The Dispatch
AI Education Explosion
Weak ties, modular credentials and LinkedInification. AI is impacting the modern university campus, but institutions are responding.
By Seb Murray
When ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, its creators could scarcely have predicted the extent to which their conversational agent would help reconfigure not just industries, but education itself.
In a little over two years, the platform has been adopted by more than 400 million users, inspired the launch of thousands of enterprise tools and triggered mass rethinking around knowledge work — from software engineering to legal research to copywriting. But perhaps most quietly transformative has been the effect on professional learning: a global surge in demand for AI literacy, and the rapid expansion of short-form, stackable educational offerings promising exactly that.
The result is a market undergoing swift reinvention. Alongside the conventional degree, learners are flocking to what could be called “credential capital”: a new class of bite-sized, résumé-enhancing certificates that sit at the intersection of executive education and continuing professional development.
"The market’s growth reflects a broader unease about redundancy in a world increasingly structured around algorithmic competence — the ability to work with AI tools to complete tasks."
A new kind of learner
According to data from online learning platform Coursera, enrolments in generative AI courses rose by an extraordinary 1,060 percent last year. The uptick was especially pronounced in Latin America and the Caribbean, where participation climbed 882 percent over the same period — underscoring a broad and intensifying demand for AI education worldwide.
At rival platform edX, which partners with institutions such as MIT and the University of Oxford, executive education programmes in AI-related courses recorded a staggering 424 percent increase in 2023, attracting more than 14,000 participants in 12 months. The figures point to intensifying demand for AI fluency, particularly among mid-career professionals.
But the most striking change is not volume — it is profile. These are not traditional students. A growing number of these students are working professionals, aged 30 to 55, already employed in mid- to senior-level roles. They include product managers seeking to integrate machine learning into roadmaps, HR leaders hoping to automate performance reviews, and general managers asked to optimise costs using AI — but often without any prior training.
“It is not just the young who need educational opportunities — technological change makes lifelong learning vital,” Jonathan Michie, President of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford told the Financial Times. “Since 2010 there has been a decline in adult education, part-time degrees and work-based training [in the UK].”
The market’s growth reflects a broader unease about redundancy in a world increasingly structured around algorithmic competence — the ability to work with AI tools to complete tasks.
According to research by learning platform Kahoot, 46 percent of employees fear their skills will be obsolete within five years — with nearly a third expecting it even sooner. Based on a survey of 1,041 office workers across tech, healthcare and finance, the findings reflect rising anxiety in a labour market being reshaped by automation.
And, a survey by online learning company Simplilearn shows 65 percent of respondents were last year enrolled in online certification courses — a figure that underscores the accelerating pivot toward digital-first, career-focused learning.
The stackable revolution
To meet this demand, elite institutions have begun offering modular, “stackable” qualifications designed for flexibility. At the forefront is Switzerland’s IMD Business School, whose newly launched Executive Master’s in AI and Digital Business Transformation programme is emblematic of the trend.
The programme lets participants tailor their learning — choosing from IMD’s executive education courses and completing the degree in 18 months to five years.
“We know that professionals want control over their learning, they want to deliver results quickly for their organisation and they want a powerful credential,” says Misiek Piskorski, IMD’s Dean of Executive Education.
Participants conclude the programme with a faculty-supervised capstone project, aimed at solving a real challenge within their organisation — an arrangement designed to maximise immediate return on investment for employers and participants alike.
From prestige to portability
What makes these programmes distinctive — and commercially potent — is their modular structure. Rather than offering a single, monolithic degree, they are composed of stackable components: certificates, short courses and credentials that can be accumulated over time. Each module serves as a standalone proof point of expertise, offering flexibility for busy professionals and clarity for employers.
The appeal stands in sharp contrast to more traditional pathways, which have come under increasing scrutiny. In a pointed critique in FT, Euan Blair, founder of UK-based training platform Multiverse, : “The challenge of higher education and even traditional corporate learning is there is a complete lack of direction or consequences. The measure of success of colleges is not successful careers for their students.”
Still, many in higher education argue that universities provide more than just career training — the educational journey offers critical thinking, intellectual breadth and social capital that short-form learning alone may not deliver.
