1. Access to information is not access to education

Search engines, online resources and AI can answer individual questions almost immediately. Education, however, is built over time and needs structure and direction.

Universities provide one way to organise that process, but access remains limited by cost, location, admission, schedules and personal circumstances.

High-quality educational material is already widely available online. What is often missing is a coherent path through it.

2. Educational work does not accumulate as much as it could

Every year, some of society’s most knowledgeable people devote an enormous amount of time to preparing and teaching the same subjects at universities around the world. This involves extensive duplication of effort, leaving considerable room for improvement.

Not all explanations are equally useful, though. Exceptional teachers can make ideas that seemed inaccessible become clear and intuitive, but their impact is often limited to the students they happen to teach.

Even when such an explanation is published, it remains one resource among many. There is no shared mechanism that makes it the default starting point and allows later improvements to build on it.

3. Learning should not be shaped around certification

The same course is often responsible for both teaching and assessment. This can tie the learning process to the exam: material is organised around what will be tested, and students are encouraged to focus on passing rather than understanding.

Certification is definitely valuable, but it is not the purpose of education. Learning should be organised first around understanding, without being constrained by a particular assessment.

4. Qualifications lack a common reference

Degrees and courses are defined by each institution rather than against a shared standard. Their content may be documented, but equivalent knowledge can be divided, named and assessed differently across programmes.

Without a common reference, institutions, employers and learners must interpret qualifications case by case. This makes previous learning harder to recognise, limits academic mobility and obscures what a credential actually certifies.

5. Education in a time of accelerating technological change

University programmes require coordination and review, which protects their quality but also makes them slow to change. In fields where required knowledge evolves quickly, this creates a persistent gap between what education provides and what professional work demands.

Recent advances in AI are accelerating technological change. Keeping up with the knowledge needed to understand that change will become increasingly difficult as this acceleration continues.

At the same time, AI gives individuals access to capabilities that once required far more time, expertise or coordination. Greater capability also increases the consequences of acting without sufficient understanding or judgement.

Education must therefore keep pace not only with the technology itself, but with the responsibility that comes with using it.