The university is a secular educational system that has evolved primarily from the Western approach-European and American-which has now become the model by which universities on all continents are inspired.
The university system in the 21st century faces several threats, which may threaten the existence of many universities and perhaps the university institution itself:
- The advent of Artificial Intelligence, and in particular AGI and ASI (general and super AI), with enormous information processing and even academic research capabilities, directly affects the role and competencies of universities, calling into question the very motivations for study and courses in existence. Entire majors (e.g. foreign languages and interpreting) are already finding in declining enrollment the negative effect of AI operation and automatic replacement of skills.
- Competition from On-Line Universities, based at first on video and now on AI, threatens to undermine the physical universities’ model at its base, with enormously lower costs and increasing educational effectiveness.
- The demographic collapse in advanced countries is a ticking time bomb that promises in turn to trigger a heavy downsizing of enrollment and consequently fierce competition among universities to vie for the dwindling numbers of students.
In addition, it should be noted that, in the global competition of university systems, China starts with the advantage of producing more engineers than the United States and Europe and having the structural features best suited for the development of educational technologies.
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