Education 2047 : THE LAST DECADE OF UNIVERSITIES: IVORY TOWERS IN THEIR TWILIGHT

Education 2047 #Blog 47 (31 AUG 2025)

Why the old temples of knowledge may not survive the next ten years?

The Sunset Feeling on Campus

Step onto a university campus today and it still looks timeless. Students stroll between lecture halls, convocations carry pomp, and libraries hum quietly. Yet beneath the surface, the foundations are cracking.

For centuries, universities thrived as the custodians of knowledge. They controlled access to professors, books, and credentials. That monopoly is over. Knowledge has escaped. It’s free, abundant, and flowing through every phone, search engine, and AI tutor.

Here’s my blunt prediction: this may be the last decade of universities as we know them. Not because learning has lost value, but because learning has slipped beyond their walls. And if something replaces universities, it won’t be a temple of knowledge. It will be an arena of experience.

Eleven Red Flags of Decline

1. Knowledge is Cheap.
Once rare and precious, knowledge is now free and abundant. MOOCs, YouTube, open repositories, and AI tutors make world-class content accessible to anyone with a smartphone. When the core product you sell is available for free, your business model is doomed.

2. AI is the New Professor.
Generative AI doesn’t just provide answers—it adapts explanations to each learner, gives instant feedback, and simulates real-world problems. Compared to a one-size-fits-all lecture in a crowded hall, AI feels like a personal coach. The traditional professor loses relevance.

3. Degrees Don’t Pay Back.
The return on investment from degrees is declining. Costs are soaring, but jobs no longer come guaranteed. Employers now care more about portfolios, projects, and problem-solving ability than about paper credentials. The prestige of a degree is fading.

4. Credentials Are Unbundled.
Why wait three years for a degree when you can stack Google, AWS, or Coursera certifications in months? Micro-credentials are cheaper, modular, and continuously updated, while university curricula remain frozen in time. Students choose agility over tradition.

5. Industry Is Teaching Itself.
Companies like Tesla, Infosys, and IBM run their own academies and apprenticeship models. Many don’t require degrees at all. When industry itself becomes the teacher, universities are bypassed. The talent pipeline no longer runs through campus gates.

6. Demographic Shifts.
In many regions, student enrolment is shrinking as populations age and birth rates fall. Universities built for mass intake are left with empty seats and bloated infrastructure. What once was their strength—scale—becomes a liability.

7. The Campus Is a Liability.
For centuries, universities flaunted sprawling campuses, lecture halls, and auditoriums. Today these are stranded assets. With VR, XR, and remote labs, students can collaborate and experiment from anywhere. Physical campuses now look like relics of a bygone era.

8. Exams Are Obsolete.
Exams measure recall, but recall is what machines now do best. Employers know marksheets don’t prove real skill. The exam–degree–job conveyor belt is breaking down, leaving universities clutching at rituals that no longer convince.

9. Universities Aim Too Low.
Most universities still operate at the lower rungs of Bloom’s Taxonomy—remembering, understanding, and applying. But real-world work demands evaluating, synthesizing, and creating. The result is cognitive stagnation, where graduates enter the workforce ill-prepared for higher-order challenges.

10. The Social Contract Is Broken.
Universities once symbolized truth, opportunity, and public trust. Today, they are criticized as bureaucratic, elitist, and resistant to change. Their cultural authority has eroded, and society increasingly questions their value.

11. The Tyranny of Compliance.
Universities are compliance machines. Students obey syllabi and exams, faculty chase accreditation rubrics, and institutions submit to regulators. Non-compliance is punished with penalties and failures. But there is no framework to reward originality. A student who challenges the syllabus, or a teacher who innovates in pedagogy, is often penalized for “not covering the curriculum.” In perfecting punishment for non-compliance while ignoring creativity, universities end up breeding conformity. And in a world where AI can out-comply any human, conformity is worthless.

From Knowledge Monopoly to Experience Monopoly

If knowledge is abundant, what’s scarce? Experience.
The future of learning lies not in consuming information but in doing, building, evaluating, and solving real problems.

