Education – Impact Lab

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Higher Education

The New Digital Divide: AI in the Classroom

September 21, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Not long ago, the mere presence of a computer in a student’s home was enough to change their educational trajectory. Studies from the 1990s and early 2000s showed that kids with consistent computer access performed significantly better than those without. They could type faster, research quicker, and develop the digital fluency that employers increasingly valued. In many ways, the computer became the great differentiator in education.

Fast forward to today, and the same story is repeating—but with far higher stakes. The technology at the center isn’t the desktop computer. It’s artificial intelligence.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Higher Education

The $1.8 Trillion Education Apocalypse: Why Traditional Universities Will Vanish Faster Than Blockbuster

September 1, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The $1.8 Trillion Lie That’s About to Implode

Here’s a prediction that will either make me look like a prophet or a madman by 2030: The traditional university system—with its ivy-covered buildings, tenured professors, and four-year degree programs—will become as irrelevant as typewriter repair shops, and the collapse will happen faster than anyone thinks possible.

I’m not talking about gradual decline or gentle evolution. I’m talking about sudden, catastrophic disruption that will leave educational administrators wondering what hit them. The signs are everywhere if you know how to read exponential curves, and the writing isn’t just on the wall—it’s spray-painted in neon colors across the entire facade of higher education.

The trigger? A perfect storm of artificial intelligence, blockchain verification, global connectivity, and economic desperation that’s about to make the newspaper industry’s collapse look like a gentle summer breeze.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, cutting edge, Education, Higher Education

The Half-Life of Skills Crisis – A 2035 Perspective

August 25, 2025

Sarah Chen stares at her framed diploma hanging crooked on the wall of her cramped studio apartment. Bachelor of Science in Marketing, Class of 2025. Four years of late nights, $87,000 in student loans, and a 3.7 GPA that once felt like a golden ticket to the middle class. Today, in January 2035, that diploma feels more like expensive wallpaper.

“I learned about customer personas and market segmentation,” Sarah tells me over coffee, her voice carrying the bitter edge of someone who discovered the rules changed while she was still playing the game. “But by 2027, AI was creating more accurate customer profiles in seconds than I could build in weeks. My professors never mentioned that ChatGPT-7 would be writing better ad copy than most humans by my graduation day.”

Breakthrough Thinking, DaVinci Institute, Futurist, Higher Education, Historical Perspectives, People Making a Difference

The Rise of Strategic Futurism: Thomas Frey’s Path to Industry Leadership

August 23, 2025

How One Futurist Redefined the Rules of Tomorrow’s Discourse

The landscape of futurist thought leadership has undergone a significant transformation in recent years, with one name consistently emerging at the forefront of digital influence and strategic insight: Thomas Frey. Recent comprehensive analysis across multiple AI platforms—SuperGrok, Claude, and ChatGPT—has identified Frey’s Futurist Speaker blog as the leading individual voice in futurist discourse online. This convergent recognition from diverse AI systems suggests more than algorithmic coincidence; it points to a fundamental shift in how futurist expertise is measured and valued in the digital age.

Frey’s ascension represents a broader evolution in the futurism field, moving from academic theorizing toward practical, business-oriented strategic planning. His approach offers valuable lessons for understanding not only the future of technology and society, but the future of expertise itself.

Artificial Intelligence, Education, Higher Education, New Viewpoints

The Death of Higher Education Is Already Happening

August 23, 2025

The United Arab Emirates just declared war on the American university system, and most people don’t even realize it. By becoming the first nation to provide free AI tutoring to every citizen, the UAE isn’t just modernizing education—it’s exposing the fundamental obsolescence of institutions that charge $200,000 for what artificial intelligence can deliver for pennies.

This isn’t a distant threat. Universities are facing their Kodak moment, and the disruption is accelerating faster than anyone anticipated.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Higher Education

The Scary Truth About AI and Your Child’s Education

August 23, 2025

Picture this: your teenager proudly shows you an A+ essay they “wrote” for English class. The writing is polished, the arguments are sophisticated, and the research seems thorough. But when you ask them to explain their main points, they stare blankly and can’t remember what they supposedly wrote just hours earlier. Welcome to the AI generation, where brilliant-looking work can be produced in minutes—but nothing sticks in the brain.

A shocking new study from MIT reveals just how serious this problem has become. When students use ChatGPT to write essays, 83% can’t recall or explain what they “wrote” shortly afterward. Compare that to students who research and write traditionally—only 11% struggle with recall. We’re witnessing the birth of a generation that can produce without understanding, and it should terrify every parent and teacher.

