For the last few months, I've been collecting journalism, opinion pieces, and essays about what will happen to higher education in the age of AI.

I'll post those over the next few weeks, and I'll look forward to your reactions. But I thought I'd start with this essay from the New Yorker, by Jay Kaspian Kang, which in a way is beginning at the end.

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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.

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I think Mr. Kang has put his finger on it. At least three quarters of our higher education institutions have survived by positioning themselves as credentialing institutions: That four-year degree will make you more employable. It will be your ticket to a good job, a higher salary, and a life better than the ones your parents led.

AI is beginning to wipe that particular reality away.

To be clear: Higher education is more than due for a reckoning. The Higher Education Act of 1965 opened the doors for students to borrow for their degree in a way that had never been possible before, and from there through the 2000s, colleges were able to consistently hike their tuition rates because students were borrowing to attend--and students believed that the loans would pay off, in the end, because of those good jobs and higher salaries. That is no longer the case, but at the same time, the entire apparatus of student loans has quadrupled and encouraged even more debt and even more borrowing.

Upward mobility won the day. Exploring reading, writing, and thinking for their own sake has increasingly become a privilege of those who can pay for it without borrowing.

This is not sustainable for higher education. We're looking at a sea change here, and the tide is just beginning to swell.

www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/will-ai-make-college-obsolete?_sp=5ad68571-16a8-4d3f-8782-4921...

www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/sea-change-shakespeare-origin-history

www.bu.edu/fairstudentloans/a-brief-history-of-student-loans/ ... See MoreSee Less

Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?

www.newyorker.com

During a time when American trust in institutions is at an all- time low, A.I. is poised to accelerate a growing disillusionment with higher education.

2 hours ago