Imagine institutions where:

Students work on live industry or civic challenges.
Learning is organised in sprints, not semesters.
Portfolios replace marksheets.
Faculty act as mentors and challenge designers, not examiners.

That’s the Experience Hub model. A place where learners don’t just pass exams but produce evidence of competence—products, projects, patents, policies.

Why This Matters for India

India’s demographic dividend won’t last forever. If our universities remain stuck in 20th-century routines, we risk producing millions of degree-holders with little employability.

But if we seize this moment to recast our institutions as studios of experience, India could lead the world. We already have the youth, the entrepreneurial energy, and the policy momentum. What’s needed is courage.

The Courage to Sunset

The university’s twilight is not a tragedy—it’s a graduation. Just as monasteries gave way to universities in medieval times, so too must universities evolve into Experience Hubs.

And this isn’t just my perspective. Futurist Peter Diamandis warns that “education is one of two massive industries… that AI will completely disintermediate, disrupt, democratize, and demonetize.” He argues that the four-year model is already broken: costs rising, jobs uncertain, and curricula frozen in time.

The choice before us is stark: wait for the extinction, or reinvent around experience, evidence, and impact.

No Class. No Exam. No Curriculum. Only Experience, Evidence, and Impact.
That is the manifesto for the learning institutions of the future.

Epilogue: Twilight and Milestones

This essay is part of a longer journey — one that is steadily moving toward the milestone of fifty blogs. Along the way, I have tried to interrogate the assumptions that bind our education systems and offer glimpses of what might lie beyond.

Ivory Towers in Their Twilight is not just a prediction but an inevitability. It connects with the broader arc of my writing: a shift from knowledge monopolies to experience monopolies, from compliance to creativity, from classrooms to arenas of doing.

As I approach that fiftieth marker, my reflections grow sharper. The twilight of the university system, in my view, is not a lament but an inflection point. The question is no longer if the towers will dim, but what new forms of learning will rise in their place. And that is the path I intend to keep exploring in the blogs ahead.

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About the author

The author combines educational leadership with technology foresight in his role as Pro-Chancellor of JIS University, Kolkata. His background includes strategic positions with India's key educational bodies—AICTE and TIFAC—where he developed expertise in translating technological possibilities into educational realities. Co-author of Technology Vision 2035: Roadmap for Education, he has dedicated significant research to understanding how India's learning ecosystems must evolve. The analysis presented here represents his independent thinking on assessment transformation, informed by professional experience but expressed as personal insights.

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§ Breaking Industrial Cages: Society6.0's Path to Educational Liberation by 2035

§ Decoding Human Potential: Why Grades Are Failing Our Future

§ Ancient Wisdom, Digital Age: What Dronachatya Knew About Teaching With AI

§ Will Universities Survive the Age of AI and BCI ?

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§ Breaking the Silos: Remagining Universities without Subjects (PART II)

§ Breaking the Silos: Reimagining Universities without Subjects (PART I)

§ Designed to Label, Doomed to Lose: Rethinking a System that Fails its Learners

§ The Missing Catalyst: Peer Learning as the Core of Educational Transformation

§ The Great Educational Reversal: Responding to AI's New Role in Learning

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§ Liquidating Cognitive Stagnation in UG Education- The 'SPRINT' Model Blueprint for Change

§ Architects of Viksit Bharat: Why Universities must Recognize Achievement over Graduation

§ The Digital Macaulay: A Modern Threat to Indian Higher Education

§ Why Instant Information Demands a Fundamental Rethink of Education Systems?

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§ Rethinking Learning: A World Without Curriculum, Classes, Nor Exams

§ Empowering Learners: Heutagogical Strategies for Indian Higher Education

§ Heutagogy: The Future of Learning, Rendering Traditional Education Obsolete

§ The Forgotten Half: Learning from Fallen Ideas through the Metaphor of Dakshinayana

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§ Weathering the Technological Storm: The Impact of Internet and AI on Education