🦾How You Can Leverage:

College degrees are becoming like participation trophies. 

Like…. cool. What’s this thing good for?

And pretty soon, we’re going to see the higher education system in the U.S. go through an apocalyptic-esque collapse like the mortgage industry in 2008. 

Why? 

Universities cared more about self-preservation and control than educating themselves and students on required technology.

And now, AI is going to slowly eat university’s lunch. 

We just dropped the hottest take in higher education on Everyday AI today — the kind that gets tenure-track professors crying into their craft beer.

Universities spent years treating AI like academic kryptonite while employers demanded AI skills. Now we’re all supposed to be shocked when college grads can’t find jobs in their fields and employers are scoffing at their lack of AI skills? 

The math ain't mathing, and the reckoning is here.

We suggest you listed to the whole episode. Don’t just take our word for it. 

Let’s dive in, shorties. 👇

Most colleges created their own death spiral through pure cowardice.

Let's trace the carnage.

November 2022: ChatGPT launches. Universities panic. Less than 10% had any coherent AI policy.

2024: Full meltdown mode. Over 1,000 institutions banned AI outright. Called it cheating. Academic dishonesty. The devil incarnate.

Students didn't care. 92% used AI tools anyway.

The adults were having existential crises while kids understood what the grown-ups couldn't grasp.

2025: The survivors shifted responsibility to individual professors. 51% of universities essentially said "figure it out yourself."

That's not leadership. That's institutional cowardice.

Liberty University still prohibits AI-generated content. University of Chicago Law treats AI as plagiarism. Duke calls it cheating under their community standard.

Princeton requires disclosure for brainstorming help. Brown previously banned it entirely.

These schools are training unemployable graduates for a world that's already moved on. While they debated AI ethics, employers started demanding AI skills.

The disconnect is criminal.

Try This

Audit your recruiting pipeline for universities with restrictive AI policies immediately.

Cross-reference against your most successful recent hires. You'll find the pattern everyone's seeing: AI-forward schools produce better candidates.

Start tracking which universities your top performers attended. Build that into your recruitment strategy now.

Companies aren't firing people. They're just….. not replacing them.

Recent grads are getting slaughtered in the job market. Only 30% landed jobs in their field of study, down from 41% the previous year.

Meanwhile, job postings mentioning AI surged 170%.

Connect the dots.

We're witnessing what we dubbed ‘Quiet Hiring’ on steroids. Instead of mass layoffs, companies just stop adding headcount. AI handles work those entry-level roles used to do.

The divide between AI-native universities and AI-resistant ones is creating two completely different job markets.

Ohio State requires AI proficiency for all 65,000 students. California’s state schools gave ChatGPT to 500,000 students and faculty. Arizona State runs 500+ OpenAI-enabled projects.

These graduates arrive fluent in enterprise AI workflows.

Compare that to graduates from restrictive schools who spent four years hiding their AI usage. They're competing for fewer jobs with inferior skills.

The talent arbitrage opportunity is massive for executives who recognize this divide early.

Try This

Create a two-tier recruiting strategy based on university AI policies.

Tier 1: Schools with mandatory AI training get your premium recruiting budget and fastest hiring tracks.

Tier 2: Restrictive schools get basic screening with heavy AI skills assessment.

The gap between these groups is measurable now and accelerating fast.

Here's where this is all heading, and it's gonna be brutal.

Our AI in Education predictions we went over in today’s show. 👇

University donations will be replaced by access to university IP. Smart schools realize they're sitting on goldmines of structured data. Classroom conversations, research, intellectual property. AI labs pay unlimited money for this. Donations become data licensing deals.

University rankings will be influenced by compute and frontier AI access. Forget traditional metrics. Rankings will depend on partnerships with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft. Schools with better AI access will dominate job placement rates.

Four-year degrees will be replaced by learning subscriptions for current students, new off-location students and alumni. The half-life of traditional knowledge is collapsing. Smart universities will offer ongoing AI-powered education subscriptions instead of one-time degrees.

More than 2,000 of America's 5,800 colleges will disappear or get acquired within 10 years. College closures doubled in 2024 vs 2023. It’s gonna snowball soon, shorties. We see hundreds a year shutting down or being acquired for their student IP by early 2030s. Big tech companies have unlimited cash and need clean, human-first data that can’t be found on the internet. Google University won’t be a joke anymore. lolz.

Tech companies will acquire universities outright. When schools can't make payroll, they'll get bought for their data assets and alumni networks. We're talking about fundamental shifts where universities become tech subsidiaries.

The consolidation wave is inevitable when degree value plummets while AI training data becomes priceless.

Try This

Identify partnerships with universities that have strong data collection in your vertical now.

Propose joint research projects that give you early access to their datasets before big tech locks them up.

You're building relationships with future Google or Microsoft subsidiaries. Position these as innovation partnerships, not recruitment plays.

We put together one of the most comprehensive and helpful resources to go with today’s show.

To get access, just repost today’s show on LinkedIn.