Reform education

…in order to prepare for the jobs of a future dominated by artificial intelligence.

Reform education to prepare Americans for an AI economy

Modern American education needs serious reform. The signs are everywhere. Student loan debt tops $1.7 trillion and keeps climbing. Many borrowers never finished a degree. Many who did cannot find jobs that justify what they borrowed. And now, just as we reckon with that failure, artificial intelligence is arriving to upend the labor market again. Without reform, we are setting up the next generation for a worse outcome than the last one.

This is not a partisan issue. It is a management failure. American universities have operated as a protected monopoly for decades — insulated from competition, slow to modernize, and rewarded for enrollment volume rather than results. Federal student aid has funded their expansion without requiring accountability. The market signal that would normally discipline any other industry has simply been absent.

The cost problem

Tuition has risen faster than both inflation and wages for decades. Total costs — tuition, fees, housing, required expenses — now push many four-year degrees beyond what families can pay without heavy borrowing. This happened without meaningful changes in how courses are taught or any material improvement in graduation rates.

The consequences fall hardest on students who can least afford them. Low-income students are the most likely to leave college with debt and no credential — the worst of all outcomes. Federal data consistently shows that fewer than half of students complete a degree within six years at many institutions, yet enrollment drives revenue regardless of outcome.

These gaps are shaped well before students reach college. Research from the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis shows that students in high-poverty school districts fall multiple grade levels behind wealthier peers by middle school, even when early aptitude is similar. Funding disparities are a core driver: because school budgets rely heavily on local property taxes, wealthier districts spend substantially more per student. State and federal programs narrow these gaps only partially.

The access problem

American higher education still operates on physical scarcity. Campus capacity, residency requirements, and geography all limit access — even though modern technology can deliver high-quality instruction at scale and near-zero marginal cost per additional student.

Remote education will not replace the residential college experience, nor should it. But for students constrained by income, location, or family obligations, access to most of the instructional value at a fraction of the cost is far better than exclusion. Leading universities already operate profitable online and hybrid programs. The model works. The question is whether federal policy encourages its expansion or ignores it.

Community colleges serve a disproportionate share of first-generation, working, and low-income students at far lower cost than four-year institutions. Yet they face chronic underfunding, weak transfer pathways, and inconsistent alignment with local labor markets. Low completion rates reflect institutional constraints more than student ability.

Now add artificial intelligence

Unlike earlier waves of automation, AI threatens routine office and professional work, not just manual labor. Research from the OECD and the McKinsey Global Institute consistently shows that tasks change before entire occupations disappear — pushing demand toward workers who can apply judgment, supervise systems, and adapt to new tools.

At the same time, new roles are expanding in system support, data operations, quality assurance, and skilled trades that install and maintain advanced infrastructure. These are often well-paid and durable jobs. They require applied skills and continuous retraining — not credentials earned once, early in life, and rarely updated.

An education system built for static four-year degree models will leave graduates unprepared for this economy. It will also leave behind the millions of workers who need to retrain mid-career but have no practical way to do so.

What needs to change

The federal government already shapes higher education through student aid, accreditation, and regulation. Institutions respond when incentives change. The current system rewards rising costs, credential inflation, and exclusivity while placing limited weight on completion, employment, or earnings. That can be corrected without federal control over curriculum.

Federal aid should be tied to measurable outcomes: graduation rates, employment, earnings relative to debt incurred. Institutions that consistently produce graduates who cannot service their loans — or who leave without a credential — should face reduced eligibility for federal funding, not continued subsidy.

Accredited remote degrees and short-cycle credentials should be expanded, with clear credit transfer rules so that learning accumulates over time rather than expiring. Transparent pricing, well below residential alternatives, should be required for online programs that receive federal support.

Career and technical education needs to be elevated — in funding, status, and visibility. Countries like Germany maintain paid apprenticeship systems that combine classroom instruction with work, producing skilled workers without universal reliance on four-year degrees. There is no good reason the U.S. cannot develop comparable pathways in construction, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and technology support.

Community colleges should be resourced and incentivized to function as the core workforce institutions they already are for millions of Americans, rather than treated as a lesser tier of the system.

Conclusion

The cost of college has outrun its value for too many Americans. Artificial intelligence is about to make this problem worse, not better, unless education adapts quickly. The federal government has the leverage to accelerate that change. What is lacking is the willingness to use it — to tie public support to results, reward access and completion over prestige, and treat workforce preparation as a serious national interest rather than an afterthought.

The next generation cannot afford to wait for universities to reform themselves.

Sources

PREVIOUS
Repair our fiscal condition

NEXT
Address climate change