Nonetheless, there’s a broader trend toward the “LinkedInification” of learning. Digital certificates — complete with institutional branding and embedded metadata that verify a credential — are now prominently displayed on social media profiles, CVs and job applications. For recruiters and employers, they offer a real-time snapshot of an individual’s evolving skillset. For learners, they offer a way to move forward in their careers without stepping away from work.
This flexibility is helping to reshape how professional success is credentialed. In a 2023 survey by Coursera, 63 percent of employers said an industry micro-credential would favourably influence their decision when evaluating candidates with otherwise similar academic backgrounds.
Institutional realignment
The rise of credential-based education is not only driven by learner demand. It also reflects changing incentives among universities themselves, some of which face stagnating degree programme applications, growing pressure to diversify revenue and a crowded global education market.
Between 2010 and 2022, US college enrolment fell nearly 15 percent, from 18.1 million to 15.4 million students. Driven by a shrinking demographic, rising tuition costs and growing scepticism about the value of a traditional degree, the decline has pushed some institutions to cut budgets, close campuses or pivot toward non-degree, job-focused credentials — gradually reshaping the role of higher education.
Business schools, especially, have moved quickly to expand their executive and non-degree offerings — once peripheral, now central to strategy. Yet demand for the full-time MBA has held up better than expected, reflecting a broader reality: traditional degrees still hold ground in fields requiring formal accreditation, such as law, medicine and education, or where employers value theoretical depth and established networks, as in engineering, academia and the sciences. For many, the degree remains both a gateway and a signal of long-term intent.
The network dividend
But the value of modern programmes increasingly extends beyond the curriculum. One of their lesser-discussed strengths is the network effect: rather than moving through a fixed cohort, participants rotate through modules alongside new peers — often from entirely different sectors, functions or geographies.
The result is a broader, more dynamic professional network. Over time, this creates an ever-expanding matrix of “weak ties” — the kind social scientists have long identified as a key driver of unexpected opportunity.
“When we look at the experimental data, weak ties are better, on average, for job mobility than strong ties,” said Sinan Aral, a management professor at MIT and co-author of a study based on millions of LinkedIn users.
That network, for many participants, is as valuable as the credential itself — a source of fresh ideas, cross-industry benchmarking and, in some cases, lateral career opportunities.
A hedge against uncertainty
Still, the boom in AI education is not just about ambition — it is about survival. With white-collar automation accelerating, professionals are acutely aware that skills acquired even five years ago may now be obsolete.
A 2023 edX survey found that 49 per cent of executives believed nearly half of workforce skills would be obsolete by now — underscoring rising concern over capability gaps and the shrinking shelf-life of expertise.
“We have to understand that everyone will be an AI person, just at different levels of proficiencies,” Kian Katanforoosh, lecturer at Stanford University and CEO of virtual skills platform Workera, told Forbes. “Most of us are users of AI, interfacing with AI, calling APIs and language models to solve problems.”
In this context, micro-credentials are not merely an educational trend. They are becoming a form of professional insurance: a way of signalling adaptability, maintaining employability and, perhaps most importantly, buying time.
The credential economy
As AI shifts from a nice-to-have to a must-have, education providers face a familiar challenge: scale without dilution. With so many new credentials entering the market, questions around quality assurance, recognition and long-term value will become more pressing.
Digital credentialing platform Accredible said that in 2024, its clients launched more than 101,000 new courses — a 26.5 percent increase on the previous year, reflecting the rapid expansion of the market.
Industry observers caution that not all credentials are created equal. Already, websites such as Class Central have begun ranking and auditing certificate programmes, while LinkedIn has introduced vetting mechanisms for adding credentials to user profiles.
But the underlying shift appears irreversible. The credential economy — modular, digital and demand-driven — is rapidly challenging the traditional degree-dominated model. For professionals, the implications are clear: lifelong learning is no longer optional, and agility has become a more potent career advantage.
For institutions, the stakes are equally high. In an increasingly disintermediated market, those that fail to adapt risk not just irrelevance, but invisibility.
And for everyone else — the managers, the marketers, the lawyers, the engineers — the path forward is beginning to look something like this: no sabbaticals, no campus cafés, no dorms. Just a stack of certificates, an active LinkedIn profile, and a calendar blocked out for another AI module, somewhere between quarterly planning and the school run.