We hear the same chorus everywhere. In labour markets transformed by AI, geopolitical volatility, and climate change, the most valuable skills are adaptability, critical thinking, ethical judgment, learning agility, and resilience.

Everyone broadly agrees, at least theoretically, that knowledge transmission is no longer the core purpose of higher education, that a degree alone is insufficient, and that lifelong learning will define modern careers. We even acknowledge the difficulty of preparing students for jobs that do not yet exist or, worse, that may disappear within a decade.

And yet, despite this near-universal consensus, business schools and universities behave largely as if none of this impacts their core value proposition. Degree structures remain mostly unchanged. Learning is still organised around fixed timeframes, credit accumulation, and course completion. Assessment continues to reward knowledge reproduction rather than practical capabilities. The central output of nearly every institution remains the same credential it has offered for decades, if not centuries.

This widening gap between rhetoric and reality is increasingly visible to employers. Prominent technology leaders have publicly questioned the relevance of degrees as hiring filters, emphasising demonstrated skills over formal credentials. Under Sundar Pichai, e.g., Google removed degree requirements for many roles and launched its own career certificates, positioning them as alternatives to four-year degrees in hiring decisions.

Importantly, this critique does not come only from outside academia. Economist Bryan Caplan argues that universities function primarily as credentialing systems rather than learning systems. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing, contends that higher education is approaching a bubble, sustained more by brand recognition than by validated outcomes, and that labour-market signaling will increasingly shift elsewhere. Having spent nearly two decades in higher-education leadership myself, as a business school dean and university president, I have also discussed the profound transformation, if not disruption, of the sector. Higher education is not disappearing. But without a fundamental rethinking of its model, it will be disrupted, either from within or by external actors.

Students prioritise employability over education

To understand the pressure business schools face, we must be candid about student motivations. While they may value learning, personal growth, and intellectual exploration, for most, the decisive reason for enrolling at an institution is employability, especially in a future shaped by automation, AI, and sustained labour-market disruption. Students choose institutions they believe will maximise their chances of securing meaningful work.

Degrees from elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, or Yale function as powerful labour market signals, not because they guarantee competence, but because they reduce uncertainty for employers. In this sense, a degree is less a record of what a graduate knows than a proxy for exclusive selection. Employers infer capability from institutional prestige, assuming that graduates possess desirable attributes largely because those institutions admitted strong candidates in the first place.

This signalling mechanism is convenient, but it is not equivalent to certifying capability. Universities implicitly promise job readiness without directly measuring it. Crucially, the capabilities future labour markets value most rarely appear on transcripts. Have you ever seen a grade next to a student’s critical thinking potential or degree of ethical judgement? Business schools certify what is easy to test, not what is most consequential. The result is a growing disconnect between what business schools measure and what employers actually seek.

Higher education institutions often respond defensively to such statements, insisting they are not job-training centres, for fear of subordinating themselves to short-term labour-market demands. This concern is legitimate but incomplete. Teaching students to think critically, adapt to uncertainty, and exercise judgment is not vocational narrowness; it is precisely what evolving labour markets require. The real danger is not that business schools become too close to employment realities, but that they become increasingly irrelevant to them.

Degrees as a time-based product in a competence-based world

Traditional degrees are time-based bundles: three or four years for undergraduate study, one or two for a master’s. These durations are historical artifacts shaped by regulation and institutional habit, not by learning science. Time served remains the primary unit of progress, even though it is a poor proxy for competence.

If the goal is capability, why is advancement measured in semesters completed rather than readiness demonstrated? Why does learning end when time is up rather than when competence is achieved? These questions are rarely asked because they challenge the legitimacy of the degree itself.

Most degrees are organised around courses that transmit knowledge and assess it through exams or assignments. Yet many of the capabilities business schools claim to develop, such as adaptability and resilience, are acquired largely outside the classroom. Internships, student initiatives, entrepreneurship, volunteering, and international experiences often contribute more to these outcomes than lectures do.

Without question, students develop real-world capability through internships or study-abroad experiences, yet business schools rarely structure, coach, or rigorously assess these environments. The most formative learning remains peripheral to the formal curriculum, even though it underpins the outcomes institutions publicly claim.

Business schools and universities now face a strategic choice. They can continue to defend fixed-duration degrees and optimise learning within them. Or they can decouple certification from time and commit to validating competence wherever and whenever it is acquired. The latter challenges deep assumptions—but aligns more closely with how learning actually occurs.

Business schools as default certifiers, not natural owners

Business schools and universities remain the most trusted certifiers of job-market readiness. But this trust is historical, not inevitable. Degrees function as hiring shortcuts, not because they precisely measure capability, but because employers lack better signals. Once more accurate indicators emerge, older proxies weaken.

Other industries have undergone similar shifts. Hotels relied on institutional trust until platforms like TripAdvisor introduced reputation-based validation. Taxis depended on scarce licenses until Uber replaced upfront permission with continuous assessment through in-app evaluations. Higher education is vulnerable for the same reason. We assume graduates of a given program possess similar capabilities, even though individual competencies are rarely measured. This fiction persists because individual certification has historically been costly. But technological and methodological advances are rapidly reducing that cost.

