On a gray San Francisco morning, the kind where the sky feels low enough to touch, Ben Mann watches his daughter chase a kite in a windswept park. The kite jerks and dips, wild and stubborn against the wind. Nearby, a couple sits hunched over a laptop, whispering furiously about school applications, test scores, “enrichment pathways.” Their stress hums in the air like power lines. Ben notices, smiles faintly, and says something that would have baffled his younger self: “Twenty years ago I’d have sent my daughter to top schools. Today I think it doesn’t matter.”
The Old Map: When “Top School” Meant “Top Life”
Two decades ago, the road to a “good life” looked neatly paved: crush your exams, get into a top university, land a job at a respected company, climb the ladder, retire with a decent view and a decent pension. That was the map handed down like an heirloom. It was the story told at family dinners, PTA meetings, career fairs, and in carefully worded letters from guidance counselors.
Ben Mann grew up inside that map. Before cofounding Anthropic, one of the companies at the center of the AI revolution, he’d already walked the standard road: excel in school, aim higher, treat prestige as proof of worth. Top schools weren’t just institutions—they were compasses. You pointed your child at one and hoped they’d arrive somewhere safe and shining.
Back then, if you’d walked into a coffee shop in any major city, you’d hear the same hushed refrain at neighboring tables: “I just want my kid to have options.” Options, of course, were almost always code for “brand-name schools.” Parents talked about education the way some people talk about real estate: limited supply, rising prices, better get in now.
But the world has a way of turning maps into antiques. Technology doesn’t just rearrange industries; it rearranges meaning. And as Ben helped build systems that could draft essays, write code, summarize research papers, and tutor in half a dozen subjects at once, he watched something unexpected happen: the ground under that old educational map started to crack.
The Day the Ground Moved
Imagine being inside the engine room of history as it starts to whir faster. That’s what the AI frontier has felt like: a constant hum of updates and breakthroughs; models that can reason, generate, analyze, and assist with tasks that once required years of specialized training. The kind of work that used to justify four years of university—and sometimes years of debt—can now, in some domains, be accelerated or augmented by a tool you can open in a browser tab.
It’s not that knowledge no longer matters. It’s that the monopoly on knowledge has slipped from locked libraries and lecture halls into a world where most of human understanding, or a rapidly growing slice of it, sits a prompt away. The question “Where did you study?” quietly loses some of its authority when a teenager with curiosity and an AI assistant can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with someone who took the standard path through prestigious gates.
Ben has a front-row seat to this dislocation. He sees people with nontraditional backgrounds using AI tools to leapfrog old credential barriers. A self-taught programmer who learns faster with an AI tutor than he ever did in a classroom. A mid-career nurse exploring bioethics and policy through endless conversations with a language model on late-night shifts. A carpenter experimenting with parametric design because a digital assistant never gets tired of answering “What if we tried this instead?”
Once, the top school was the gatekeeper. Now, the gate is dissolving. There are still advantages—networks, mentorship, access to certain opportunities—but the castle walls are cracked. And so, standing in that windswept park, watching his daughter follow her kite, Ben’s certainty about what she “needs” has quietly, radically shifted.
What Matters More Than the Emblem on the Sweatshirt
It would be easy to turn this into a neat slogan: “Degrees are dead” or “College is pointless now.” But that’s not what Ben is saying. His shift is subtler, and maybe harder to swallow because it demands more of us, not less. What he’s really pointing at is this: in a world where information is cheap and flexible, the rare and precious qualities move elsewhere.
They move into the realm of character: curiosity, resilience, honesty, judgment, the willingness to keep asking questions even when answers arrive too quickly. They move into the realm of relationships: the ability to collaborate, to communicate hard truths gently, to listen for the quiet thing unsaid.
They move into the realm of values: What do you refuse to trade away, even when it would be convenient and profitable to do so? In an AI lab, those questions are not abstract. Systems get built by people with habits, blind spots, pressures, and ideals. Educational pedigree matters less, Ben has noticed, than whether someone can sit with uncertainty, notice ethical risk, and not look away when shortcuts appear.
In that sense, the “top” education in this new era may not be the one with the longest history or grandest buildings. It might be the one that, formally or informally, helps a young person learn how to:
- Think clearly in a storm of information.
- Ask better questions than the ones on the test.
- Stay grounded in values when speed and scale turn everything into a race.
- Work well with minds—both human and machine—that don’t think like theirs.
