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By Han Verstraete
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A major new survey found that 16 percent of U.S. college students have already changed their major because of AI’s impact on the job market. The Lumina Foundation-Gallup research also found 47 percent have seriously considered doing so. That should stop people in their tracks. Students are not waiting for universities to settle the debate. They are already acting on a growing suspicion that the old bargain between education and opportunity is getting weaker.
I think they are right to worry.
For a long time, education has sold two things at once—learning and signaling. It promised to educate young people, but it also claimed that the credential itself would hold its value. AI is forcing those two ideas apart. Families are increasingly asking: If machines can now do more and more of the work that schools once pledged to prepare students for, what exactly is the degree still proving?
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My view is simple. AI did not break education. It exposed how much of it was already built on weak foundations.
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The problem did not begin with chatbots. Long before generative AI, too much of modern education had become standardized, bureaucratic and detached from real intellectual formation. Students are grouped by age, marched through prescribed content, judged by systems that often reward compliance more than curiosity, and pushed toward credentials that too often signal endurance rather than mastery. We tell ourselves this is education. Too often, it is a bureaucratic system wrapped in the language of learning. It should not surprise then that these days it is not uncommon for universities to have more administrative staff than teaching faculty.
That old model now looks even shakier because AI has changed the value of knowledge. Facts, summaries, polished paragraphs, even decent explanations are now cheap. They can be produced in seconds. If education is mainly about delivering information, then it is in real trouble. A machine can already do much of that quicker and cheaper.
But should information in itself ever be the highest purpose of education? What matters now, and what will matter even more in the future, is understanding. It is one thing to ask a machine for the distance between the Earth and the moon. It is another thing entirely to understand why the moon is there, what forces are at work, how that knowledge fits into a larger picture, and what it means. One is retrieval. The other is understanding. One gives you an answer. The other forms a mind.
That distinction is no longer academic. It is becoming the whole game.
That is also why one of the more revealing recent stories in higher education involved something very old-fashioned. Some professors are reviving oral exams in response to AI. That makes perfect sense to me. A student may be able to turn in smooth work with technological assistance. It is much harder to fake understanding when you have to explain yourself aloud, answer follow-up questions, and show that you actually grasp the subject in real time. In that sense, the return of oral exams is not a quirky trend. It is a sign that education is being pushed back toward something more honest.
And that leads to the point I care about most. The right response to AI is not less human teaching. It is more.
Good teachers do not just hand over information. They frame it. They test it. They challenge students. They change their approach when they see confusion. They use humor, analogy, timing, judgment and lived experience to help another person truly understand something. That is not an outdated human extra. It is the core of education. Just watch one of Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics.
My point is that the more AI outputs, the more valuable human input becomes.
That is not to diminish the role of AI. It can help teachers prepare materials, organize a course, reduce routine burdens and give students more ways to review and practice. But a machine should not be put at the center of the educational relationship. Let’s use AI to assist us in our quest for truth but not become its source.
This also means we need to be more honest about where valuable knowledge comes from. The old model assumed learning happens mainly in youth, inside formal institutions, under approved authorities, along a prescribed path. That made more sense in an earlier era. It makes less sense in today’s world. Real expertise exists far beyond traditional campuses. Some of the most thoughtful, capable and knowledgeable people in society sit outside academic hierarchies altogether. Many people will need to keep learning throughout adulthood, not in neat stages but continuously, in response to changing work, changing technology and changing interests.
A serious education system should reflect that reality instead of pretending it does not exist.
That does not mean standards should disappear. It means standards should become more meaningful. The question should not be whether someone passed through a prestigious institution. The question should be whether they actually learned something of substance, can demonstrate understanding, and can continue learning as the world changes. I suspect employers will increasingly care less about static credentials and more about credible proof of real capability. That will unsettle established institutions, but it may also force education closer to its actual purpose.
The danger now is that we draw the lazy conclusion from AI. We hear that machines are getting smarter and assume that human teaching matters less. The opposite is true. The easier it becomes to generate words, code, images and answers, the more we will need people who can judge quality, detect nonsense, connect ideas and pass on understanding in a way that builds both competence and character.
Those are not sentimental virtues. They are practical ones.
Education in its current form does not deserve blind defense. Too much of it is bloated, procedural and overconfident about what its credentials still mean. But that is not an argument against education. It is an argument for rebuilding it around what is actually valuable: curiosity, rigor, intellectual honesty and the deeply human work of helping one person understand something real.
That is why real learning matters more than ever in the age of AI.
Han Verstraete is a U.S.-based entrepreneur and founder of dEdu, a new type of school where teachers teach what they know without compromise, where learners fund the courses they want to study, and where achievement is cryptographically verified and rewarded.
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