It's Later Than You Think
The starkest view
This fall, prospective students and parents should be looking at university recruitment materials with one question in mind: what exactly is a university education worth in the AGI era?
The AI systems of 2024 were tools, limited to tasks like writing essays or analyzing data. Artificial General Intelligence is different. The AGI systems launching now can reason, learn, and solve problems across all domains, at or above human level. If universities cannot articulate in detail how their faculty exceeds AGI capabilities, what value are they offering to tuition-paying students? Traditional arguments about the value of a college education collapse without faculty expertise.
The usual, comfortable rhetoric about “irreplaceable” human elements of education—mentorship, hands-on learning, community building, and critical thinking—might suffice for a four-year social networking summer camp, and some parents may still value that. But in the AGI era, the only defensible reason for universities to remain in operation is to offer students an opportunity to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses current AI. Nothing else makes sense.
Marketing that touts traditional benefits of a university education while ignoring AGI actively harms the sector, suggesting that higher education either fails to grasp the AGI revolution or is trying to hide from it. Universities must instead lead with brutal honesty: students should pay precisely for the “last mile” of human knowledge that surpasses AGI’s capabilities. The true value of a university lies in faculty who can offer advanced education, mentorship, and inspiration at the highest level, while every other aspect of college life becomes a secondary consideration that no longer justifies tuition on its own.
Immediate Faculty and Dean Action Required
Every faculty member should begin to write a detailed memo specifying the following: “What specific knowledge do I possess that AGI does not? What unique insights or capabilities can I offer that exceed AGI systems? Which students, and in which topics, would benefit enough to pay to learn from me and why?” Faculty who cannot produce this memo with concrete, defensible answers have no place in the institution. There is no middle ground.
Every dean must immediately audit their course catalog against one criterion: what advanced knowledge or skills does this course offer that AGI cannot replicate? Each course must demonstrate specific knowledge transfer or skill development that exceeds AGI capabilities. It will become obvious that the highest value courses are those aligned with specific faculty expertise. General education courses focused on basic knowledge transfer become indefensible. If the information is general enough to be called “general education,” AGI can deliver it more effectively than any human instructor. This will eliminate most of the current curriculum.
Universities will retain faculty in three categories: those advancing original research beyond AGI capabilities, those who teach the use of advanced equipment and sophisticated physical skills, and those handling previously undiscovered source materials or developing novel interpretations that outstrip AGI’s analysis. In the sciences, this means laboratory-based faculty who validate AGI-generated research proposals and offer advanced hands-on training with advanced equipment. In engineering and the arts, it’s faculty who guide students in high-level physical manipulation, augmented by AI tools. In the humanities, it’s scholars working with newly discovered primary sources, untranslated manuscripts, or archaeological evidence not yet processed by AI, as well as those creating fundamentally new interpretive frameworks that transcend AGI’s pattern-recognition capacities.
The curriculum narrows dramatically. Most lecture courses disappear. What remains are advanced research seminars where faculty share findings from new source materials or original experiments, intensive laboratory and studio sessions for hands-on skills, and research validation practicums where students learn to test AGI hypotheses. This represents a 60-70% reduction in current faculty positions, with remaining roles requiring fundamentally different capabilities than traditional academic work.
Research and Physical Space Transformation
In the AGI era, research splits into two intertwined tracks. First, there are research faculty who both propose new questions to AGI—shaping its line of inquiry with domain-specific insight—and validate the system’s theoretical suggestions through experimental design and documentation. Second, there are laboratory specialists who perform the physical experiments, calibrate equipment, and record results. AGI systems, capable of scanning millions of papers across fields and languages in seconds, detect methodological flaws and propose novel experimental designs. Each morning, research faculty receive an AI-generated synthesis of all newly published work in their field, complete with suggested validation experiments. They then collaborate with lab specialists to devise rigorous testing protocols. Meanwhile, as AGI assumes tasks like grant-writing, compliance paperwork, budgeting, and regulatory submissions, indirect cost rates will shrink from their current 52–69% range to a maximum of about 15%. This reduced overhead pays for essential physical infrastructure and the human validation ecosystem; any higher rate becomes indefensible when an AI-driven workflow has rendered most traditional administrative burdens obsolete.
