Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?
A few weeks ago, while I was dealing with taxes, it occurred to me that the money my wife and I were putting away in a college fund for our children might be better used somewhere else. This wasn’t a novel musing, but it felt particularly pressing as I watched my account balance go down, a portion of its resources funnelled into something that can’t be touched for at least the next nine years. When my nine-year-old daughter graduates from high school, in 2035, I asked myself, will the landscape of higher education look the way that it does now? Will it still be as expensive? Do I actually need to squirrel away money for tuition, or should I just put what I have into a stable-growth account so that later I can cash it in to buy her an apartment, an iPhone, and whatever other tools she needs to deal with a world governed by our coming A.I. robot masters? (Maybe a machete and a copy of “My Side of the Mountain.”)
For the next few weeks of this column, I will dig into questions about the viability of the American university system. The pressures on higher education seem extraordinary, even to someone like me, who is generally convinced that real change is rare, perhaps especially when it comes to America’s tried-and-tested system for replicating its élites. Private and state universities have had their funding cut by the Trump Administration, professors report rampant A.I.-assisted cheating by their students, and seemingly every week brings a new report about how nearly all entry-level white-collar jobs—whether they’re in consulting, insurance, finance, management, or the sciences—will be replaced by friendly chatbots that may or may not someday destroy the world. A recent survey found that more than one in four college students in America believe that their tuition was not a good investment, at a time when more than forty per cent of college graduates between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven hold a job that does not require a college degree. According to Pew, seven in ten Americans think that the “higher education system in the United States is going in the wrong direction,” with most respondents expressing concern about the high price of tuition. With all this happening, should I continue to contribute to my children’s 529s?
The short, easy, and most likely correct answer is yes—I should assume that, when my nine-year-old reaches high school, she will go through the familiar gantlet of academic competition and spend much of her time building a résumé for college-admissions committees. I should also assume that the cost of whatever college she attends will not come down during the next nine years. The university system in America has survived worse than A.I.: pandemics, wars, campus unrest, massive open online courses, the internet. If colleges seem impervious to revolutions in information technology, is it possibly because their actual appeal has less to do with the transfer of knowledge than their administrators might want to admit? As the economist Bryan Caplan has observed, “The main function of education is not to teach useful skills (or even useless skills), but to certify students’ employability. By and large, the reason our customers are on campus is to credibly show, or ‘signal,’ their intelligence, work ethic, and sheer conformity.” As long as college remains a way for upwardly mobile kids to stand out from one another, and as long as employers believe that a better college degree is a sign of a better potential worker, the American university system should survive, even if teaching methods change.
Nonetheless, it seems a bit odd that, when it comes to predictions about our A.I. future, which typically range from friendly revolution to organ-harvesting apocalypse, declarations about higher education have been relatively mellow. Granted, many of the commentators offering these predictions are employed by traditional universities, and might tend to believe more strongly in the enduring relevance of the academy. There are exceptions: the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman has suggested that his own kid might not attend college; Howard Gardner, a psychology professor at Harvard, recently surmised that A.I. will significantly shorten the time children need to be in school. But the consensus is that college will still exist in ten or twenty or thirty years, a forecast that, for a parent of two staring down future tuition bills, is a bit disappointing.
Even some pundits who are open to A.I. as a major development agree that higher education isn’t going anywhere. Tyler Cowen, for instance, Caplan’s colleague in George Mason University’s economics department, has argued that more instruction time should be devoted to A.I. in American classrooms—and mused that A.I. might help students better understand the Odyssey—but maintains that the traditional subjects and pedagogy of higher education should largely remain intact. Sal Khan, the founder of the free online-learning service Khan Academy, has launched a partnership with TED and the Educational Testing Service called the Khan TED Institute, which aims to provide a “world-class higher education accessible throughout the world at a radically low cost.” (Around ten thousand dollars, he says; details are a bit thin. The institute’s website is filled with a lot of pablum about opening “new pathways into the AI economy where skill-based measurement becomes the critical link between learning and livelihood.”) But Khan doesn’t see his latest venture as a wholesale replacement for the brick-and-mortar university; he has described it as a reasonably priced alternative that can keep pace with a world that is changing “very, very fast.” (Khan also believes that tutoring, which is both effective and expensive, could ultimately be done by A.I. agents, making one-on-one instruction more accessible, though one of the parties would be a robot.) Scott Galloway, a professor, a popular podcaster, and perhaps the most influential public voice on the value of a university education, has declared that “this narrative that A.I. is going to destroy higher education is such ridiculous bullshit.” Higher education could drastically change soon, he says, if tech giants start partnering with prestigious universities to expand their enrollment through online degrees, thereby effectively shutting down hundreds of smaller, private colleges. But those changes would be driven by supply and demand, rather than a fundamental shift in opinion about whether it’s still good to go somewhere, in person, to learn things.
