Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

I predict that very soon we will have AI tutors like ChatGPT, and then entire courses will be automated in technology. We already have "100% tech" online schools with one teacher per 100+ students or no teachers at all; but with AI tutors, I expect these schools will become much more effective, much more popular, and ultimately much more prevalent. I don't believe that the traditional school system will be replaced or that any public schools will become online-only: in-person learning is still necessary for many students, as are factors like free lunch and mandatory socialization, and AI will never solve those issues. But I do believe that fully-online learning, which is already rapidly growing, will start to grow even more rapidly.

And this isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Frankly, many people's public education system sucks because of lack of resources, and I don't see any alternative way that it can improve, because of lack of resources. For the students, a good AI tutor can be much more helpful than a teacher (and much more patient). For the teachers, it may be harder to get a "traditional" general-elective teaching job, but maybe instead they can teach small focus groups in special classes, where the teaching is much more fun and interesting, but also harder to automate. The state of education in modern society is awful and this has serious consequences (see: recent elections); a low-cost, effective teaching solution would be a huge benefit to global society.

IMO, this is an extreme bias in the Ed VC community and explains how they managed to flush so much cash down the toilet. In no particular order:

1. Tech focus. Most SWEs do not need a CS or even SE degree, and even if you do need that knowledge it really can be learned by hacking at things alone in a room. This ranges between "a lot less true" and "hilariously out of touch" in a lot of other fields.

2. The startup founder set skews toward the "independent learner" type.

3. Within VC/founder world, it's often actually true that university was for networking and prestige. This is one of my huge "you are so close to understanding how unreasonably BS your world is" pet peeves. Not everyone graduates from Stanford. The majority of college graduates attended colleges and universities that you've never even heard of. There are several thousand of institutions of higher education in the US. How many can you name? Sometimes I really want to say to EdTech founders/VCs: "just because you are incompetent and survive on your fancy Stanford degree despite knowing nothing doesn't meant that's true of all College degrees." (But not you in particular, of course, and this is just my inner narrative frustration... I don't mean it to be an attack on anyone in particular.)

Most students really do need years of in-person learning that does not scale well.

Most institutions provide very little signalling value.

Most of higher ed is completely misunderstood by a set of Standford grads gambling with more money than most institutions have in their endowment.

And I'm highly suspicious of counter-narratives from anyone who hasn't taught Calc II at the branch campus of a state university system.

American institutions of higher education, particularly the non-elite private ones, have been capturing value from actually teaching people useful things for two centuries. It's hard, it won't make anyone a billionaire, and we should get back to the old model of doing things not-for-profit in an unscalable way and without federal debt subsidies. Where by "capturing value" we mean "updating aging buildings and paying faculty enough to live a normal middle class life", not "supporting a massive administrative apparatus" and certainly not "buying yachts for LPs".

edit: various typos. Typed while in a meeting (about this very topic, as it happens)

There is a LOT of paperwork and hassle involved. Also years of time.

It's enough of a hassle that some new institutions have found it worth their while to buy out a bankrupt school that already has accreditation rather than starting the process from scratch.

Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a significant portion of your life to obtaining the degree, something many people legitimately are unable to do. Startup education has no signalling power because employers don't know about it and don't believe it is difficult to obtain the degree.