Sponsoring Disruption

Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, has announced a new venture called the Khan TED Institute  a collaboration with TED and the Educational Testing Service that aims to offer an AI-focused degree for under $10,000, completable faster than a traditional program, with skills-based assessments replacing the credit-hour model. I have long been a fan of  Khan Academy and J benefitted a great deal from it when she was a kid. TED started out being great but quality and quantity simply cannot co-exist. The corporate thought partners of the Khan TED venture include Google, Microsoft, McKinsey, Accenture and Bain. The pitch is that higher education is too expensive, too slow, and too disconnected from what employers actually need. I would argue that very premise, why does higher education be so tightly coupled with what employers want specially these days when any number of those wants can be met by AI. No time like the present for higher ed to do start doing the job it was actually hired to do. 

One CEO who called KTI "the McDonald's of higher education" and that is about right. The value of a degree has never been purely about the content delivered absent the surrounding context and the intangible value that four years of college brings to a young person's life. KTI has none of those things yet, and the accreditation process alone that will make this useful to graduates can take two to six years. Students who enroll early would be taking a significant gamble on a credential that no employer is yet obligated to recognize. It is hard to predict if they ever will.

When Google, McKinsey and Microsoft get to sit at the table and shape what an AI degree looks like, they are not doing this out of civic generosity. They are building a pipeline optimized for their own needs, while also using AI to eliminate the entry-level jobs that degrees used to unlock. The question of who this actually serves deserves more scrutiny than it is getting. Cheap education designed by the people who benefit most from a compliant, reskilled workforce is not disruption. It is just a more efficient version of the same arrangement where the employees will be worse off than they are.