“Beyond the degree: What education must become in the age of AI”, First Post, April 18, 2026
“A recent report from Lightcast, a global leader in labour market intelligence, highlights a clear paradox at the heart of academia-industry links: degrees are becoming less reliable predictors of future employment outcomes. The credential no longer consistently signals the capabilities organisations actually need. This mismatch has been growing for years, but artificial intelligence is accelerating it and making the gap impossible to ignore.
For decades, a degree stood in for deeper judgement. Employers treated it as a reliable signal that someone could do the thinking their job required: a finance graduate would build models, a computer scientist would write software, and a policy graduate would draft regulations. That convenient shortcut always hid a difficulty. What employers actually relied on was visible output, the spreadsheet, the report, or the code, not a direct measure of how a person thinks. Artificial intelligence is exposing that gap abundantly.
Education’s real deliverable has usually been the capacity to reason, not a narrow list of technical tasks. Good programmes teach students how to structure an argument, test assumptions against messy evidence, and tolerate uncertainty long enough to reach a defensible conclusion. Those habits let graduates move into roles that do not map neatly to their credentials. For a long time the labour market accepted an imperfect trade: visible outputs served as evidence that the underlying reasoning existed. That trade now breaks down because the visible outputs are easier to produce……..”
Read full article at firstpost.com
