universities can’t be fixed
Universities won’t and can’t reinvent themselves to compete with pega6.
Every time I talk about the need for a new post-secondary model, someone inevitably asks,
“why don’t colleges just modernize what they’re doing?”
It’s a fair question, but it assumes:
That colleges want to change; and
That colleges could change even if they wanted to.
But they don’t and they can’t because what is required is a fundamentally new and radically different model . . . like the one we’re building at pega6:
One year;
$15,000;
Agile;
Completely job-skills focused (technical and durable skills);
100% experiential; and
AI first.
to do this, universities would need to dismantle their very foundations
fire all the professors
To make something job-skills focused and experiential would require hiring industry veterans to head up the classrooms because only they know how to create the job-ready employees their industries need.
But universities can’t do that without firing their professors. And tenure systems, union constraints, and century-old hierarchies make that kind of staffing overhaul impossible.
goodbye lectures
Learn-by-doing is the only successful pedagogy for mastering job skills.
Universities still rely on lectures, case studies, textbooks, and exams—a system built for content transmission, not skills mastery.
So, universities would need to overhaul literally everything:
Curriculum design;
Assessment;
Staffing;
Physical spaces;
Technology;
Class structures;
Accreditation models;
And more . . .
colleges just don’t have the culture that allows for that sort of radical transformation
admit they were wrong
For decades, universities have defended their esoteric curriculum by telling people that their purpose has always been to produce “well-rounded people,” not prepare students for the phase after college. (You can see my original post on why universities' understanding of their original purpose is incorrect.)
Making this leap from the esoteric to the pragmatic would require universities to admit, to the public and themselves, that they have drifted away from their original intent and what the world actually needs.
That level of cognitive dissonance is too threatening to their identity, their prestige, their donors, and their culture.
they simply can’t afford to
Colleges literally cannot afford to change.
Imagine a university shifting to a one-year, $15,000 model.
Their cost structure is fundamentally incompatible with a streamlined model.
If they attempted the shift, universities would collapse under their own weight.
universities are simply too bloated to downsize into relevance
This is why innovation in post-secondary education has to come from building something new from the ground up without the legacy constraints that make change impossible.
And this is exactly what pega6 is doing.
