The Depreciating Diploma: Three Things Schools Must Do to Ensure Value

Every June, something beautiful happens in gymnasiums and football fields across the country.

Caps fly. Parents cry. Principals say the word "journey" approximately fourteen times. And somewhere in the audience, a grandmother who immigrated to this country with nothing, watches her grandchild walk across a stage and receive a piece of paper that represents everything she sacrificed to make possible.

It is a genuine milestone. It deserves the celebration it gets.

And then the applause fades, and the questions arrive the way they always do. Quietly. Have we done enough? Are they ready? I have asked it twenty-five times now. This year they are lingering longer, hitting harder.

The class of 2026 is walking into a world that is moving faster than any graduation speech will acknowledge. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, drawing on data from over 1,000 companies representing more than 14 million workers, found that analytical thinking, resilience, creative thinking, and self-awareness now rank as the top skills employers consider essential (World Economic Forum, 2025). Not content knowledge. Not subject mastery. The ability to think, adapt, and navigate ambiguity. The same report projects that nearly 40% of the skills currently required on the job will change by 2030 (World Economic Forum, 2025).

That is not a distant forecast. The students we just graduated will be 22 years old in 2030.

Meanwhile, AI has quietly dismantled the assumption that knowledge-based credentials are the competitive differentiator we built our educational system around. ChatGPT has passed or nearly passed all three components of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, passed the Uniform Bar Exam with a score approaching the 90th percentile, and cleared the CPA exam (Kaplan, 2024). The tests we use to certify professional readiness, tests far harder than anything on a high school transcript, are tests AI can pass on a Tuesday afternoon. The diploma is depreciating. Not because students are less capable. Because the system is measuring things that are losing value.

As the confetti settles, it is time to ask honestly whether we are doing enough. If you need a pause before you answer, that pause might be telling you something. I think we can do better for future graduating classes. Here are three places to start.

1. Schools Need to Take an AI Forward Stance

It is deeply human to reach for stability when everything around you is moving. Most of us are quietly nostalgic for a simpler time, before the algorithm, before the smartphone, before the notification that arrives at 11pm. That nostalgia is understandable. Building schools around it is not.

Too many schools have responded to the AI moment by banning it, ignoring it, or waiting for clarity that is not coming. The College Board's 2025 Research Report on students' use of generative AI found that 84% of high school students are already using AI tools, while only 13% of schools actively encourage its use and just 17% of educators report receiving sufficient professional development to navigate it thoughtfully (College Board, 2025). Students are living in the AI-integrated world already. The school that pretends otherwise is not protecting them. It is leaving them unprepared for a world they re-enter every afternoon at 3pm.

Banning AI is not preparation. An artificial environment where AI does not exist does not prepare students for a workplace where their employer will require them to use it. The World Economic Forum projects that AI and big data literacy will be among the fastest growing skill sets employers demand through 2030 (World Economic Forum, 2025), the date this graduating class will graduate from college. Schools that opt out of that preparation are not neutral. They are making a choice, and students pay for it later.

The right stance is clear and human-centered. Allow AI use during learning. Be explicit about how and when. Establish boundaries around assessment where independent thinking needs to be demonstrated. Educate faculty and students together about what good AI collaboration looks like and what it costs when it is done carelessly. Take a position. The absence of one is itself a position, and not a defensible one. Banning is nearly malpractice.

Schools that take an AI forward stance are not abandoning traditional rigor. They are protecting the value of what rigor will look like in next year and beyond. A graduate who knows how to learn with AI, think alongside it, and recognize its limits, holds a credential that appreciates in value. A graduate who was simply shielded from it does not.

2. Use Class Time for the Things AI Cannot Do

There is a quiet dysfunction that settled into many classrooms during the pandemic and never f

ully left. Too much class time is used to complete work students could do independently. If a student knows they will get class time to finish the reading, why would they do it the night before? The culture of low expectation around independent work has crowded out the thing class time is uniquely positioned to do: put human beings in a room together and make something happen between them.

AI will not replace instruction. Not if instruction is focused on the things AI genuinely cannot do.

AI cannot replicate the moment a student argues for an interpretation of a text and has to defend it in real time against a classmate who read the same pages and arrived somewhere completely different. It cannot simulate the productive discomfort of a Socratic seminar where the teacher says nothing for thirty minutes and the students have to carry the thinking themselves. It cannot manufacture the experience of a Harkness table where every voice is expected and silence is a choice you have to own. A structured debate where students argue a position they did not choose, then switch sides, builds cognitive flexibility. Problem-based learning drops students into a situation without a predetermined answer and asks them to reason their way through it together. Simulations put historical or scientific knowledge to work under conditions the AI bot never anticipated. Critique protocols teach students to give and receive honest feedback on each other's thinking. 

You get my point, classrooms need laboratories of human interaction. These are not enrichment activities reserved for the schools with extra time and resources. They are the core of what a human education offers that no tool can replicate. And they are appreciating assets. The skills that emerge from a great seminar or a well-run debate are becoming more valuable as AI makes everything else cheaper and faster.

The practical redesign is straightforward. Independent knowledge acquisition, the reading, the foundational content, the skill practice, happens outside of class, increasingly with AI as a learning companion. Students use AI to understand what they do not yet know, to check their thinking, to move through prerequisite content at their own pace. They arrive at class having done that work. And class becomes the place where the work gets interesting.