Those skills can be cultivated at an elite university. But they can also be grown in messy startups, local community colleges, family kitchens, volunteer projects, and late-night conversations with good friends or with a quietly helpful AI model. The soil is everywhere now. The emblem on the sweatshirt is no longer the main story.
A Quiet Rewriting of the Parenting Script
This realization doesn’t land lightly on parents. For years, the pressure has been to optimize. From music lessons to math camps, language immersion to robotics clubs—there’s this anxious background thrum: are we doing enough? Are we opening every door? The phrase “top school” is often just another way of saying, “I’m scared of getting this wrong.”
Ben’s remark is disarming precisely because it comes from someone who, on paper, did everything “right” in the old sense and now helps shape the new one. When he says it doesn’t matter the way it once did, he is not shrugging off responsibility. He’s relocating it.
Instead of, “How do I maximize my child’s odds of admission?” the better questions become:
- How do I help my child stay deeply curious in a world that tries to distract them constantly?
- How do we talk about technology in our home—not as magic, not as menace, but as a tool we’re responsible for using wisely?
- What does integrity look like when shortcuts and hacks are everywhere?
These questions don’t show up on application portals. They don’t submit test scores. They sit at the dinner table, or in the car on a long drive, or in the lull before bedtime. And they are not answered by a single “yes” from a famous admissions office.
School in the Age of AI: A Different Kind of Classroom
Walking through a modern campus, you can almost feel the tension between eras. Old stone buildings, new digital labs. Lecture halls designed when books were scarce, now filled with students who can access entire libraries and simulated tutors in seconds. A professor speaks while, three seats over, an AI quietly rewrites the notes into cleaner summaries on a laptop screen.
Will “top schools” still exist? Yes. They offer research ecosystems, mentorship, spaces to bump into unexpected thinkers. But their monopoly on preparation is gone. The world has forked into parallel classrooms: physical and digital, synchronous and asynchronous, institutional and improvised.
In this new landscape, what actually shapes a person might look less like a traditional transcript and more like a layered record of lived experiences and evolving skills. Imagine a young person’s next ten years not as a straight school line, but as a braided path: some formal study, some project-based work, some self-guided learning with AI tools, some time for wandering, some periods of intense focus, some service to others.
A simple way to picture the shift is to compare what used to matter most with what feels central now:
| Yesterday’s Focus | Today’s Emerging Focus |
|---|---|
| Prestigious school brand | Proven ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn |
| Test scores and GPA | Real projects, portfolios, and outcomes |
| Static curriculum | Adaptive learning with AI and diverse resources |
| Individual competition | Collaborative problem-solving across disciplines |
| One-time credential (degree) | Lifelong learning and evolving skill stack |
The table doesn’t claim that old markers are meaningless; it simply shows how badly incomplete they now are. For someone like Ben, whose daily work involves thinking about how AI will shape human futures, the signal has shifted: the emblem on a diploma is faint compared to the way a person thinks, adapts, and chooses.
The Human Edge When Machines Get Smart
Stand inside a room where engineers are training a powerful AI system and the air feels almost electric: lines of code, dense mathematics, racks of humming hardware. But if you listen more carefully, you’ll also hear something else—conversations about tradeoffs, responsibilities, “What if this goes wrong?” and “Who might we be leaving out?”
That second layer—the deeply human layer—is where education now needs to double down. As models become more capable, the question “What can you do?” will overlap more and more with “What can your tools do with you?” The differentiator shifts to why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, and who you’re becoming in the process.
Ben has likely seen talented people who can handle complex technical challenges but struggle when faced with softer, messier questions: Should we build this at all? Who is vulnerable here? What would it mean to slow down, even when others are racing ahead? There is no standardized test for that kind of discernment.
Ironically, the more advanced our tools become, the more crucial it is to cultivate old, almost ancient qualities:
- Humility in the face of systems too complex to fully predict.
- Empathy for lives that will be touched by technologies they didn’t ask for.
- Courage to say “not yet” or “not this way” in rooms that prefer “ship it.”
- Imagination to ask, “What world are we quietly normalizing?”
These are not stamped onto diplomas. They are grown over time, in how we respond to failure, how we talk to people different from us, how we treat those with less power, how we show up when no one is watching. Top schools can nurture or neglect them. So can any other environment.
Raising a Child for the Unwritten Chapters
So what does it mean, practically, when someone like Ben says it doesn’t matter so much whether his daughter attends a “top” school? It doesn’t mean indifference. It means a different center of gravity.
