Paying a fortune for a college education may be a big waste of money right 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 studen...