A pricey college education may be a big waste of money now

We’ve entered the age of AI — yet parents are still ponying up small fortunes for their kids to learn jobs that will soon be antiquated (if they’re not already).

It’s high time to question the value of our higher education system.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp told Axios last week that smart kids graduating from great universities with “generalized knowledge” are “effed.”

“The Yale grad will have to learn something specific — domain expertise,” he said. “How do I actually write a script that allows me to target terrorists?… How do I put cement in a factory with such precision that you can build a factory like it was built in Taiwan, in America?”

As computers have synthesized every scrap of human knowledge on the internet and turned it into coherent intelligence, a general knowledge of liberal arts fluff and common core factoids is obviously not going to cut it. 

But even students who entered computer science programs just four years ago are graduating as dinosaurs, as AI can code more quickly than humans and college curriculum struggles to keep pace.

A 2025 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that, among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors have some of the worst unemployment rates —  6.1% and 7.5%, respectively. That’s more than double the rate of the perennial punchline of art history, at 3%.

Open AI’s Sam Altman predicted last month that “in another couple of years it will become very plausible for AI to make for example scientific discoveries that humans cannot make on their own.”

He added: “I can easily imagine a world where 30, 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future.”

Even before products like ChatGPT and Sora were available to anyone able to pay a monthly subscription, critics of higher ed were pointing to frivolous degrees and a mounting student debt crisis as proof that the system is broken.

The median student at a third of colleges will earn less than the typical high school graduate. Companies are hiring fewer new employees. Postings for entry-level jobs are down 35% since January 2023. Over the past two years, the number of people spending six or more months searching for a job has increased by more than 50%.

Young people feel like collateral damage in a cataclysmic economic and technological shift beyond their control.

That’s partly what fueled Zohran Mamdani’s resounding victory with New York City’s young people. Many Gen Zers are frustrated that their expensive degrees don’t look like they were worth the time and effort and their lives simply aren’t panning out as they imagined.

But Altman made it clear that all is not lost.

Asked what educational route he hopes his own infant son eventually pursue, his advice was enlightening: “The meta skill of learning how to learn, of learning to adapt, learning to be resilient to a lot of change … learning what people want.”

The problem is, right now, colleges aren’t necessarily teaching those life skills.

Moving forward, parents must help set their kids up for success by exercising healthy skepticism about the educational status quo. We have to break the traditional mold of achievement.

Karp said that people without four-year degrees are going to be able to “make a lot more money” if they can maximize the potential value-add of AI.

Keep your mind open to hands-on trades, vocational schools, emerging fields and even certificate programs from AI companies themselves — like OpenAI Academy, which trains students to become literate in the technology.

And for god’s sake, if doing anything but college is unpalatable, actually consider the jobs that have low unemployment.

There’s a common theme with nursing and early childhood education and even construction science: humanity. These are jobs that will certainly rely on rapidly evolving technology to enrich the way they are done — but the human element remains key

Altman said of the near future: “We will see that AI systems can do some things incredibly well, struggle with some others, and humans use these tools and bring their sort of human insight, creativity, ingenuity to bear in ways that are really important … I’m so confident that people will still be the center of the story for each other.”