What is the future of the university?

Status: extremely early, collecting thoughts as they come up

Posts that sparked this (better to read these than my own thoughts at this point!):

• https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiversity-is-finished
• https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/what-comes-after-the-multiversity
• https://www.unbundle-the-university.com/

Rough notes:

• For some reason “return to classical education” doesn’t feel right to me… worth digging into why
• At least the first two posts operate under the assumption that AI progress stays roughly where it is now (ie we don’t get AGI). Curious if that’s a good assumption to make in this context or overindexed on the present
• And even more than that, I get the sense there is an implicit assumption that the shape of “how to succeed in the real world” stays roughly the same. Which seems hard to believe in a real AGI scenario
• I don’t see elite extremely expensive universities going away anytime soon, regardless of AI. The status signaling aspect is massive and may even grow. A stratification of elite private universities continuing to get more and more expensive, public universities getting cheaper (?), and middle-of-the-pack universities’ business model dying away seems possible. Though this feels like something someone could have predicted 10 years ago.