Nobody Told My Students That the Rules Changed
On AI, ambition and what we owe the class of 2025
I had a conversation recently that stopped me in my tracks.
A student I’ve been mentoring bright, hardworking, genuinely curious got her IB results, secured a place at a good university, and then asked me something I wasn’t expecting.
“Is it still worth it? Going to university, I mean. With AI doing everything?”
She wasn’t being dramatic. She was being honest. And honestly, I didn’t have a clean answer for her.
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since that conversation.
The students finishing the IB right now are stepping into a world that has shifted faster than any of us predicted. The degree that their parents pointed to as the golden ticket, the one that justified two years of Extended Essays and 6 am study sessions, is no longer the automatic passport it once was.
Graduate hiring is contracting in law, finance, and consulting. The entry-level roles that used to absorb thousands of smart, eager graduates every year are quietly disappearing, eaten up by AI tools that do in seconds what a junior analyst used to do in a week.
And yet we’re still telling eighteen-year-olds that the path is clear. Study hard. Get into a good university. The rest will follow.
It won’t. Not automatically. Not anymore.
The funding conversation nobody is having with young people
One of the things I wish someone had told my students much earlier is that ideas need money, and money has rules.
The ones who are going to thrive in this new landscape aren’t just the ones with the best degrees. They’re the ones who understand how value gets created and funded. Who knows the difference between a grant and a venture investment? Who understands why a joint venture fails, not because the idea was bad, but because the structure was wrong.
This is not taught in the IB. It’s barely taught in most undergraduate programmes. And yet it’s the literacy that will determine whether a young person with a good idea can actually do something with it, or watch someone else do it instead.
I’ve watched too many capable young people arrive at the door of opportunity with no idea how to open it.
Alternative paths are not consolation prizes
Something else is changing, and I think it’s actually good news.
The stigma around not going to university or going later, or going differently, is finally starting to crack. Apprenticeships at serious companies, gap years with real structure, community college to university transfer, entrepreneurship straight out of school these are no longer the paths you take when the other one didn’t work out.
For some students, they’re the smarter choice. Full stop.
What I tell families now is this: the question isn’t which university. The question is, what does your child actually need to become who they’re trying to become? Sometimes that’s Oxford. Sometimes it’s two years building something real while everyone else is in a lecture hall.
The bravest thing a parent can do right now is resist the pull of the familiar path when it isn’t the right one for their child.
What AI actually changes and what it doesn’t
AI will not replace curious, courageous, adaptable people. It will absolutely replace people who learned to perform tasks without understanding why those tasks matter.
The IB, at its best, was always trying to build the former. Students who can think across disciplines, hold complexity, and care about the world they’re inheriting. Systems Transformation, the new IB course currently being piloted at UWCSEA right here in Singapore, is the clearest signal yet that the IB knows the landscape has shifted.
But curriculum takes years to change. The students graduating right now are working with the tools they were given.
Which means the people around them, parents, mentors, and educators, need to fill the gap. Not with fear. With honest conversation about what the world actually looks like, and what it genuinely takes to navigate it.
That conversation, in my experience, is the most valuable thing a young person can receive right now.
More valuable, sometimes, than the degree itself.