cooked
adjective
having achieved a state of failure; being doomed
I’ve spent the past year across continents and at conferences, listening to our field take its own temperature. Last week’s AIRC conference was simply the last stop of the season — and I walked away with a sobering realization.
We are still talking about symptoms, not the disease.
Visa volatility.
OPT anxieties.
H-1B bottlenecks.
Skyrocketing tuition.
Shrinking budgets.
Contractions and layoffs.
All real.
All urgent.
All missing the point.
Because not once did we ask the question that sits beneath all the turbulence, the question that determines whether U.S. higher education will remain globally competitive or quietly slide into irrelevance:
What if the real crisis isn’t immigration or politics — but that universities have stopped creating value?
Immigration policy isn’t the root cause.
Economic uncertainty isn’t the root cause.
Competition from other destinations isn’t the root cause.
The root cause is internal.
The root cause is structural.
The root cause is a 200-year-old academic model limping along in an AI-powered world.
Even if the borders open wide, even if Washington becomes welcoming again, even if every geopolitical headwind softens — universities will still face the same existential crisis.
The U.S. is losing ground not just because of policy. It’s losing ground because universities are failing at the one thing society needs them to do.
They have forgotten how to create talent.
This is not a political problem.
It is an educational one.
And until we acknowledge that, universities are cooked (as the kids would say)
THE LONG DRIFT INTO IRRELEVANCE
There are moments when institutions lose the plot so slowly they don’t notice the decay. Higher education is there now — simmering in complacency, convinced its old recipes still work, unaware the world has already moved on.
Universities were meant to be the birthplace of talent.
That was the contract.
That was the promise.
That was the entire justification for their existence.
But
Does a degree still signal readiness?
Does a major still map to the world of work?
Does a transcript reflect anything employers actually value?
If employers increasingly bypass degrees to test skills directly, what does that say about the credibility of the degree itself?
We know the answer.
The degree is a weak signal.
The major is a relic.
The transcript is an artifact.
This isn’t malice.
It’s not a conspiracy.
It’s incompetence with an ounce of negligence — a system too enamored with its own rituals to recognize its irrelevance.
Meanwhile, a parallel ecosystem has exploded online — fast, adaptive, AI-powered, infinitely accessible.
Technical skills? AI teaches them better.
Knowledge delivery? AI delivers it faster.
Assessment? AI personalizes it instantly.
And yet universities cling to three-hour lectures built on slides designed in 2011.
If that sounds harsh, good.
Higher education has been too gentle with itself for too long.
THE JOB UNIVERSITIES MISUNDERSTOOD
The job of a university was never to transfer information.
It was to transform humans.
Information is infinite now.
Expertise is democratized.
Students can learn Python, design thinking, geopolitics, storytelling, and protein folding from AI agents that update every hour.
They do not need a faculty senate to approve a syllabus when the world has already changed twice since the agenda was drafted.
So what is a university for?
To forge future-ready leaders.
To cultivate judgment, resilience, imagination, cross-cultural fluency.
To build identity, not transcripts.
To expose students to the world’s complexity, not shield them with content.
Right now, universities are failing at the one thing only they can do.
Instead, they offer:
• Majors — rigid boxes in a boundaryless world
• Credits — seat time dressed up as progress
• Lectures — passive consumption masquerading as learning
• Assessment — punishment disguised as feedback
• Brochures — predictable, interchangeable, uninspired
Walk through any recruitment fair. You’ll hear the same pitch, said 300 different ways:
“We’re ranked…”
“We’re located…”
“We offer 150+ majors…”
“We have 200+ clubs…”
It’s the marketing equivalent of reheated leftovers. No wonder students stop listening.
The future doesn’t want menus.
The future wants meals — real experiences, real growth, real impact.
Universities aren’t short on intelligence. They’re short on courage.
Their governance structures are built to prevent change, not support it.
Committees slow innovation to a crawl.
Accreditation protects structure, not relevance.
Faculty incentives reward research productivity, not student transformation.
THE CREDENTIAL THAT WILL REPLACE THE DEGREE
Not microcredentials.
Not badges.
Not certificates.
A Proof-of-Impact Archive — a living record of what a student has built, solved, led, endured, influenced, adapted to, and contributed.
Evidence of readiness.
Not GPA.
Not credits.