He might care less about perfect grades and more about whether she lights up when she’s learning something new. Less about whether she wins every competition and more about how she treats the person who comes in last. Less about stacking activities and more about giving her time to get bored enough that her own ideas have room to emerge.
He might encourage her to learn how to learn with AI—treating it like a powerful, sometimes fallible partner rather than a magic answer machine. Ask it to explain, then ask herself, “Does this actually make sense?” Use it to explore subjects beyond her school’s curriculum. Let it be a doorway, not a crutch.
Perhaps most importantly, he may model how to live with uncertainty. Because the honest truth is that no adult alive today fully understands the world his daughter will inherit. We can squint at trends, extrapolate from graphs, but there will be shocks, detours, and transformations we can’t yet name. In that context, no single institution can guarantee safety. No admissions letter can wrap a life in bubble wrap.
What will matter, again and again, is how she responds when the script changes. Can she find her footing when the job market tilts? Can she reinvent herself when an industry shifts under her feet? Can she hold onto her ethics in a landscape rich with shortcuts? Can she collaborate—with humans and tools alike—to build things that leave the world a bit less brittle, a bit more kind?
The old promise of the top school was, “We will open doors for you.” The emerging promise of a different kind of education—messy, hybrid, sometimes improvised—is, “We will help you learn how to walk through any door, or build your own when you have to.”
The Kite, the Wind, and the Story We Tell Next
Back in the park, the kite finally catches a steady current. It stops thrashing and begins to glide, bright against the low clouds. Ben’s daughter laughs, that pure, sharp sound that cuts through adult worry. The couple with the laptop has left; the bench is empty now, their arguments about strategy carried away by the wind.
The scene holds a quiet metaphor. You can’t control the wind: the forces of technology, economics, and culture moving faster than any one of us can steer. You can’t guarantee that the air above a certain campus will be kinder than the air anywhere else. But you can help a child learn to feel the tug on the string, to understand how to move with the gusts instead of being yanked off their feet.
For a long time, many of us outsourced that responsibility to institutions with impressive names. “If I can just get my kid in there,” we thought, “they’ll be fine.” Now, people like Ben, working in the engine room of AI, are gently warning us: The engine has changed. You can’t just pick one destination and coast.
That might sound scary. But there’s another way to hear it—as permission. Permission to take a breath. Permission to ask what kind of person your child is becoming instead of only what brand of school they might attend. Permission to remember that education is bigger than a system, older than any university, and more personal than any ranking list.
Twenty years ago, a parent like Ben might have measured success in acceptance letters and scholarships. Today, standing on the edge of an unknowable future, success might look more like this: a young adult who knows how to keep learning, keep caring, keep questioning, and keep choosing decency even when no one is keeping score.
That kind of education doesn’t fit neatly on a bumper sticker. But it might be the one that matters most—top school or not at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this mean top universities are now useless?
No. Top universities can still offer incredible opportunities: mentors, research access, communities of driven peers. The point is that they are no longer the only viable path to a meaningful, impactful life, especially as AI tools expand access to knowledge and skills. Their value should be weighed against cost, fit, and a person’s goals—not treated as an automatic golden ticket.
Is it still worth pushing for good grades?
Good grades can reflect discipline and understanding, but they shouldn’t be the sole focus. What matters more is whether a student is actually learning, thinking critically, and staying curious. In a world where AI can help with homework and essays, the deeper question becomes: can the student explain, apply, and extend what they’ve “produced”?
How should young people use AI in their education?
AI works best as a tutor, collaborator, and simulator, not a shortcut machine. Students can use it to:
- Get explanations in multiple ways until a concept clicks.
- Explore topics beyond the school curriculum.
- Brainstorm ideas, then refine and fact-check them independently.
- Practice skills through feedback-rich exercises.
The key is to remain in the driver’s seat—questioning, verifying, and thinking, rather than copying.
What should parents focus on if not just school prestige?
Parents can focus on nurturing traits and experiences that don’t go out of date:
- Curiosity and love of learning.
- Emotional resilience and the ability to handle failure.
- Ethical judgment and empathy.
- Collaboration, communication, and initiative.
These can be developed in many environments: community projects, part-time jobs, creative hobbies, family conversations, and yes, traditional schools too.
Will employers stop caring about degrees?
Not overnight. Many employers still use degrees as an easy filter. But there is a clear shift toward valuing demonstrable skills, portfolios, and real-world outcomes. As AI makes it easier to learn outside formal systems, more companies are experimenting with skills-based hiring, especially in fast-changing fields. Over time, evidence of what you can do—and how you do it—may matter more than where you went.