The two largest Central Asian countries have embarked on a higher education spree. In Uzbekistan since 2020 almost 100 new universities have opened, swelling the number of BA candidates in the country by some 400,000. In Kazakhstan, hardly a week goes by without an announcement from the Ministry of Education ballyhooing the opening of another foreign campus on Kazakh soil. In taking this path, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are a bit late to the party, but they are joining a world-wide consensus, shared among students, universities, governments, society, and business, that more BA graduates are a good thing. Nonetheless, there are signs that this consensus is coming apart, and this could lead to serious complications both in Central Asia and beyond.
THE CONSENSUS. WHY GET A BA?
From a student perspective the incentives look obvious. With a BA under their belt they will likely get a well-paying job (all of which require such credentials). A degree acts as proof of social adequacy and, frankly, will also provide the student with 3 or 4 years to have fun, socializeand develop a sense of self. Moreover, the degree course will usually enable the student to learn to think in deep and complex ways
From a university’s perspective BA students pay the bills, allowing for expansion and more knowledge creation. The best BA students further the university’s knowledge creation functionand loyal and succesful alumni can provide significant resources.
Society and business also benefits – Successful economies need more knowledge workers.
They help to provide social stability – students studying keep young people off the streets during a volatile period of their lives. After graduation they work, have families and pay taxes and some graduates become social, academic, economic and political leaders. Finally, graduates have skills businesses need to expand and grow. They require supplemental training, but if universities didn’t produce graduates, businesses would have to do it themselves at a much higher cost.
WHAT IS UPSETTING THIS CONSENSUS?
The useful half life of the knowledge and skills students get from their BA has been getting shorter, however. If the reason to get a BA from the student’s perspective is about getting a better paid job, the investment of time and money may soon not be worth it. As for credentials, already in the technology/IT world, companies simply do not care whether students have a degree if they can do the work. More frightening, AI is increasingly able to do a satisfactory job filling posts in the knowledge economy. For many graduates there may soon be nothing relevant to do. Only those who enrolled to learn and think deeply about complex subjects who have worked exceptionally hard will be in demand. It is of course possible that AI will create new jobs (as earlier technological leaps did) and this will lead to a demand for a further expansion of the knowledge workforce. But this is not the expectation of those investing billions in AI development.
For students, social adequacy may remain relevant for some time, as there will be a lag between the loss of relevance of the BA and its waning social prestige. But is the ecosystem of the massified university necessary for this? Perhaps there are other ways to provide socialization without the expense of offering degree programs that most students neither need nor want.
Keeping people beneficially engaged, learning skills and not idle is valid but not everyone wants (or needs) a degree. Is there a better way to identify the group of people who can and will benefit without wasting resources on the 85% who never wanted this kind of education but had to pretend they did in order to get the better paid jobs? And how should they be trained? There are university projects in the world, including inVision U in Kazakhstan, trying to answer these questions, but they are few and far between.
Taken together, these factors will likely lead to a reduction of demand among students for BA places, first in countries where costs are paid out-of-pocket, and later where taxes subsidize education if governments perceive that these investments are not producing economically beneficial results.
The consensus will also come under pressure from within universities. Universities are conservative. While they may not love the implications of fewer students, the alternatives appear much worse, so until and unless students begin voting with their feet universities won’t change much. British and American institutions have been hedging against a graduate downturn by exporting excess capacity, but this will not work when students there, too, realize that a BA is no longer a reliable meal ticket. Since most universities can’t attract more serious students, they will likely respond to lower demand by offering shorter and cheaper programs but this will a) cut revenue and lead to fewer faculty and b) begin to cut into the social benefits for students (perhaps the only function universities might be able to fulfill better than anyone else). To survive, universities will need to reinvent themselves to reach different audiences with programs relevant to societies in which AI, overseen by a small and elite cadre of truly brilliant and well-educated humans, does most of the knowledge work.
From society’s perspective, the situation is even more complicated. If an expanding knowledge workforce is no longer needed, what will societies do with upwardly mobile citizens? The problem will be particularly acute where there is a surplus of young people (as in Central Asia). Erstwhile BA students do not want to work as plumbers or farmers but the knowledge economy may not be able to absorb them. Most likely some form of universal basic income will have to be provided to deal with social stability. Perhaps shorter-term programs that produce humans who need to fulfill knowledge-related tasks will grow, but the resources that encouraged the enormous expansion of BA populations will dry up.
But if society is going to invest in the creation a new educated elite, there will be a demand that a much higher percentage of the remaining BA students get a superb education. And business will want an even bigger say in what and how they learn, as they will hire people only when a human can outperform AI.
For Central Asian countries the new normal will be jarring. Significant resources have gone into a robust expansion of mediocre BA-level programs in the hope that new graduates will help lift these countries into the middle-tier of economies. Unfortunately, however, what will likely be needed going forward is not a large group of acceptable BA graduates, but a small number of exceptionally well-trained individuals who can do things AI will, for now, not be capable of. Can these countries shift from quantity to quality? What will happen to the bulge of young people who had hoped to take their place in the ranks of high earning knowledge workers?
by Andrew Wachtel, President, inVision U