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.”
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