The motivational logic follows naturally. The mundane work earns the interesting work. Students who arrive unprepared can use class time to catch up with AI support while the rest of the group engages in the discussion. They miss the experience. That is a natural and immediate consequence that no detention slip replicates. When they are ready, they join.

The teacher's familiar lament, that they cannot do the engaging work because some students did not do the reading, dissolves. Coming prepared becomes the entry ticket to the part of school worth showing up for. That is purposeful differentiation that drives genuine motivation rather than compliance.

3. Teach Students the Uniqueness of Being Human

For point one and two to work, we must ensure the next one.  

We already have an interesting case study of what happens when we do not actively engage with an emerging technology. The mobile phone. And the Yonder bag is a useful symbol here. The instinct behind it is a good one. Phones are genuinely disrupting attention, sleep, and adolescent mental health in ways the research is no longer ambiguous about. Removing the phone from the classroom offers short term relief for teachers and administrators managing distraction. But it does not teach a student anything about why they reach for it, what it does to their attention when they do, or how to make a different choice when the bag is not there. It helps the school. It does not necessarily help the kid. And our moral responsibility is to the kid.

The phone problem and the AI problem are, at their root, the same problem. Students are engaging with technologies that are extraordinarily good at exploiting the features of human psychology, and they have not been taught how their own psychology works. They are being shaped by systems designed by the most sophisticated engineers on the planet, optimized to capture and hold adolescent attention, and most of them do not know it is happening.

Teenagers are developmentally wired for autonomy, for novelty, for peer validation, for risk. Social media platforms did not invent those drives. They learned to pull on them with extraordinary precision. A student who does not understand their own evolutionary biology is defenseless against that. Locking the phone in a Yonder bag is a short term answer to a long term problem. Self-knowledge is the real answer.

This isn’t an argument advocating for another SEL initiative. It is much more foundational: it's a 22nd century, AI and robot infused literacy argument.

Understanding how the brain works, how dopamine and reward systems operate, how attention is built and depleted, how emotions move through the body and why, is foundational knowledge for navigating the world these students already inhabit. They need to understand delayed gratification not as a moral virtue but as a neurological capacity that can be developed with practice. They need to understand why human connection is not optional for wellbeing, and what happens, measurably, when it is replaced by curated substitutes. They need to understand addiction not as something that happens to other people, but as a predictable response to systems deliberately designed to produce it.

Preserving your humanity in the AI age starts with understanding what you are giving away. Every app a student opens is collecting data. Location services track where they go. Notification systems are engineered to interrupt at the moment most likely to produce a return tap. Watch time algorithms learn, with unsettling precision, exactly what keeps a specific teenager scrolling past the point they intended to stop. That data does not disappear. It builds a profile that is used to predict, and then shape, behavior. Most students have no idea this is happening. Most adults do not either.

Moreover, that data is monetized, without their knowledge. This is beyond digital literacy, it's an essential survival skill to protect their humanness and has personal consequences.  Understanding what data is being collected, why it is valuable, who profits from it, and how it is used to engineer attention and desire, is as foundational as anything on a high school transcript. Their attention belongs to them. Their data tells a story about them. They need to know how to protect them, and in doing so protect their free will. 

In an AI world, knowing what makes you human, how your mind works, what you feel and why, what you want to build and who you want to become, is the highest appreciation asset a school can develop in a student. Consciousness, emotional fluency, genuine social skill, the ability to sit with uncertainty and still make a decision, these are the things AI cannot replicate. They are also the things the next economy will most reward.

A student who understands themselves well enough to use powerful tools intentionally, to engage the world honestly, and to keep growing long after the diploma stops mattering, that student holds something that compounds. That is what we are trying to build.

What We Are Actually Celebrating

Again, the class of 2026 deserves to be celebrated. They have overcome and accomplished so much. They navigated a pandemic, a mental health crisis, an accelerating information environment, and a school system doing its best inside constraints it did not choose. They showed up, adapted, and succeeded.

But being totally honest, the diploma they received was measuring the wrong things for most of their academic lives. It certified their compliance with a system designed for a different century. It recorded how well they listened, repeated, and performed on demand. And in doing so, it undersold them. The young people crossing all those stages this month are more capable, more resilient, and more interesting than any transcript captured. The value of their diploma depreciated while they personally appreciated. That gap is the indictment, and it is ours to answer.

Because here is what we know. A diploma that certifies a student who understands how to learn, who can hold a position and defend it honestly in front of people who disagree, who knows their own mind well enough to use powerful tools without being used by them, that diploma appreciates. It earns compound interest over a lifetime. Critical thinking does not become obsolete. Emotional fluency does not get automated. The ability to walk into an unfamiliar problem and find a way through it, together with other human beings, is not a skill AI is coming for. 

The class of 2030 will be ninth graders next year. They will watch how we respond. Do we embrace the challenge of teaching with AI or do we ban it? Do we demonstrate human resilience in the face of change or do we avoid it? Do we hand them a diploma that depreciates faster than a new car, or do we equip them with the human skills that only appreciate with AI?

The diploma they receive can be made powerful. Something that appreciates with time. Something that reflects who they have become.

That choice is ours.