Skill certification is often dismissed as superficial or gamified. Yet complex attributes such as language proficiency or leadership potential are already assessed at scale. By comparison, final exams are blunt instruments. Once a credible third party can reliably answer the question “Is this person ready?”, the degree loses its monopoly as the dominant hiring signal.

Business schools as optimisers of learning trajectories

If skill certification becomes mainstream, business schools will be judged less by who they admit and more by how much students improve. Prestige based on input quality will give way to accountability for learning gain, raising a long-standing question: do elite institutions create exceptional capability, or do exceptional individuals merely pass through them?

Business schools rarely measure learning trajectories. They certify completion, not transformation. Yet this is precisely where they could create distinctive value: as platforms that optimise learning curves rather than containers that deliver content.

Experiential learning already points in this direction. Internships, exchanges, and student initiatives are rich learning environments, yet business schools typically manage them administratively rather than pedagogically. Few institutions systematically prepare students for these experiences, support them during participation, or rigorously assess the development of capabilities afterwards.

If business schools and universities fail to assume this role, motivated learners will increasingly bypass them, assembling their own experiential pathways, accessing knowledge at low cost online, and validating skills through emerging credentialing platforms. Given the time and expense of traditional degrees, this alternative might become increasingly attractive.

Not useless, but inefficient as capability certifiers

This argument is not anti-knowledge. Conceptual foundations remain essential for data-driven decision-making, systems thinking, and interdisciplinary problem-solving. But knowledge itself is no longer scarce. What is scarce is credible validation, as well as well-designed systems that optimise and coordinate learning.

The future business school is, therefore, less a place of instruction than a platform for learning optimisation and validation. In such a model, universities would recognise learning acquired anywhere, structure experiential pathways, rigorously assess skills, and certify readiness when competence is demonstrated rather than when credits accumulate.

If business schools do not build this platform, others will. Employer consortia, professional networks, or technology firms may become default validators, but without academia’s commitment to public purpose or long-term thinking.

Regulation is often cited as the main obstacle. I have made that argument myself. But what regulation governs most tightly is the granting of degrees, not the certification of competence. And regulation is not immutable: many past transformations in higher education were once deemed incompatible with existing frameworks. Structural vulnerability does not disappear by denying it.

Developed deliberately, measured methodically

To become genuine learning-curve optimisers and credible certifiers of labor-market-relevant skills, business schools must act deliberately. They must actively develop such skills rather than assuming they emerge indirectly, and they must measure them explicitly.

Skills such as adaptability can be cultivated through intentional pedagogical design: project briefs that change midstream, datasets with late-revealed flaws, shifting simulations, or capstone “stress tests” with real stakeholders. Even international exchanges could be allocated less by preference and more by learning potential. Brainstorming with faculty would likely yield many practical approaches.

Measuring skills such as resilience requires moving beyond proxy signals toward performance-based evidence. AI-powered virtual environments may be particularly promising, as they allow observation of behaviour under pressure rather than self-reported beliefs. In simulated settings, students can face setbacks, ambiguity, and escalating challenges over time. Resilience is then assessed through observable recovery behaviour, namely, how quickly students re-engage, adapt strategies, and improve after failure, providing a credible basis for certification.

Measurement will never be perfect. But traditional grades are also imperfect predictors of professional success. Making skills visible, assessed, and recorded on transcripts would already be a major step forward—and one that can be refined over time.

Change-resistant, not change-incapable

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how quickly higher education can adapt when necessary. Institutions that had resisted online teaching for years moved entire programs online almost overnight. This episode revealed not incapacity, but conditional resistance.

Institutions most likely to shift toward skill-centric models are those already deviating from conventional structures. Minerva University is one example, with a curriculum organised around explicit competencies assessed through performance.

Another path lies with newly founded universities designed around distinct missions rather than retrofitted onto legacy models. History shows that reinvention is possible. Berlin’s Humboldt University helped establish the modern research university by uniting teaching and research. The UK’s Open University represented a radical redesign at scale, built around open admissions and distance learning.

Elite universities could also lead this shift. They have resources and brand insulation, though they often face stronger internal constraints. Stanford University illustrates how prestige need not preclude adaptation—from its postwar embrace of industry collaboration to its early role in legitimising high-quality online learning by unbundling world-class instruction from formal degrees without diluting academic standards.

Ultimately, the business schools and universities best positioned to lead change combine institutional credibility and strong funding with faculty willing to rethink roles and practices, typically under visionary leadership capable of challenging entrenched structures.

The question is not whether a platform-based business school or university model would be perfect. It would not. The real question is who will define and validate readiness for the future of work: business schools, or someone else? If business schools take ownership of learning optimisation and skill validation, they can preserve academic values while remaining central to society. If they cling to degrees as sacred artefacts, they risk becoming peripheral credential providers in a system that has already moved on. The direction of disruption is clear. Only its pace and leadership remain uncertain.

About the author:

Andreas Kaplan is a higher-education leader with international experience across multiple countries and continents. At ESCP Business School, he gained deep insight into European higher education through senior leadership roles on campuses in Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Turin, and Warsaw, including serving as Rector and Dean of ESCP Berlin and ESCP Paris (Sorbonne Alliance). As President of KLU Kühne Logistics University, a young and entrepreneurially oriented university in Hamburg, he expanded this expertise globally by establishing institutional presences in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. He began his academic career at ESSEC and Sciences Po Paris.

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