The New Khan TED Institute: Reimagining Higher Education Without It

Almost two years ago, I wrote about a number of fundamental problems with using a chatbot like Khan Academy’s Khanmigo in higher education.

Yesterday, Sal Khan upped the ante when TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced the Khan TED Institute, a new initiative that will “reimagine higher education for the AI age.” Corporate partners include Google, Microsoft, Accenture, Bain & Company, McKinsey and Replit.

Not a single university is involved, which is of course a deliberate choice.

Thousands of higher education institutions worldwide employ hundreds of thousands of researchers and other higher education professionals who have spent entire careers thinking about learning, knowledge, and human development. There are entire fields dedicated to the questions this initiative claims to address - philosophy of education, curriculum theory, assessment, learning sciences, higher education studies, and so on.

But instead of looking towards these fields of expertise, the future of higher education - we must understand - will be shaped by a testing company, a media organization, Sal Khan, and a consortium of corporations whose primary interest in education is as a supplier of workforce capacity.

The framing is all too familiar: higher education is too slow, too bureaucratic, too resistant to change. And so the disruption must come from outside, from those unencumbered by the institutional baggage that supposedly prevents real innovation. This is not a new story, and while it may hold some truth it is worth asking why it keeps getting told and who actually benefits from the telling.

Incidentally, just this week, a Chalkbeat investigation documented that Khanmigo has largely flopped - students didn’t use it, teachers abandoned it, and Khan Academy’s own chief learning officer, Kristen DiCerbo, said she is “not seeing the revolution in education.”

And yet, undeterred, Sal Khan is moving on to higher education.

Employer alignment

The announcement states that corporate thought partners “will help shape the program and competency signals—ensuring the program stays aligned with the skills employers value most.”

The assumption here is worth paying attention to, as it presents employer alignment as self-evidently good. It is almost as if the main purpose of education is to produce people who fit neatly into existing economic arrangements designed by employers.

I think most readers will agree that higher education is also about creating conditions under which people can think beyond what is currently valued - to develop capacities that don’t yet have obvious market applications and to ask questions that employers have no interest in seeing asked. The university, at its best, is a space where the value of inquiry is not determined by its immediate economic utility.

When we reduce education to employer alignment, we foreclose precisely the kinds of thinking that might help us navigate a genuinely uncertain future.

The measurement problem

Then there is ETS. Educational Testing Service is one of the largest testing organizations in the world, responsible for the GRE, TOEFL, and parts of the SAT. What does it mean, exactly, to have a testing company as your measurement partner when you’re claiming to reimagine education?

Measurement is never neutral or innocent. Every assessment framework encodes assumptions about what counts as knowledge, what counts as competence, and what counts as learning. When a commercial testing organization is making those decisions, the question becomes whose interests are being served by the answers.

We are entering an era where the artefacts we have traditionally used as proxies for understanding - the essay for example - can be produced by systems that have no understanding at all. If we continue measuring the artefact, we are measuring the wrong thing.

But perhaps the underlying problem is that whatever we choose to measure instead will eventually become the thing that gets optimized for. I don’t know what a genuinely new measurement paradigm would look like, but I am fairly confident it will not emerge from an organization whose entire business model depends on the existing one.

Khan Academy has been simultaneously building the learning product, constructing the evaluative framework around it through partnerships like this one, and now designing the institution that will replace the ones that didn't move fast enough.

Instead of research and collaboration with actual educational institutions, then, we get assumptions in the form of Sal Khan explaining that the initiative will help people “find meaningful ways to contribute to the world around them,” as if meaning is something that can be delivered through a platform, measured by a test, and validated by McKinsey.

The narrative of the uniquely human

The announcement further emphasizes the development of “uniquely human skills” and “durable soft skills.” This type of framing has become ubiquitous in discussions of generative AI and education, and it deserves a comment in this context as well.

When we talk about “uniquely human skills” in the context of generative AI, we are drawing a line - at least implicitly. On one side sits the analytical, the technical, and the knowledge-intensive - territory we are implicitly ceding to machines. On the other side sits the interpersonal, the communicative, and the intangible - the domain we are reserving for humans.

But this division is neither innocent nor inevitable. It reflects a particular view of what generative AI is and what humans are for, one that accepts a future in which human value is defined by what machines cannot yet do. It asks education to prepare people for that diminished role.

I don’t think this is what education should be doing, and I don’t think the people making these announcements have thought carefully enough about what they’re conceding - if they care at all, of course.

The future of learning in an AI-transformed world is genuinely uncertain, and anyone who claims to have it figured out - especially those who stand to profit from their particular vision - should be viewed with healthy skepticism.

The Khan TED Institute may actually produce useful things. Who knows. But the framing of this initiative, with its casual exclusion of higher education from a conversation about its own future, tells us something important about how educational futures are being imagined and by whom.

We should probably pay attention to that.