By Futurist Thomas Frey
For decades, we’ve accepted a fundamental premise: a college degree is the ticket to economic opportunity. We’ve built an entire social infrastructure around this belief—guidance counselors steering students toward four-year universities, parents taking on crushing debt to fund tuition, employers requiring degrees for jobs that didn’t require them a generation ago.
AI is now revealing what many have suspected but couldn’t prove: much of this system is built on illusion. The correlation between credentials and capability is far weaker than we’ve been led to believe. The return on educational investment has been declining for years, masked by credential inflation that benefits institutions far more than students. And alternatives that could deliver better outcomes at a fraction of the cost have been systematically marginalized.
The awakening in education isn’t just about cost—it’s about the massive gap between what we’re paying for and what we’re actually getting.
Continue reading… “The Awakening Series Part 4: Education and Credentialing—The Degree Illusion”