Who Needs College Anymore?
The Answer Will Change How You Plan Your Future
It’s graduation season! As I write this, my nephew has just finished high school and he’s sleeping on the pull-out couch in the study. He’s visiting New York to celebrate his graduation. In a couple months, he’ll start college at Ole Miss.
To listen to him talk about college is to be reminded that I came up in a different time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at 18…or 22…and the adults in my life reassured me that this was a good thing. In 1997, my college English degree was a ticket to a stable career, even with the college loans I needed to pay back.
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By contrast, my nephew is practical in thinking about what college will unlock for his future. He wants to be a dentist. He sees it as a practical area that he hopes will give him a stable, lucrative career. He has made choices already so that he’ll incur as little debt as possible, choosing to attend a state school and applying for scholarships.
His perspective has been shaped by his parents’ generation. We have been telling him and he can plainly see that college can be a trap if you don’t manage it right. It can sink you into debt while preparing you for…what exactly? Careers that are changing so fast we don’t always know how to train people for them.
All of this begs the question: what’s the purpose of college today? Who needs it?
This week on Hello Monday, I’m talking with Kathleen deLaski, author of Who Needs College Anymore? and founder of the Education Design Lab. Kathleen’s work focuses on what comes after the traditional four-year degree, and on the 62% of people who either don’t go to college or don’t finish.
It turns out, we don’t actually have good data on what happens to them. Most of the advice we give people like my nephew is based on an incomplete and often outdated picture. But understanding alternative paths into the workforce is a critical step to planning for the future.
On this week’s episode, I grill Kathleen about what I should be considering for my own kids, who are just six and four. We’ll talk a bit about what’s happening on college campuses across the United States, particularly at elite colleges like Harvard. She shares some surprises about where learning is actually happening, and how employers respond to this type of training. And she’ll get really crisp on exactly who should go to college, and how we define the value proposition.
If AI can write, why should I?
This question has been getting to me lately. To wit: AI’s voice is encroaching on my own…in my own head. I spend my days immersed in text that comes partially from humans and partially from AI, and remain mostly satisfied by this as long as I’m confident the intent behind the text is driven by actual humans. This breaks down for me when I aspire to write on my own. I find I’ve gone through phases on my own writing since I rebooted this Substack in January:
AI is great! It can express what I want to express with more clarity than I can summon! It can save me from embarrassing mistakes! No one will ever have to know that occasionally I, an otherwise intelligent person, misspell the word “their.”
AI is bumming me out. Yes, it’s nailing my headlines. Yes, it’s capturing the context of my conversations on Hello Monday. Yes, I can sometimes even see the data that suggests that people are more responsive to the AI’s impersonation of me than they are to me…. but what am I supposed to do with my early mornings, if not think out loud on a screen while I sip my coffee?
AI is distancing me from you. I used to write to feel close to people, often people I didn’t even know, who would hit reply and send back their thoughts in reaction to my own. This was the joy of the work, the reason I did it. Now you can’t be sure if any certain turn of phrase or paragraph comes from me, or from the AI. And while you may trust my intent, you don’t owe my work your time in the same way.
AI is distancing me from me. I’ve lately realized I can’t hear my own writing voice in my head the way that I could a year ago. I’m too busy trying to strip all of AI’s identifying factors from my work. Have I gotten rid of all the Em dashes? How about the colons? Does that clause sound like a ChatGPT clause? I’m trying so hard *not* to sound like the technology that I’m not sure what I sound like.
If you’ve made is this far, you might have some thoughts of your own on this topic. I’d love to hear them—it would be helpful to me. How are you thinking about this for yourself? What does it mean to be a writer in 2025? Will Vauhini Vara’s book, which I have ordered, help me understand myself? Will you forgive me if I misuse the word “their?”
