"If AI already knows everything you learn at a top school, why fight to get into one?" The question often comes from parents who studied at good schools themselves, and who now watch a machine write in ten seconds the memo that took them an evening at twenty-five.
My answer is yes, a good school is still worth it. Not quite for yesterday's reasons, and that is what should guide the choice.
What AI makes less rare
For a long time a degree certified two things: that you knew a certain number of things, and that you could produce a certain kind of work, an analysis, a financial model, a briefing note. AI lowers the value of both signals. Knowledge is within everyone's reach, and so is a good first draft.
Entry-level jobs already feel it. A Stanford University study published in November 2025, based on US payroll data, finds a 16% relative decline in employment for 22 to 25 year-olds in the occupations most exposed to AI, while employment of experienced workers stays stable. The tasks that used to train young graduates are precisely the ones AI does best.
It would be wrong to conclude that education no longer matters. What sets a candidate apart is moving, that is all.
What a good school gives, and AI does not
A standard. People rise to the level of the room they are in. Three to five years surrounded by students selected the same way, with teachers who expect a lot, set a bar that no tool provides. AI can mark an essay; it does not make anyone want to do better than the person next to them.
Trained judgement. The faster machines produce, the more value sits with the person who can tell whether the result is right, what is missing and what to do with it. That judgement is built on hard cases, by being contradicted, by presenting work to demanding people. It is the daily life of a good school.
Selection. A hard admission still carries information, because it sums up years of steady work and nobody can sit it in the student's place.
Tomorrow, the network will matter more than yesterday
This is the most underrated point, and the one that makes me optimistic for students who aim high.
When anyone can produce a polished application, a well-turned letter, a presentable project, those documents stop telling candidates apart. A recruiter, an investor or a client who receives a hundred flawless applications looks for something else: someone who knows the candidate and will vouch for them. Trust becomes the scarce resource, and trust travels through people.
A top school's network is not an alumni directory. It is classmates who will found companies, lead teams, invest and hire, and who will remember who kept their word on the group project. It is professors who write a recommendation, alumni who take on an intern because they come from the same school. The fewer entry-level jobs are open to all, the more first doors will open through these ties.
No tool manufactures that capital. It is built at eighteen or twenty, in a specific place, with specific people. It is the best reason to aim for a very good school, and it will weigh more tomorrow than today.
What it changes in choosing a school
If the network matters more, a school is also chosen for the people one will meet there: the range of backgrounds and nationalities, how engaged the alumni are, links with companies and research labs, student societies, exchanges abroad. Rankings remain one marker among others.
And a network only serves those who use it. The student who joins a society, builds a project with others and goes to talk to their professors leaves with far more than a degree. The one who stays alone with their tools leaves with a degree.
What it changes from secondary school
Selective admissions have not gone away: the best schools remain in high demand. The foundations that lead there change little: solid grades, good mathematics, precise writing, English. What changes is how they are used. A secondary student who uses AI without handing it their reasoning, who can work in a team and defend an idea out loud, starts with a head start.
I do not know which jobs will exist in fifteen years, and I am wary of anyone who claims to. What I do know is that you do not choose a school for a job: you choose it for the standard it holds you to and for the people you meet there.
That is what we build with families in an action plan: where the child stands, what they need to build, which schools will open the right doors. I have detailed what AI changes for three common plans, medicine, law and coding, in which path for my child.