2026-06-27
24 分钟This is In Conversation from Apple News.
I'm David Green in for Shumitabasu.
Today is college, still worth it.
Earlier this year, New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang was doing his taxes with his wife when he started
to think about the contributions they were making to their children's college savings accounts.
He lives in the Bay Area, where there's a lot of talk about how AI will fundamentally alter higher education.
And he wondered what that might mean for his nine year old daughter,
who will be graduating from high school in 2035. My question was just like, should I keep contributing to this thing?
Is my nine-year-old really going to go to college
or at the very least is the landscape of higher education going to look very, very different here in ten years.
This personal inquiry became the premise of a deeply reported series
for the New Yorker about the viability of the American university system.
Init J explores how AI is already impacting higher education.
But he also looks at a much broader crisis happening.
How factors like demographic shifts, high tuition costs, and low public trust in institutions
are leading to growing disillusionment with college education and dropping enrollment numbers.
And underneath it all, there are pervading questions about the true purpose of higher education
and whether colleges and universities are adequately serving that purpose today.
So this all started with a really personal and specific question
about whether you should still be contributing to your nine-year-old daughter's college fund.