Science labs will be redesigned to incorporate AGI-enabled equipment, robotics, and real-time data analysis systems. Chemistry students will still handle beakers and run experiments, but with AGI systems monitoring techniques, suggesting optimizations, and analyzing results in real-time. Engineering students will work with AI-augmented design tools and automated manufacturing systems while directly manipulating materials and machinery. Machine shops become critical as spaces where students work with AI to create physical objects. Biology students will combine hands-on specimen handling with automated sequencing systems, AI-guided microscopy, and advanced imaging equipment. Creative arts and design studios will enable integration of AI tools for generative design while maintaining spaces for physical creation. Every square foot must justify its existence against AGI alternatives.
Administrative Reduction
In a university reduced to faculty who exceed AGI capabilities and students paying to learn from them, most traditional administrative functions, beyond hiring and promoting faculty, become irrelevant. What’s actually needed?
First, physical asset managers who understand both facilities requirements and AGI integration specialists who can configure spaces for human-AGI collaborative research and learning. They handle everything from laboratory safety with AGI-enabled equipment to studio space optimization for physical skills training.
Second, research partnership coordinators who manage the interface between university capabilities and external funding sources. As research overhead drops dramatically, these administrators must identify and secure funding specifically for human-AGI collaborative research that extends beyond current AGI capabilities.
Third, enrollment strategists who can evaluate which students are genuinely qualified to learn from the university's remaining faculty, matching student potential to the specific areas where faculty exceed AGI capabilities.
That’s it. Everything else, from registration, scheduling, degree tracking, basic student services, routine communications, is handled by AGI systems. No vice presidents, no deans of student life, no army of coordinators and assistants. A university that retains these traditional roles is burning money on functions that no longer have purpose.
The Value Proposition
Students cannot be expected to continue paying for information transfer that AGI provides freely. Instead, they will pay to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses AI, offering mentorship, inspiration, and meaningful access to AGI-era careers and networks. Universities that cannot deliver this specific value will not survive. This isn’t a mere transformation but a brutal winnowing—most institutions will fail, and those that remain will be unrecognizable by today’s standards.
To begin, university leaders must take a hard look at every academic function a university performs, from knowledge transmission to research guidance, skill development, mentoring, and career advising, and ask where the function exceeds AGI capabilities, or it has no reason to exist. Universities will find that faculty experts offer the only value worth paying tuition to access.
I agree that some adjustments are needed, particularly with traditional assignments, but lecture courses have been replaceable for a long time. Schools - especially elite schools - are providing signaling and networking
Wonderful work here. Forward thinking and prescient. I just recorded my introductory lecture to my students and offered my own policy for working with AI, as my institution has not yet crafted one. In it I argued the value of LLMs as research tools and structural aids but demanded students resist the temptation to pass it off as their own work, citing as primary benefits the value of critical thinking and strong writing, both in their future scholarship and lives.
When I try to justify my own skill set, knowledge, or role in an institutional framework, I find myself turning to a Socratic inquiry, the first brought to my attention by Harold Bloom: where is wisdom to be found? Certainly AGI prompts knowledge, accumulation, logistical, arguments, and rhetoric. But how do we trust it in the realm of wisdom? As I’m principally concerned with the psychology of creativity, there is an inherent embodiment issue. Aesthetics can be taught, but not why something is of the moment, or indeed salient to any given situation. How does AGI handle intuition?
Today’s knowledge institutions are top heavy behemoths with little oversight and bloated administration budgets. We seem to be in an era of resistance to the swift oncoming, subtle knife of artificial intelligence and the obsolescence of the bureaucrat. As you rightly point out, there is an inherent redundancy to rote regurgitation. Though I’m sure you don’t suggest that the AGI inform the artist what to paint, what to sculpt, how to write, or for whom to make music.
As Nietzsche wrote in Dawn of Day, there’s a time for theater, when a people’s collective imagination becomes so weak that it must have its stories portrayed to it. But at all other times, it is too blunt and instrument. There’s not enough in it of dream or bird flight. However, I fear we are in that time now.
The time of AGI is also the time of the shamans rise, the artists power, and the poet’s pure vision. I have seen LLM poems that cut a neat caper, but they lack honesty for the simple reason that they are an amalgamation of billions of words with no organizing experience. A robot can squeeze orange juice for you, but it will never taste it.