Photo: mindinventory.com
The former faced a rude awakening in 1790; the latter are hurtling toward a similar upheaval.
Education has ceased to be a social service and has become a new infrastructure of power. Whoever controls the development of technical talent controls the future. Countries that understand this have stopped arguing about the quality of teaching and have begun to measure how quickly knowledge is transformed into skills. The rest are reforming the 20th-century system and calling it progress.
Major employers such as Google, Apple, and IBM now follow hiring practices focused on skills rather than degrees. More than half of employers have gone so far as to completely eliminate degree requirements for certain positions.
Recruiters no longer want to know how much applicants have memorized; they want to know how they make decisions under uncertainty and how quickly they learn.
Y Combinator funds students who dropped out of Stanford—or those who never attended college at all. A GitHub profile now says more about what you can build than an academic transcript.
Of course, degrees still have value, but mainly for access to regulated professions such as law and medicine, to jobs in the public sector, and to prestigious networks. But take note: this value lies in access, not in knowledge.
In a world transformed by artificial intelligence, skills are becoming the new dividing line. Yes, a free AI chatbot can explain quantum mechanics to anyone. But access to a tool is not the same as knowing how to use it.
A growing divide exists between people capable of using AI to solve complex problems and those who merely consume the ready-made answers it provides.
Orchestration will be the key skill of the next decade: managing multiple AI agents to achieve a result defined by the person themselves.
The Opportunities and Threats of AI in Education
This raises an important question: Does AI in education pose a threat or an opportunity? My answer: It is an opportunity, but only for educational institutions willing to adapt to this technology.
This means a fundamental overhaul of assessment methods, since the mere reproduction of knowledge is no longer as important as demonstrating the ability to exercise independent judgment and the skills to apply knowledge in practice.
The key is to assess whether a student can manage an AI system and critically evaluate its performance, rather than simply delegating the task of thinking to it.
Thanks to this shift, AI has the potential to become the most powerful lever for scaling education in history, providing personalized learning at virtually zero marginal cost, large-scale simulation, and instant feedback.
Take, for example, the real-time drone hacking simulation that SET University in Ukraine—of which I am president—conducted in collaboration with IronCyber, my cybersecurity startup. Thanks to the use of AI, it was completed about six times faster. The technical level can be simplified, but the level of coordination cannot; this reality cannot be understood by the old educational model, which is designed to resist AI.
The university fails to recognize its own value. Its campus, faculty, and curricula are supposedly its most valuable assets.
But in the digital age, data trumps everything else. Every student interaction with a learning platform leaves a trace that reflects their cognitive processes, rate of adaptation, and ability to collaborate. Universities possess terabytes of such information, but they make virtually no use of it.
All of this points to the need for educational institutions designed from the ground up with AI in mind. The dramatic decline and resurgence of the edtech sector indicate that this shift is already underway.
Companies that simply moved their lectures online are disappearing. Investors who once helped some of Silicon Valley’s most famous tech companies grow are now funding their successors. Outsmart, founded by former Duolingo executives, has raised over $36 million from Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, and DST Global, based on a single promise: to build “the university of the future.”
Other influential players in the tech market, who no longer trust universities, have also begun creating alternatives. Peter Thiel pays young people $100,000 to drop out of school and launch startups. Y Combinator has turned into a “university for founders,” compressing years of iteration into a few months.
It’s not knowledge that matters, but the end product
And yet, the real product of elite universities has never been education—MIT has been offering lectures for free for two decades now. It’s the network of contacts. Four years spent in the same space build social capital that pays dividends for a lifetime. It is for this—and not for the curriculum—that people pay.
It follows that the future of the university depends on the deliberate creation of an environment that fosters strong connections—something almost no one is doing.
Moreover, the emphasis should be placed not so much on the number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates as on the path from university to the final product.
Many are concerned that China produces more PhDs in STEM fields than the United States. But what sets China apart is the speed with which it transforms research into innovations that people can use—in a matter of years, compared to a decade or more in other countries.
Most of the world views education as a cultural mission that needs only minor improvement, even though it has become a decisive factor in strategic advantage. Why else have Canada, Germany, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates introduced fast-track visas to attract technical specialists whose education was paid for by other countries?
Training talent for export is a subsidy to other economies. The question that should guide education reformers is how quickly they can turn a person’s knowledge into a benefit for the country before someone else beats them to it.
Irina Volnytska,
founder and CEO of the cybersecurity startup IronCyber, is president of SET University—a Ukrainian technology university offering four master’s programs and featuring an accelerator and two in-house startups.
©: Project Syndicate, 2026.
