Industrial‑era college – four expensive years of ladder‑climbing prep – is on a collision course with two forces: compounding automation and collapsing trust in academic gatekeepers. Unless it’s rebuilt from first principles, it will survive only as a high‑priced social club. Here’s why going to college today is probably a bad idea, and how higher education needs to change to remain relevant.
Somewhere along the way, college lost its mid-20th-century connection to the thing that made it useful: it was once a clear signal that someone had the intellectual horsepower to join the expanding market for cognitive labor. Now that intelligence is no longer scarce, that signal is noise.
When I needed a data analyst at my company, I didn’t deal with weeks of hiring, messy HR issues and the overhead of another person, I got it done with a $0.06 API call. I’m not alone. A 2024 hiring-manager survey highlighted in Vanity Fair found 70 percent believe AI can cover intern-level tasks, coinciding with a sharp drop in internship postings across finance, healthcare, and media.