Stanford dropout Sam Altman says college is ‘not working great’ for most people—and predicts major change in the next 18 years

Having dropped out himself—from Stanford University in 2005—the now-billionaire has often advised young people to look beyond a college education and not automatically follow the traditional path. In previous comments, Altman has downplayed his own decision to drop out, saying he always had the option to return if things didn’t work out.

Dating back more than a decade, Altman has long cautioned that young people shouldn’t go to college without dedicating themselves to worthwhile projects and connecting with ambitious people. 

“Most people think about risk the wrong way—for example, staying in college seems like a non-risky path. However, getting nothing done for four of your most productive years is actually pretty risky,” he wrote in a blog post in 2013.

In an interview on the This Past Weekend podcast with comedian Theo Von published Thursday, Altman expanded on his thoughts, claiming his kid would “probably not” go to college.

In a world where young people grow up with new advanced technology such as AI, Altman notes that future kids, including his own, will never be smarter than AI, and will never know a world where products and services aren’t smarter than them. This changes the game for education, he said.

“In that world, education is going to feel very different. I already think college is, like, maybe not working great for most people, but I think if you fast-forward 18 years it’s going to look like a very very different thing,” he said.

While Altman told Von he had “deep worries” about technology and how it is affecting kids and their development, especially the “dopamine hit” of short-form video, he noted the real challenge with advancing AI is whether adults will be able to catch up. 

“I actually think the kids will be fine; I’m worried about the parents. If you look at the history of the world when there’s a new technology—people that grow up with it, they’re always fluent. They always figure out what to do. They always learn the new kinds of jobs. But if you’re like a 50-year-old and you have to kind of learn how to do things in a very different way, that doesn’t always work,” he said.

Altman clarified the advent of new technology will likely eliminate some jobs, but many more jobs will evolve rather than disappear. Just like when Google first came online when he was in junior high, some are also now claiming education may become useless thanks to AI. 

Altman doesn’t buy into this idea. Rather, he points to new tech as yet another tool that helps people think better, come up with better ideas, and do new things.

“I’m sure the same thing happened with the calculator before, and now this is just a new tool that exists in the tool chain,” he said.

However, Altman cautioned, it’s impossible to know how education and jobs will evolve and which roles will exist in the future, and how. He noted his own job as CEO of an AI company would likely have been unimaginable in the past. An AI CEO may even be on the horizon for OpenAI, he said, and therefore his own job would have to change.

Altman isn’t a doomer about the future of work, though, because of the innate social nature of humans and their seemingly limitless capacity for creativity, purpose-seeking, and improving their social status.

In the same way people from the time of the Industrial Revolution might have viewed modern humans as leading a relatively easy existence, looking forward 100 years from now, we may well think the same thing. Either way, he said, he sees a bright future ahead.

“I think that’s beautiful. I think it’s great that those people in the past think we have it so easy. I think it’s great that we think those people in the future have it so easy,” Altman said. “That is the beautiful story of us all contributing to human progress and everybody’s lives getting better and better.”