By Olsi Bakalli
If a university degree was once seen as a magical passport to enter the world of work, today it is more like a museum relic kept in a frame for reasons of nostalgia.
Artificial intelligence has opened an era where the value of information is no longer measured by the number of credits earned in college, but by the speed and way you manage to use that information.
Who needs to listen to a lecturer repeating Keynes' theory for the hundredth time, when an AI system can explain it with practical examples, dynamic visualizations, and translation into any language with a click?
The bitter question is this: what will remain of the university as an institution, besides hefty fees, academic bureaucracy, and a diploma that serves more as a family keepsake than a job guarantee?
The future seems to be leading us towards a market where the ability to learn quickly, filter information, and ask the right questions will be worth much more than four years wasted in classrooms that mimic the last century.
Perhaps within ten years a bachelor's degree will have the same weight as an online course certificate: a document that shows you spent a few hours learning something, but not necessarily that you possess the capacity to use that knowledge creatively.
And this is where the paradox arises: if the university is collapsing as a monopolized fortress of knowledge, pre-university school must be invented from scratch. Because in a world where information is free, the question is no longer what you know, but how you use it.
In this new reality, school must become a laboratory of questions, not an answer factory.
Today, every child with a smartphone has access to more knowledge than all the academics and Nobel laureates combined. But what value is that knowledge if you don't know how to use it?
What if you swallow it whole, unchewed, unfiltered, without questioning? Students don't need to memorize endless lists of dates and formulas, but rather ask the right questions: why, how, what if?
The teacher should no longer be the oracle of truth, but the conductor of a research process where the student tests, doubts, and experiments.
Information filtering is the vital skill of the AI century. In the endless ocean of data, every click can lead you to accurate knowledge or to a deceptive illusion.
Only a mind trained to distinguish argument from propaganda, fact from opinion, science from pseudoscience, has a chance of surviving in this new reality. This is precisely why the importance of classical foundations cannot be lost.
If children don't learn to write well, to read literature, to know the structure of language, then AI will always give them beautiful answers, but they won't know how to read them, nor understand them.
A clear writing is a clear thought. A literary text is a training ground for the imagination. And imagination is the only weapon that protects you from becoming a machine.
Mathematics, too, is not simply a list of formulas, but the language of logic, order, and structure of thought. Anyone who does not know how to think mathematically will be overwhelmed by the numerical illusions that AI endlessly generates.
Physics, chemistry, biology should not be learned for an exam, but to understand the material reality that surrounds us. Without this foundation, every encounter with the world is a dangerous game of myths and illusions. And then, philosophy.
Declared dead every time a new technology appears, but always necessary. Because only philosophy teaches you to ask questions that even AI cannot answer: what is right, what is beautiful, what is happiness, what is the meaning of life.
A society that abandons philosophy for the sake of technological efficiency is a society that abandons itself.
On the other hand, art and music remain man's last defense.
If AI can compose symphonies and paint paintings that imitate masters, this cannot replace the experience of a violinist trembling in the hand of a student, a fiddle whispering mountain melodies, a couplet groaning in an ode, or a labial polyphony bursting from people's chests - no algorithm reproduces these, because they are sounds of flesh and soul, there is emotion, error, effort - things that no algorithm can reproduce. Sports, on the other hand, is territory that AI cannot enter.
No one enjoys watching a robot score goals. It's the sweat, sacrifice, and lively rivalry that give meaning to sports.
And precisely because our world is becoming increasingly virtual, sport must become more present in school: not only as a physical activity, but as a lesson in perseverance, cooperation, and the real limits of the body.
So what will happen to the university?
There are two options. Either it will degrade into a library-like museum where you only go for nostalgia and Instagram photos. Or it will reinvent itself as a research laboratory, not of the knowledge we already have online, but of deep thought, collaboration, and innovation.
If universities do not accept this transformation, they will turn into empty castles where the diploma is only valuable to parents who want to see their child “educated.” But one thing is clear: it will no longer be a necessity for the job market.
Because the market will demand flexible, curious minds capable of working with technologies that change every day, not people who know by heart the textbooks of a 1980 curriculum.
Will the education system be able to adapt, or will it continue to produce useless degrees as the world works with AI?
Will we understand that school should nurture imagination, critical thinking, and basic skills, or will we abandon children to the hands of algorithms that know everything but understand nothing?
And finally: are we ready to accept that the era of university monopolization of knowledge is over and that the only path to the future is a school that teaches to ask, not simply to answer?
Because, ultimately, artificial intelligence may be smarter than any professor, but it will never be able to have what makes humans human: the ability to doubt, to dream, and to create meaning where science is silent.
And that's why, even in the age of AI, there will never be enough clicks to replace the right question.
