“I’ll get into college, study for four years, find a good job, and make a lot of money.”

Sound familiar? This is roughly the plan every college applicant has in mind when submitting their application. And roughly the same number of people are in for a slew of unpleasant surprises - both about the education system and about themselves.

The paradox is that today’s students have access to limitless resources: free courses, lectures from the world’s top universities, digital libraries, and AI-powered chatbots. Never in history has knowledge been so accessible.

Yet the job market is unforgiving. There are plenty of diplomas. Real-world skills - almost none.

Why is this happening when everything you need is freely available?

Problem #1: An Outdated System

As a student, I’ve repeatedly encountered situations where professors (mostly older ones) present material they themselves used twenty or thirty years ago. Everyone insists: if you don’t study this, you’ll struggle on the exam and won’t find a job.

And there is a grain of truth to that. It really will be hard to find a job. But the reason isn’t the one they cite.

This isn’t just my subjective impression. Surveys of businesses show that about 70% of employers confirm that graduates of secondary, higher, and vocational education institutions lack practical skills. A World Bank study documented a skills gap between employees and business needs in 4 out of 10 companies in key industries.

Here’s another, more recent figure: nearly 40% of Ukrainians do not work in the field they studied. In other words, in 40% of cases, the four years a person spent earning a degree have no direct connection to what they do every day.

But the worst part isn’t even the outdated material. The worst part is that the system shifts students’ focus from learning to simply surviving within the system. You’re not thinking about how to master the material, but about where to cheat so you can stay in the rankings, keep your scholarship, or simply avoid getting kicked out. And this is rational behavior: the system rewards grades, not understanding.

Problem Two: An Excessive Reliance on AI

Since students are concerned about their grades, they naturally look for the quickest route to a high score. A neural network can complete homework in seconds and write an exam in minutes.

And here I’ll say right away what the authors of alarmist op-eds won’t: there really is a benefit. The routine that yielded nothing but wasted time disappears. Space opens up for personal pursuits. It’s pointless to deny this.

But there’s a catch, and in 2025, it took on a measurable form.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab, led by Natalia Kosmina, conducted an experiment: 54 participants wrote essays under three conditions - using ChatGPT, using a search engine, or without any tools. Brain activity was recorded via EEG. The experiment lasted four months, with each participant undergoing several sessions.

The results were consistent. The group that worked without any tools showed the strongest and most extensive neural connections. The group using a search engine achieved an intermediate result. The group using AI had the weakest connections of all.

But here’s the most interesting part: Participants who wrote with AI had a harder time recalling what they had just written - even just a few minutes earlier. Their own text. They also had the weakest sense of authorship regarding the result.

And in the fourth session, the participants switched places. Those who had previously worked with AI were left without it and performed worse than those who had written independently the entire time. The authors called this “cognitive debt”: relief today, reckoning later.

We’ve stopped reading deeply. We’ve stopped stumbling upon something interesting on the way to what we need. And it was precisely in these serendipitous discoveries that most of what we call erudition was formed.

The result is a lack of a foundation, weak dialogue skills, an inability to argue a position, and an inability to handle criticism.

The third and main problem: impatience

We live in an era of fast-paced content, highlights, and stories about sixteen-year-old millionaires flaunting their lavish lifestyles. This erodes us from the inside out every day.

We want massive results with minimal effort. We want to be nobodies today and wake up as everyone tomorrow.

And we forget one simple thing: mastery takes years.

Many students naively believe that right after graduation they’ll become seniors, completely skipping the junior stage. This is where rose-colored glasses shatter against reality - and lead to disappointment not in the system, but in oneself.

There’s another dimension here that’s rarely discussed. The formula “minimum effort - maximum result” and the formula “AI will write for me” are one and the same. It’s just that the second one sounds more high-tech. Impatience didn’t emerge with neural networks; it simply gained a more convenient tool.

What to Do About It

Immerse yourself in what you’re studying. Read professional forums and blogs where practitioners share real-world case studies. Often, this yields more than a whole semester’s worth of learning. Invest in self-education. Take courses outside of university; seize every opportunity. You never know in advance which pieces of knowledge will prove most valuable. Engage your critical thinking. Neither social media posts nor a neural network’s response is the default truth. In AI, there’s no mechanism to say “I don’t know” as reliably as there is to say something confidently - and incorrectly. Work on your soft skills. Talk to people from different fields and expand your network. This is the part you can’t delegate. Use neural networks in moderation. The most practical approach, based on MIT research, is to think for yourself first, then check your work against AI - not the other way around. The difference between “write this for me” and “check what I’ve written” is the difference between a liability and a tool. Take a break from fast-paced content. Giving up mindless scrolling helps you regain your focus. It doesn’t happen right away, but it does happen. Think for yourself. So far, no one has been able to replace your brain.


Sources: Kosmyna, N. et al. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. arXiv:2506.08872 Data on the labor market: Finance.ua (July 2026), World Bank study