What happens to school when learning is everywhere?

On the collapse of the credential economy and the future of education

When I use the term ‘school’, I’m referring to traditional education and legacy academia. To answer the question, what happens to school when learning is everywhere? We have to understand how schools came into existence and why many of us still choose to invest in them today.

For most of human history, learning happened through apprenticeship, observation, family, and community. Skills were passed down through participation, not through classrooms or lectures. Knowledge was something you absorbed by being in close proximity to people who did the thing you wanted to learn.

The first universities emerged around the 11th century in Europe. Initially, they were designed for the church and the ruling class. Knowledge was centralized, controlled, and gated. If you wanted access, you needed status. Universities didn’t replace apprenticeship or community learning, for centuries, they coexisted. Ordinary people still learned by doing. Universities were where people with power learned.

As societies industrialized, governments and factory owners needed workers, not thinkers, something universities couldn’t provide. During the Industrial Revolution, school was redesigned to turn people into reliable workers. The system trained children to follow schedules, obey authority, and perform repetitive tasks. Classrooms were modelled after factories, since that’s where most people would end up working. Schools went from being optional and exclusive to a strategy for economic order.

Mass compulsory schooling began to spread globally during the 19th century. The formula was simple: go to school, get a job, earn a stable living.

After WWII, society became increasingly “professionalized.” In much of the West, higher education opened its doors to the masses, not just wealthy families and social elites. A university degree became the new marker of credibility. Governments poured funding into universities, white-collar industries grew, and more professions began requiring formal credentials. But access didn’t mean equality, marginalized groups still faced systemic barriers while the pressure to get a degree intensified.

By the 1980s, the dominant culture had adopted the belief that you need a degree to live a good life. Employers, parents, and policymakers aligned on the narrative that college was the fastest and safest path to success, which put pressure on people from every class to pursue formal education, not only to get ahead, but to avoid falling behind.

Over the next two decades, that belief turned into a universal standard. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you needed accreditation and affiliation. Universities became the gatekeepers of opportunity. The degree became the passport to belonging in the economic system. And eventually, we stopped questioning it. We had entered the credential economy. A world where proof of learning became more important than learning itself, where a degree became a symbol for intelligence, capability, and worth. This is the system we inherited and one many of us still opt into. Not necessarily because it makes sense today, but because we have yet to develop a stronger narrative or new social/cultural norms supported by economic validation.

School today is less about learning and more about status, identity, belonging, and managing risk. It helps us feel more prepared for an uncertain future. It creates a sense of safety and security in a world where credentials and networks can determine our opportunities. We go to school to be seen and respected. We admire people with Master’s degrees and PhDs because these credentials aren’t easy to attain.

Despite learning being more available and accessible than ever before, school still offers a badge of honour. Going to a top school is a “golden ticket” in certain industries. If you’re an MBA from Harvard, you must be smart. If you’re a Juilliard graduate, you must be talented. If you’re a Stanford engineer, you must be brilliant. Which school we attend and what degree we earn can instantly legitimize us in the eyes of others. Getting a degree can change the direction of our lives and accelerate our career trajectory. Learning is everywhere, but school legitimizes learning.

Sometimes we go to school, or go back to school, because we feel inspired to learn, but more often than not, we may see it as the only way to advance our careers or to be invited, accepted, or taken seriously by institutions and corporations. It’s also true that we go back to school because we’re stuck, afraid, or unsure of what to do next. School can delay adulthood and decision-making. School provides structure and a clear outcome. It’s expensive, but it’s not risky. At the end of the journey, assuming you put in the work, you’ll have a degree to show for your efforts.

There are many other journeys that require dedication and rigour that leave us with nothing but wisdom in the end. For people who are more risk-averse, school is a safe bet. The likelihood of getting a better job or making more money is high, or at least it used to be.

In the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of online learning. Self-paced courses, cohort-based programs, and bootcamps available across every niche and industry have made learning permissionless. Virtual academies and micro-credential programs offer certifications you can earn in 3-6 months, rather than years. Platforms like Masterclass and Skillshare have turned expertise into entertainment. And if you want something less formal, anything you could ever want to know has a ‘how-to’ video on YouTube.

Learning has become more accessible, flexible, and affordable than ever before. Yet, we continue to invest in higher education because it still holds power.

AI has introduced an interesting layer to how we think about careers and what skills will actually matter, and there are subtle signals of people questioning the education system in a world where degrees no longer guarantee job security and success.

