This weekend, I took a deep dive into AI-powered educational technology and found that creating a high-quality online course in subjects like history or business can now be done in just a few hours. With over 25 years of experience in e-learning and course design, having taught or built more than 300 college and law school courses, it's clear to me that the landscape of higher education is on the brink of a major transformation.
EdTech will allow corporations, NGOs, training companies, must about anyone to create low-cost courses, exams, lectures for online use with high standards and quality. Colleges and universities may suffer or even close if they do not remain agile and innovate quickly.
EdTech is Redefining Education - Educational technology (EdTech) is revolutionizing the way we facilitate learning. Traditionally, we've defined EdTech as the management of high-tech resources, processes, and innovations to enhance education. But the tools available today are pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Now, platforms powered by artificial intelligence can seamlessly create video lectures from text, populate courses with textbook-quality content in minutes, and deliver personalized learning experiences that once took months to build.
Liberal Arts Colleges: Becoming Obsolete? The rise of EdTech raises an important question: Is attending an expensive liberal arts college still necessary? While there are valid reasons for young adults to seek the social experiences that traditional colleges offer, the reality is that AI and technology have made it possible to access top-tier education without the hefty price tag.
Many colleges have shut down in recent years, and for good reason including bloated budgets, unaffordable campuses and poor recruiting. However, online-taxpaying institutions are not only more cost-effective, but they are also more agile and better positioned to thrive in the AI-driven education landscape provided they have access to students who can get loans.
A 1000% Boost in Admissions - These innovative, nimble online-colleges can use AI to increase their admissions by 1000% if they are willing to embrace the technology. Producing high-quality online courses and e-learning content is now ten times cheaper than it was just a year or two ago.
Without the burden of bureaucratic inefficiencies, agile institutions can offer competitive education at a fraction of the cost of traditional colleges In contrast, giant non-profits that don’t pay any corporate taxes are ill equipped to adapt as their organizational charts are slow to innovate.
A Shift in Government Recognition - The importance of course specializations and certifications over traditional degrees has even caught the attention of the U.S. government. In 2020, the President issued an executive order recognizing that these certifications can be as valuable as a diploma for certain jobs. This shift means there’s less need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a degree unless it’s required for specific professions like law, nursing, medicine, or accounting.
AI’s Growing Impact Across Industries - AI is not just transforming education; it is set to impact creative fields as well. From art and music to coding and web design, AI is becoming an indispensable tool. It’s also revolutionizing content creation for books, audio, and online media by automating the production process, drastically reducing costs.
It also has some fun aspects as customers can apply various types of speaking accents to audio books and lectures. The EdTech technology allows authors like myself to select English proper or even an Australian accent if I like for my audio books.
The Future of Custom Learning - In the future, large corporations and organizations will benefit greatly from custom learning solutions powered by AI. This weekend, I found over 20 online platforms alone that allow the rapid creation and customization of courses complete with quizzes, exams, and interactive content. Some can even help with AI video lecture and avatar creation such as Learnworlds or Pictory.ai.
This kind of custom, on-demand learning will be key to addressing the needs of today’s fast-paced work environments. As a note, they are now calling these course building platforms “LMS Learning Management Systems”. A Learning Management System (LMS) is a software application that helps organizations manage and deliver learning programs which used to be an internal process but now can be outsourced to amazing AI driven educational companies. I suppose in the next 3 years, we will find out which of these AI educational companies will be the market leaders.
College Closures are Massive - Over the past decade, a significant number of U.S. colleges have closed due to various factors such as declining enrollment and financial instability. Between 2016 and 2024, at least 70 colleges either closed or merged, with 48 of those institutions shutting down entirely. Many closures were due to financial struggles exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In fact, between 2004 and 2021, 861 colleges and nearly 9,500 campuses have closed. Many for-profit schools have also closed in recent years that served mostly women and minorities, and these schools were typically shut down by bureaucratic regulators who may believe that taxpaying schools take students from local public schools.
However, everyone knows that online education can help with gainful employment just as much as anyone attending courses at a 50,000-person university that has classes with 300 students being taught by a TA (Teaching Assistant) who may not even speak English at a college level.
MOOCS – Massive Open Online Courses - The MOOC was all the rage over the last 10 years. Some of the big MOOC clearinghouses went from zero to billions in market cap over the last 10 years. If you check out Coursera, EdX or Udemy, you will see what I mean. Many of these companies prided themselves for their eyeballs and users. These MOOC entities would allow big colleges to put courses on their systems for people around the world to take.
Many professors at state colleges have been selling their courses via MOOCs for years and selling an attendance certificate with the college crest etc. for completing the class. This was a cheap way for somebody from offshore to take a class at the University of California or Harvard.
Serving The Most Vulnerable - According to Harvard, E-learning and EdTech has proven to be particularly beneficial for various groups, such as individuals with disabilities, parents, rural students, and caregivers for the elderly. Online education offers flexibility that allows these groups to access educational opportunities in ways that traditional college settings may not support.
Diversity and Real Inclusion - Online education does not care about your race or religion. E-learning companies will generally take you, and they will teach you if you are willing to learn, do the work, and pay the fees. However, you get what you put into it. If you are not learning, studying and performing in your classes, then you are wasting your time and money.
