A college sophomore sits in the library, surrounded by stacks of textbooks. Tomorrow is her midterm — 200 multiple-choice questions on biology facts she has crammed all week. Out of curiosity, she copies one of the practice exams into ChatGPT on her laptop. The AI answers instantly, correctly, and even explains the reasoning in plain language. Perfect score.

She realizes something unsettling: the exam she’s about to spend hours sweating over isn’t testing her intelligence — it’s testing something a machine can now do effortlessly. The thousands of dollars in tuition, the hours of rote memorization, the pressure to regurgitate facts… all of it suddenly feels like a ritual built for another age.

Universities and schools were designed to train specialists for stable careers. Their model rested on three assumptions:

1. Knowledge is scarce.
2. Credentials signal value to employers.
3. Skills remain relevant for decades.

Now: Each of those assumptions has collapsed.

• Knowledge is no longer scarce. AI can retrieve, explain, and apply factual information instantly. Teaching students to memorize and regurgitate facts is like teaching them how to use a slide rule in the age of calculators.
• Credentials no longer guarantee value. Employers are finding AI can draft contracts, analyze data, and even code better than entry-level graduates — before those students even leave school.
• Skills expire faster. AI’s iteration cycles outpace curricula; by the time a four-year degree is completed, the content may already be obsolete.

Result:

• Students are weighed down with debt for skills they may never use.
• Employers find graduates mismatched to real needs.
• Education becomes a treadmill of credential inflation — more degrees, less alignment.

The cultural collision: Society 1.0 equated education with fact mastery. In the AI era, value lies in judgment, creativity, collaboration, and contribution — things machines can’t simply replicate. But our institutions still drill students to memorize, test, and forget.