As content becomes inexpensive and instructional delivery increasingly automated, the traditional value proposition of in-person undergraduate education must be redefined.

This article introduces a 5-part framework to evaluate what remains defensible in a high-cost degree.

I also outline practical implications for university leaders and make the case that the future of higher education lies not in resisting change, but in delivering what technology cannot replicate.

This is personal. I’m dropping my eldest off to her first year of college this week.

In many classrooms today, students submit assignments they’ve drafted with machine assistance, and receive feedback their professors generated the same way.

Faculty use AI tools to outline lectures, prepare reading summaries, and draft preliminary comments on student work. Students use AI tools to conduct research, organize ideas, develop responses, and receive feedback before anything is submitted. This dynamic now shapes how learning occurs inside the classroom and how performance is evaluated. In some classrooms, this happens openly. In others, it’s unspoken but understood.

Despite this shift, many colleges have not meaningfully changed how they define, price, or deliver the undergrad academic experience. Most continue to emphasize content access, course libraries, and branded instructional platforms. Education technology vendors still prioritize scale and integration over substance. Investors tend to reward automation models that promise cost reduction rather than improved outcomes.

Yet the core problem is not technical. It is strategic.

The tools have changed. The institutional operating models largely haven’t.

The market no longer values content in the same way, but higher education continues to treat it as the foundation of its product.

This raises a fundamental question:

Many institutional leaders know the answer to this intuitively.

But very few are intentionally building strategy, operations and communication around it. The result is a widening gap between what colleges quietly rely on to justify their value—and what they publicly emphasize, measure, or invest in.

For years, undergraduate instruction has been delivered in formats that were already beginning to lose relevance. Large lectures, generic assessments, and platform-based course delivery were common before the recent wave of new tools emerged. In many cases, these models were adopted for reasons of scale, not effectiveness.

Now, most core materials: lecture notes, explanations, readings, and study aids, can be replicated at little or no cost. In some areas, alternatives are clearer, faster, and easier to use than institutional systems.

Students are aware of this. So are faculty. So are many employers.

The real surprise is how little this awareness has changed the core undergraduate academic product.

This article is not implying that higher education no longer matters. It suggests that the academic model built around content delivery is no longer sufficient on its own.

The challenge now is to make that implicit value explicit, and to structure it in ways that justify continued investment.

The future of the ~$0.5 million in-person college experience depends on institutions delivering something else: something more lasting, more specific, and more difficult to reproduce outside a structured academic environment.

I’ve developed a practical framework to evaluate and strengthen the parts of the in-person undergraduate experience that continue to carry long-term value. In my work with institutional leaders, I focus on helping them evaluate and strengthen these five levers especially as their traditional models are under pressure. Whether the goal is repositioning a degree, refining a product, or making a program strategy defensible in the market, the work begins by clarifying what still drives trust, outcomes, and long-term value.

These are not aspirational qualities. They are operational levers and each one reflects a function that universities perform when they are at their best—and each one, if neglected, becomes a source of risk.

You could think of these as the five non-exportable assets. They don’t travel well outside of strong programs, but they’re what still justify a premium.