Not time spent.
Proof.
A student “graduates” not when the calendar says so, but when they cross a threshold of competence and contribution.
Majors become irrelevant.
Seat time becomes irrelevant.
Time itself becomes irrelevant.
Transformation is the only outcome that matters.
THE FUTURE-READY UNIVERSITY
So what replaces the old model?
Not tweaks.
Not redesigned syllabi.
Not “interactive lectures” masquerading as innovation.
A fundamentally different architecture. A campus built for formation, not information — for identity, capability, and contribution, not credits.
And this isn’t just an intellectual exercise for me.
This is the model that has shaped the early blueprint of Meraki — the university experience I am now working to bring into the world.
A clean-slate design for what higher education should feel like in an AI-powered era: more collisions, more friction, more proof of who a student is becoming.
At the heart of Meraki is a weekly rhythm intentionally structured to develop future-ready talent through real-world complexity, not classroom compliance.
Monday Morning: The Collision
Each week begins with a town hall — where students are confronted with the world as it is:
A diplomat negotiating peace.
A startup founder who failed twice.
A climate scientist warning of tipping points.
A policymaker navigating ethical dilemmas.
A social activist pushing for structural change.
Students don’t study issues in abstraction;
they begin the week by confronting reality.
Tuesday to Thursday: The Wrestle
Students work in mixed-interest cohorts — not majors — wrestling with the week’s theme.
An engineering student debating geopolitics with an art student.
A psychology student analyzing systemic risk with a biology student.
A business student building prototypes with a political science student.
This is not group work. It is interdisciplinary friction, the exact texture of the world they will enter.
Faculty stop lecturing.
They become guides.
Curators of experiences.
Facilitators of discomfort.
Interrogators of assumptions.
Designers of learning, not deliverers of content.
Friday: The Contribution
Students present something real — not polished, not perfect, but honest:
A stance.
A model.
A prototype.
A critique.
A plan.
A reflection.
A reframed problem.
And every week adds a new layer to the student’s Proof-of-Impact Archive — a living record of who they are becoming.
Not test scores.
Not grades.
Not credits.
Evidence.
Capabilities.
Decisions under pressure.
Leadership in ambiguity.
Impact in motion.
Students “graduate” when they hit a threshold of readiness — not an arbitrary number of credits.
This is the future.
Not theoretical.
Not optional.
Not someday.
This is what a university must become — or risk extinction.
And anything less will first be rejected by students, then by employers, and finally by the market itself.
THE COST OF DOING NOTHING
This is why it no longer matters who sits in the Oval Office.
It no longer matters what the visa bulletin says next month.
It no longer matters what acronym the next immigration reform carries.
Those things shape the industry at the margins.
They do not fix the core.
Because even after the politics improve, universities will still face the same existential reckoning:
If you are not forging talent, you are not fulfilling your purpose.
If you are not preparing students for the future, you do not deserve their trust.
And if you are not evolving, you will not survive.
The institutions that cling to tradition will cling themselves into irrelevance.
The ones that evolve will redefine global education for the next century.
Will universities resist this?
Of course.
Any system built on hierarchy, tradition, and academic ego will resist change until the day it collapses under its own irrelevance.
But resistance doesn’t slow disruption.
It isolates the resisters.
Employers won’t wait.
Students won’t wait.
AI won’t wait.
The world won’t wait.
And even once the political climate improves — because it eventually will — universities will still face the same question:
What exactly are students paying for?
If the answer is “content,” the model is already dead.
If the answer is “transformation,” the work must begin now.
THE RECKONING IS HERE
Universities won’t collapse because of AI.
They’ll collapse because AI exposes how little value they currently create.
They won’t suffer because of migration policy.
They’ll suffer because the degree no longer justifies its cost.
They won’t fade because of global competition.
They’ll fade because they misunderstood the assignment.
They were meant to develop humans.
They settled for delivering content.
They were meant to challenge minds.
They settled for managing credits.
They were meant to forge character.
They settled for measuring compliance.
The ones that survive will be the ones honest enough to admit the truth:
The university of the future isn’t a place where knowledge is delivered.
It’s a place where identity, agency, and capability are forged.
Everything else — the majors, the credits, the catalogs, the rankings — belongs in the archives.
The question now isn’t whether universities can evolve. It’s whether they want to.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