Anyone that gives their best and graduates from an e-learning program is usually prepared to be “job-ready” at least for good entry level jobs. Further, Internet driven e-learning has served the military and veterans quite well over the last 25 years.
Liberal Arts Schools – Ethics and Professionalism Hits a New Low - In recent years, several top university presidents have faced significant backlash and, in some cases, have been fired for failing to unequivocally denounce acts of genocide where Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University lost their jobs.
With so many schools losing their bearings with regard to rudimentary values, basic ethics, and educational professionalism, many are now considering enrolling in online education from politically neutral bodies who transcend these types of biases.
Further, with Harvard and other schools problems with alleged discrimination against Asians, it makes you wonder who the bigots really are. See: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard Also, please remember that Asian nations include 48 Countries around the world.
Subject Matter Experts: A Growing Need - Despite all the advancements in AI, there remains a crucial role for human oversight. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will continue to play a vital role in ensuring the quality, accuracy, and relevance of AI-generated content. Every piece of content, whether it's text, audio or video for a course or a training program, requires fact-checking, error correction, and quality control.
Standards Value and Quality - As for standards, it used to be that top schools were so much better, with better credentialed professors while public schools may not be quite as good. However, the public school university education may be more difficult as the hand-holding and coddling of students does not happen so much at public colleges. This is also because private non-profits can’t afford to lose students paying $70,000 dollars a year as each university usually has a tight budget where administrators and professors are paid high salaries.
On average, tuition and fees at for-profit taxpaying colleges is around $31,000 per year, while private non-profit colleges that don’t pay taxes charge around $40,700 per year. This means that, on average, attending a “taxpaying for-profit” college can be about $9,700 cheaper per year than attending a private non-profit college.
While I teach for a top-tier law school that is part of a public university, I realize that some public school and community colleges are a great value, but the majority are expensive. The average university-student spends $58,628 per academic year living on campus at a non-taxpaying private school, $38,768 of it on tuition and fees. The average cost of college at most (non-taxpaying) (Non Profit Tax Exempt) colleges in the United States is $38,270 per student per year, including books, supplies, and daily living expenses.
Again, this sadly shows how taxpaying education companies can charge much less than the outlandish fees charged by “non-profits”.
As for quality, Harvard University gives out lots of A's with the typical student with a GPA of around 3.7 to 3.8. Yale University: Similar to Harvard, the average GPA for paying students is around 3.6 to 3.8. Other Ivy League schools follow this trend, with the average GPA in most being over 3.6. From a quality standpoint and kids getting pushed through the classes, how can anyone say that a public university in Mississippi or Montana is easier or with less quality than some school handing out A’s or B+’s to almost everyone?
Free Online College Courses and Degrees - In recent news, some politicians can more clearly see the future and want to invest in EdTech for all. For example, 45th President Donald Trump wants to facilitate a free online university for all. Further, since Obama implemented his 90-10 lending rule, it destroyed much of online education as we know it. However, with AI, e-learning is poised to come back with a vengeance.
With all of this in mind, it does seem that leftist politicians have fought against the expansion of cost-effective education in the private sector. We suppose that lobbyists and politicians are trying to protect lavish professor and administrator salaries, but by doing so, they prevent young people from all races and creeds from having access to affordable higher education and essential training such as nursing and medical assistant diplomas. In essence, this is yet another agenda to gouge the middle class with high fees, tuition, scarcity of essential workers, and living expenses.
Conclusion - In 1728, one of the earliest forms of distance learning was offered by Caleb Phillips, who advertised in the Boston Gazette for students to learn shorthand via mailed lessons. Students would receive assignments and instructions through the postal service, making this one of the first recorded examples of correspondence education, a precursor to modern distance learning in the United States. 300 years later, new technologies, the internet, new LMS Learning Management System platforms, and the age of EdTech have now reached new heights.
In conclusion, AI has the potential to reshape education in ways futurists predicted decades ago. With the quality gap between taxpaying education companies and non-profit colleges being closed over the last 30 years, public and private universities alike need to wake up to their outdated, bloated and overpriced structures. Overall, the ability to leverage one expert's knowledge through AI-produced content has made education for all more potentially accessible and affordable, and we're only beginning to see the vast possibilities.
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Commissioner George Mentz JD MBA CILS CWM® is the first in the USA to rank as a Top 50 Influencer & Thought Leader in: Management, PM, HR, FinTech, Wealth Management, and B2B according to Onalytica.com and Thinkers360.com. George Mentz JD MBA CILS is a CWM Chartered Wealth Manager ®, global speaker - educator, tax-economist, international lawyer and CEO of the GAFM Global Academy of Finance & Management ®. The GAFM is a EU accredited graduate body that trains and certifies professionals in 150+ nations under standards of the: US Dept of Education, ACBSP, ISO 21001, ISO 991, ISO 29993, QAHE, ECLBS, and ISO 29990 standards. Mentz is also an award winning author and award winning graduate law professor of wealth management of one of the top 30 ranked law schools in the USA.