Trends always begin as undercurrents, and if you’re not paying attention, you could miss their early signals. One thing I’m noticing, more and more, is parents considering alternative education for their young kids. The public or traditional education system doesn’t seem as appealing as it once did, not just because of large classrooms and budget cuts, but because parents are seeking education that’s more nature-based, experiential, and interdisciplinary.

Without always intending to, parents practice foresight. They’re constantly thinking about their children’s futures, looking for risks and opportunities. They’re more attuned to the next generation than non-parents because they witness firsthand how kids are responding to the world, noticing what’s supporting them, what’s failing them, and whether the systems they’re moving through are sustainable long-term.

So much of why we go to school is about setting ourselves and our children up for future success. Getting a degree from Yale meant something to Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and maybe even Gen Z. But will Gen Alpha or the generation after them care about status the same way we do?

Education and work are inextricably linked. Most people get an education to then get a job or build a career that can sustain their lives. But if our education is no longer translating into job security or career potential, why would young folks (and their parents) continue to spend thousands of dollars on multi-year degrees?

Going to school matters beyond learning and status. School helps us develop social skills. It’s where we learn how to fail. How to advocate for ourselves. How to be accountable. It also helps us develop our personalities and build character and grit.

Whether we will still go to school in the future will depend largely on the future of work and society. These are the 4 main elements I think will determine whether school remains necessary:

• How AI and technologies reshape jobs and careers, and economic opportunity

• Whether society continues to attach status, legitimacy, and belonging to specific institutions

• Which jobs will continue to require or recognize credentials, and which won’t

• Whether people still seek school for what it provides beyond credentials—personality, community, structure, meaning, and a rite of passage into adulthood

We can now learn about anything, any theory, skill, discipline, or method, using AI. If we went to school to learn, I’d say AI learning is a threat to schools. But we don’t just go to school to learn, so I doubt AI will replace the experience of it.

But if legacy academia doesn’t respond quickly enough to the changes happening in the world, we might see a decline in people opting into long-term degrees. It simply won’t make financial sense and will be difficult to justify. When things are moving fast, we have to be more agile and adaptive. We won’t invest 4+ years in a degree that won’t matter 5 years after we graduate.

We’ll still seek structured learning experiences. Many of us will want the credentials and the status signal, but the upside they provide has to be aligned with the resources (time and money) required to attain them. We’ll want shorter, more flexible, more affordable, peer-based learning that helps prepare us for the real world, with a rate of change that can keep up with how fast the world is moving.

As countercultures and subcultures form around craft, analogue processes, and tactile experience, we’re seeing a return to imagination and making things by hand. Pottery, sewing, woodworking, painting—traditional arts will have a resurgence. Not just as hobbies, but as a reconnection with the body as an instrument for creation and expression. After years of optimizing for efficiency, speed, and automation, many of us are craving slowness and intentional process. The more things become automated, the more we’ll seek and value practice.

The Humanities will see a renaissance, we’ll be collectively drawn to philosophy, anthropology, and history again. Being a great multidisciplinary storyteller will become one of the most important skills we can cultivate because storytelling will become the foundation of cultural influence, and culture-making is how we’ll differentiate ourselves from machines.

We may not need careers in the traditional sense, so we won’t need school in the traditional sense either. We’ll see more artists, thinkers, and entrepreneurs who’ve found unique and unconventional ways to make money. Schools may become decentralized networks that empower us to learn and connect on our terms, virtually and in-person. To adapt, we’ll probably always be learning in some shape or form and applying that learning to make our experience of life better.

We won’t ‘go to school’, but instead, become schools. Schools of thought and schools of practice. Playing the role of both student and teacher.

And, perhaps, legacy academia, which guards its professor gates with Master’s degrees and PhDs, will more regularly recognize and hire people who opted out of traditional education but dedicated themselves to developing deep expertise in something. More people will get to teach and more people will practice lifelong learning. Which means more people will get to contribute to shaping culture. We’ll treat the preservation and continuation of human history, knowledge, tradition, creation, and innovation as something worth protecting in a machine-dominated world.

I’m romanticizing it, but this is a future I imagine. The reality is, as long as status matters, we’ll still look to legacy academia and prestigious institutions as markers of validation. But I’m willing to bet that it will matter less and less. We’re operating within a paradigm that reveres and rewards brand-name education, but when that paradigm shifts, everything will shift with it, including how and why we learn.

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