How Much Longer Can Traditional Academic Institutions Survive?

For centuries, universities and academic institutions have acted as the gatekeepers of education, knowledge, and accreditation. They controlled access, dictated syllabuses, and defined what was considered “enough” to certify competence.

But here’s the problem: the world has changed, and their model hasn’t.

Static Syllabuses in a Dynamic World

I’ve seen it first-hand: syllabuses that take years to crawl through the approval process. By the time a new degree programme gets the green light, the technology it claims to teach has already moved on.

And who’s signing off on these programmes? Often people who have been in academia for so long that they’re detached from the actual market. The result? Graduates who can tick academic boxes but struggle with the real-world skills that employers actually need.

As the Managing Director of a global tech company, I’ve read thousands of CVs. When I’m hiring developers, UI/UX experts, project managers or business development professionals, I don’t care where someone graduated. What matters is:

• Can they do the job?
• Can they communicate with clients?
• Can they translate a business vision into reality?

A degree doesn’t answer those questions. Sometimes, the only real benefit of a western degree is that the person spent four years abroad and may have picked up the cultural and language fluency to engage global clients. But even then, that’s a maybe. Hard skills and soft skills are what really count.

Geopolitics, Money, and Lowered Standards

Now add another layer: geopolitics. It’s becoming harder for international students to get visas to study in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia. Universities in those countries don’t want to lose the lucrative international student market, so they’re setting up proxy campuses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Here’s the kicker: to attract students, they lower the bar for entry — and worse, they lower the bar for assessment.

I’ve sat in meetings where I was told to find new ways of marking so fewer students fail. Why? Because failing students threatened the entire degree franchise. The local institutions set up to deliver the degrees don’t get their revenue, they don’t matriculate or “articulate” their students in the right volume that justifies them holding the licence to accredit their affiliated universities, and the accrediting institutes lose out on fees, students, global footprint and the chance to get full-paying students actually on campus for the latter parts of their degrees (where they’ll be paying even higher fees).

It’s in everyone’s interest to lower the bar… that is, of course, until the market realises that the students entering the workforce with these degrees can’t cut it in the roles they’re supposed to be doing.

The result is that the exact same degrees students in the West sweat blood to qualify for are being sold to students abroad at international rates, often with watered-down standards. Degrees that were once hard-won badges of academic discipline are now products in the Educational Industrial Complex.

The Cost of International Education: My Own Dilemma

Then there’s cost. I have a five-year-old daughter, and living in Bangkok, the international school dilemma is very real.

I built a calculator that maps school fees for over 50 international schools in Thailand. Here’s what I found:

• From kindergarten to Year 12, you’re looking at USD $500,000 to $1 million in tuition alone for a mid-to-top tier international school.
• On top of that, parents are expected to pay hefty “donations” just to secure a spot. Some parents I know have paid up to 6 million Thai Baht (~USD $200,000) simply to get their child into Year 1. These are dressed up as Environmental Enhancement Donations.

Think about that. We entrust these institutions to educate our children and instil ethical behaviour — yet entry is predicated on bribes and corruption.

As a thought experiment, I baked into my calculator the function of being able to, rather than invest in school fees, take that money each year and invest it at a compound interest rate, adjusting for inflation, to see what the return would be by the time my daughter turned 26 — the age she might graduate university (you can actually set any age in the calculator).

The result? Roughly USD $1 million. Imagine handing that to her at 26, after teaching her how to build a business and manage money during her school years. How many years would she have to work to make that same nest egg through a traditional job?

So it begs the question: why is she even attending traditional school in the first place?

In Asia, the usual answer is: “It’s not about the education — it’s about the networks.” Who your child learns with determines who will help them out in business or politics later. High school fees are the pay-to-play entry fee to Asia’s high-society class.

How can we pretend that system is sustainable?

Why I Built My Own System

This isn’t just an abstract rant. It’s personal.

I’ve been building Cracking Language Fundamentals (CLF) because I couldn’t stomach the thought of my daughter, or her generation, being trapped in this outdated model.

At age 5, she’s been my guinea pig. She’s used my interactive tools to:

• Learn scripts like Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and even ancient Khom and Lanna scripts.
• Explore maths with an abacus that renders numbers in different scripts.
• Learn multiplication tables through hands-on interaction.
• Understand tone rules and phonology, not just parrot sounds.

School, for her, is more about EQ — social interaction, empathy, play. But most of her “academia” has come from tools I built, because the mainstream system isn’t built for her. Or for any child, really.

A Macro to Micro Problem

From the macro view (outdated institutions, static syllabuses, financial exploitation) to the micro view (my daughter’s daily learning), the problem is the same: the system is rickety, outdated, and misaligned with reality.

That’s why I built CLF. Not to replace teachers — far from it. In fact, it elevates teachers. With CLF, a teacher can see exactly where a student is struggling, what their strengths are, and what the next logical step should be. It gives them the insight and tools to look like a “super teacher,” as long as they’re willing to listen and observe.

The Question We Need to Ask

So, how much longer can traditional academic institutions survive in their current form?

• When the cost is prohibitive.
• When the ethics are questionable.
• When the syllabuses are outdated.
• When employers care more about real skills than certificates.
• When parents like me are asking hard questions about whether the value matches the price.

The writing is on the wall. The old model is cracking.

Dynamic, adaptive, ethical learning systems aren’t just possible — they’re necessary. And they’re already here.

Next time: I’ll dig into one of those “super tools” — the Indic abugida — and why it’s one of the most elegant learning systems humanity has ever designed.