What if artificial intelligence isn’t the real threat to higher education?

In this episode of Education Futures, we speak with Michael Burgess, a sharp and uncompromising voice on the future of higher education, to unpack a provocative idea:

Universities don’t have a technology problem, they have a strategy problem.

Michael argues that AI isn’t breaking universities.

It’s revealing what has been broken for a long time.

Together, we explore:

1. Why higher education’s operating model hasn’t fundamentally changed for centuries
2. How AI is accelerating the exposure of slow, inefficient, and misaligned systems
3. Why “AI transformation” is often the wrong framing, and why betterment matters more
4. What universities misunderstand about students, industry, and the marketplace
5. Why entry-level work, credentialing, and degree length must be rethought
6. How innovation is more likely to come from outside universities than within
7. What the future of higher education could look like in a plural, AI-enabled world

Michael also explains why most institutions fall in love with shiny tools, layer them onto broken processes, and then wonder why nothing changes, and why real progress starts with courage, clarity, and a willingness to cannibalize parts of the existing model.