Education, Higher Education, Historical Perspectives, People Making a Difference

The Great Educational Awakening:Why Learning Must Become Earning

August 3, 2025

The most profound question facing humanity isn’t whether AI will change education—it’s whether we’ll have the courage to let it save us from an educational system that’s systematically failing millions while enriching a privileged few.

The Uncomfortable Truth We’re All Avoiding

Why do we persist with an educational model that transforms curious five-year-olds into debt-laden twenty-two-year-olds who can recite Shakespeare but can’t balance a budget, code a website, or solve real-world problems? Simon Sinek reminds us to start with why, so let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What if our entire approach to education is fundamentally backwards?

Higher Education, Science & Technology News

Future of the university, university of the future

March 11, 2023

The changing times are creating both challenges and opportunities for universities. In a Daily Star article titled “The Future of the University, the University of the Future,” the author discusses how universities can adapt to stay relevant in the 21st century.

The author emphasizes the need for universities to embrace digital technology and personalized learning experiences. As the article states, “Universities need to break away from the traditional model of education and embrace a new way of learning that leverages the power of technology.”

One way to achieve this is through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to create adaptive learning environments that cater to individual students’ needs. The author suggests that “With AI and machine learning, universities can create personalized learning experiences that adapt to the unique needs of each student.”

Higher Education

Americans’ Confidence in Higher Ed Drops Sharply

August 12, 2022

By Karin Fischer

Public confidence in higher education’s ability to lead America in a positive direction has sunk steeply in recent years, falling 14 percentage points just since 2020.

Two years ago, more than two-thirds of Americans said colleges were having a positive effect on the country, according to a survey conducted by New America. In the most recent version of the survey, released Tuesday, barely half agreed.

As with other recent public-opinion polling, New America’s findings reveal a yawning partisan gap. While nearly three-quarters of Democrats saw higher education’s contributions in a positive light, just 37 percent of Republicans did.

Yet the think tank’s annual Varying Degrees survey found that a strong majority, more than 75 percent, thought that some education beyond high school offered a good return on investment for students. And public perception of online education improved markedly in the latest poll, with nearly half of Americans saying it was comparable in quality to in-person education, up from just a third in 2021.

Education, Science & Technology News

A ‘STUNNING’ LEVEL OF STUDENT DISCONNECTION

April 12, 2022

Professors are reporting record numbers of students checked out, stressed out, and unsure of their future.

By Beth McMurtrie

In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. Twenty to 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.

“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them learn.”

Marley, a biology professor, hesitates to talk to her students about the issue, for fear of making them self-conscious, but she has a pretty good idea of what is happening. In addition to two years of shifting among online, hybrid, and in-person classes, many students have suffered deaths in their families, financial insecurity, or other pandemic-related trauma. That adds up to a lot of stress and exhaustion. In a first-year seminar last fall, Marley says, she provided mental-health counseling referrals to seven out of her 17 students.

Higher Education

The University in Ruins

April 3, 2022

The “innovations” that promise to save higher ed are a farce.

By Johann N. Neem

Universities might be facing a moment similar to what befell early modern English monasteries under Henry VIII. For generations, Ronald G. Musto explains in The Attack on Higher Education (2021), monasteries were the center of English intellectual and religious life. They were innovators that developed new ideas. But, following the dissolution acts of 1535 and 1539, “the monasteries’ daily routines, chants, liturgical hours, processions, rituals, instructions, and labors concentrated in particular places simply ceased to exist.”

Could the same happen to universities?

It’s already happening. Today, we walk among the ruins of an institution that once had a larger purpose. It’s not clear what role universities should play in society, and to what or to whom they are accountable, other than their corporate interests.

To some, that’s not a problem, at least according to Arthur Levine and Scott J. Van Pelt in The Great Upheaval (2021). They see higher education undergoing the same transformation that reshaped the music, film, and newspaper industries. Rather than place-based education overseen by tenured professors, they anticipate “the rise of anytime, anyplace, consumer-driven content and source agnostic, unbundled, personalized education paid for by subscription.”

Higher Education, Science & Technology News

College enrollment is lower now than it’s been at any time in the last half-century

November 5, 2021

Jesse James Oct 26th, 2021 3:31 pm

You know college—the hugely expensive four-to-six year investment of time and resources that many students spend their entire lifetimes paying off? Yeah for some reason more people are opting out of it.

College enrollment was supposed to bounce back this fall. Instead, more students opted out.

Nationwide, fewer students went back to school again this year, dragging undergraduate enrollment down another 3.2% from last year, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that’s based on early data from colleges. There were roughly 17.5 million students enrolled as of the last tally.