I don’t believe that these thinkers are necessarily wrong to dismiss the idea that enormous changes will come to higher education during the next two decades; as long as Americans want to distinguish their children from other children, the hierarchical college system will prevail. But these defenses of higher education feel almost performatively cynical, especially for an institution that has traditionally draped itself in high-flown sentiment about the pursuit of truth and the shaping of young minds, or whatever. (The motto splashed on all the brochures for my alma mater was “The Best Four Years of Your Life.” They were not, but I recall genuinely believing that they would be.) I also wonder if the skeptics might be overstating the power of inertia, especially at a time of extremely low public trust in all institutions, not just those of higher education. In the world of prestige media that includes The New Yorker, for example, it has long been much harder to break in without an Ivy League degree, and that remains the case; but the draw of working at a legacy-media institution has also never been weaker. Would a fifteen-year-old hellbent on a journalism career be best served by working himself to the bone both academically and extracurricularly to get into Harvard, or should he just start a Twitch stream and get to work?
Reasonable people can disagree about that. But I feel certain that most of the ambitious fifteen-year-olds who already know what they want to do these days would choose the self-made option—particularly if they come from families that can’t easily afford college tuition, let alone thousands of dollars in supplemental application prep. A.I. might not factor directly into such a decision for an aspiring reporter, but the already impressive abilities of large language models to hone research, approximate historical knowledge, and target potential sources would soften any disadvantages that this hypothetical student might suffer from skipping college. Perhaps this ambitious teen would be more susceptible to the algorithmic and predictive gutters of these machines—when the A.I. companies set the guidelines for what the L.L.M. says back, you will always be receiving their version of the truth—but professors and college curricula also have their gutters, some of which are far deeper than what you’ll find at the bottom of Claude.
Can college really be laid so bare and survive? Will the roughly sixty per cent of recent high-school graduates who invest in higher education still see the value of it if they come to believe—rightly or wrongly—that the whole knowledge part of college has been replaced by an agreeable chatbot? Our hypothetical ambitious fifteen-year-old is exceptional, of course, and certainly not the bellwether for today’s disaffection about higher education. Few teen-agers know what they want to do in life, and it’s not always good for kids of that age to limit their choices. What I find concerning, however, is that so many other white-collar industries and professions—finance, consulting, the law—are even more institutional in their thinking than the media is. They, too, are held in low esteem by the public, and that decline in trust has frayed the traditional line of thinking that you should join one storied institution, a university, to later work at another. If we agree that college primarily serves a credentialling process that stamps select young people as worthy of work, and, if we agree that A.I. helps to expose it as such, might we not conclude that, at some point, people will collectively stop paying into the system, or will start seeking out other, less expensive credentials?
I do not think that A.I. will singlehandedly destroy college. But I do think that it will accelerate an already growing disillusionment with higher education. In 2013, seventy-four per cent of eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds polled by Gallup said that a college education was “very important.” By 2019, three years before the public adoption of ChatGPT, that number had dropped to forty-three per cent; it fell again, in 2025, to thirty-five per cent, a decline that represented the steepest drop among all age groups that were surveyed. This drop might level off at some point, simply because most things regress to previous norms. But I cannot come up with any reason why the trend would reverse direction without radical changes to cost and access at the types of élite colleges that facilitate class mobility. What seems likely is a winner-takes-all scenario, in which the élite schools and flagship state universities survive on account of their cultural, financial, and reputational advantages, while other schools die out, leading to either a huge expansion in enrollment among the survivors (unlikely) or a steady drop in the number of young people who seek out a four-year degree. That may be a good outcome, but the gospel that I grew up with—the idea that everyone should get a college education not only for upward mobility but also to explore reading, thinking, and writing for their own sake—will be dead.
The future of college as we know it may rely on the ability of people who have a stake in the credentialling economy to convince the youth that there is still value in classroom instruction, in writing papers without A.I. assistance, in talking to imperfect humans about misshapen ideas. But they will be making this case to a generation of students who learned many things—skateboarding, the piano, cooking—from YouTube, and who have been able to ask Claude to assist them in every academic endeavor they’ve undertaken. Who will be the most receptive audience for this sales pitch? Probably those who trust institutions the most, and who can sacrifice some efficiency for an outdated but fancy stamp of approval—in other words, the children of the wealthy and educated. But, when you consider that the vast majority of students at élite private colleges—which is to say, this same group—already use A.I. in nearly all aspects of their academic lives, it can seem as though this fight has already been lost.
College will still exist as a place—or, at least, as a website or app—that employers will use to distinguish one applicant from another. But will it still look the way it does today, with thousands of campuses around the country, of varying reputation, quality, financial health, and philosophical missions? We’ll get into all that next week. ♦