Cogniate – Impact Lab

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

Who Invented the Four-Year Degree? And Why It’s About to Become Obsolete

December 20, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Question Nobody Can Answer

Who invented the four-year college degree? Try researching this. You’ll find it’s astonishingly difficult to identify a specific inventor, date, or rationale for why bachelor’s degrees require exactly four years.

The system emerged gradually from European medieval universities, evolved through American land-grant colleges in the 1800s, and was standardized somewhat arbitrarily around credit hours and Carnegie Units in the early 1900s. But there’s no founding document explaining why earning a degree requires four years rather than three, five, or competency-based completion.

The truth? The four-year degree is an administrative convenience that became entrenched—not an optimal learning design. And it’s about to be replaced by something fundamentally different.

future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech, new technology, People Making a Difference

Meet Gwen Lawster: The Woman Who Trains Robots Before Breakfast and Builds Startups by Lunch

December 8, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey, Advisor to Cogniate

When Learning Becomes as Personal as Your Playlist

At 6:30 AM, while most people scroll social media with their coffee, Gwen Lawster opens Cogniate and starts building her education for the day. Not a generic course designed for millions—a course designed specifically for her, teaching exactly what she needs to know, in the way her brain actually learns.

This morning’s challenge: teaching her humanoid robot, Atlas, to stop treating her golden retriever, Murphy, like a threat. Yesterday it was programming her driverless car to take scenic routes through Colorado mountain passes. The day before, coordinating a team of eight warehouse robots to work together without collision. Every day, something new. Every day, she’s building capabilities most people won’t have for years.

Gwen didn’t go to MIT. She doesn’t have a computer science degree. What she has is Cogniate—an AI-powered courseware builder that turns her curiosity into expertise, 30-60 minutes at a time.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, future predictions, future scenario, future trends

The Company That Taught the World: How Cogniate Became the First Trillion-Dollar Education Company

October 12, 2025

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In 2025, few had heard of a small startup called Cogniate. It was one of hundreds of AI-based education tools quietly experimenting with new ways to build digital learning content faster and smarter. But by 2030, Cogniate had become the most valuable company in the world—not because it built better schools, but because it redefined what education actually meant. My prediction from years earlier—that “the biggest company in the world in 2030 will be an education company we haven’t heard of yet”—had come true. And Cogniate was the proof.