We are experiencing a technological transformation comparable in magnitude to the Industrial Revolution, but with an unprecedented speed of spread. In just two years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) went from technical curiosity to a tool capable of outperforming professionals in financial analysis, legal writing, medical diagnosis and programming. However, in the midst of this tsunami, we observe an unsettling calm in the institutions that should be the beacons of knowledge: universities.
What we witness today in higher education is not “slow adaptation,” but systematic professional neglect. By enrolling hundreds of thousands of students in programs whose economic value is plummeting in real time, without warning them of the existential risk to their future professions, universities are committing an ethical failure of historic proportions. They are selling a future that they know no longer exists.
The Conspiracy of Silence
Dean David Marchick of the Kogod School of Business openly admits that AI creates a “real risk of disintermediation of traditional education” and confesses that “there is no roadmap.” This admission is devastating: institutions are improvising with students’ time and money.
The numbers confirm the scam. Student debt in the United States exceeds $1.77 trillion. An average MBA costs between $100,000 and $220,000. Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that 30% of hours worked in the US economy could be automated by generative AI by 2030. Goldman Sachs estimates that 300 million jobs globally are exposed to automation. The most threatened professions are financial analysis, accounting, administrative management, entry consulting and corporate writing, among others; These are what business schools promise as a professional destination.
This uncertainty is not reflected in admissions brochures or exorbitant tuition fees. The academy chose to protect its business model and the positions of its faculty before the financial solvency of its students. Teachers and administrators know that their relevance is in question, but they keep the machinery running to ensure their own economic survival.
The hypocrisy is tangible because teachers who use AI to automate the grading of papers, a task for which they know the tool is inadequate, while demanding that their students not use these same tools to “think.” The system seeks efficiency for itself, but sells an artisanal and “human” process to the paying customer.
The mortgage of the party
The tragedy is illustrated with a painful but accurate analogy: a college degree became the equivalent of taking out a 30-year mortgage loan to pay for a one-night wedding party.
Families go into debt, mortgage their future and sacrifice years of productivity believing that they are investing in an asset that will provide returns for decades. The reality is that they are purchasing an ephemeral experience, a rite of social passage that grants momentary status but leaves a real and persistent debt. The day after graduation, the party ends, but the bill continues to arrive, while the skills acquired have been absorbed by algorithms that cost pennies.
Selling this mirage knowing that the underlying asset, that is, traditional employability, evaporates, borders on cruelty. It is inviting someone to invest their life savings in a company that has already declared bankruptcy privately, but maintains the facade to attract the last of the unwary.
The double standards of institutions
It is outrageous to observe this behavior in the same elite institutions that for decades have pontificated on corporate ethics and social responsibility. Harvard, MIT, Stanford are universities established as moral arbiters of society, however they fail in the most basic right of their own students: the right to the truth and protection against financial fraud.
While they organize seminars on ethical frameworks and debate the responsibility of technology corporations, they practice very real financial predation. They fill their mouths with the word “responsibility,” but they are incapable of exercising the responsibility of saying: “Stop. Don’t go into debt. What we sell is no longer worth what it costs.”
There is an important distinction because not all careers face the same risk. Semiconductor engineering, robotics, certain highly complex medical specializations and fundamental scientific research remain in growing demand for now. But these are the exception, not the rule, and universities know it. What they don’t do is tell it to the accounting or marketing student who signs the promissory note believing that their investment has the same horizon.
Collective denial
We are facing a phenomenon of massive denial. People watch the news, read about the exponential advancement of AI, but act under the irrational premise that “this won’t happen to me” or “my profession is special.” They continue to sign up for dying races with the same inertia with which they continued to travel at the beginning of the pandemic when the virus was already in the air.
This willful blindness is the fertile ground where the university scam operates. But while citizens can claim ignorance, universities have no such excuse because they have the data and predictive models. By choosing silence, they become complicit in the financial ruin of a generation.
We are not facing a simple market change, it is a moral crisis where the institution in charge of preparing the future has become its financial executioner, sacrificing its students on the altar of its own survival. Every license plate signed without an honest warning is a contract with hidden defects. The question is how many more financial lives will be destroyed before someone in authority dares to tell the truth.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses technology topics like this every week with Claudio Zuchovicki in their podcast Artificial Intelligence, Financial Perspectives, available at Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
