don’t yet play a decisive role in them.
Difficult-to-manage dilemmas do arise, however – the future of the thesis being one example. Everyone senses that we should rethink how we measure student knowledge, but beyond the portfolio and the oral exam, we haven’t yet found a worthy alternative. The thesis requirement is mandated by law and by accreditation rules for most programs, so it can’t simply be phased out from one year to the next; that would require changes at the national, legislative level as well.
What we have managed to do: alongside the mandatory AI course for first-year students, the university also offers free training for teaching and research staff as well as administrative colleagues. In 2024, Hungary’s first Vice-Dean for AI position was created here: this leader’s task is to seek answers to the challenges raised by AI and to align the university’s stance on AI with regulatory changes. We’ve also gone through our course syllabi, building into each one how the subject relates to AI and how this technology helped in developing the course – because we too use this technology responsibly and knowledgeably in our own work.
Tamás Bokor PhD habil.
An associate professor and Head of the Institute of Marketing and Communication Studies at Corvinus University of Budapest, and program director of the Hungarian- and English-language Communication and Media Studies bachelor’s programs. As a researcher he works on media theory, digital and media competencies, and communication modalities. Through domestic and international collaborations, he mainly leads communication and digital skills-development training and designs training programs, and he also supervises doctoral students working in these fields.
