Higher education is broken, says Sal Khan, founder of the free digital learning platform Khan Academy, and he aims to provide students with an alternative.
Khan said Tuesday he is working on a way to offer a new type of credential that would effectively serve as an alternative to an undergraduate or graduate degree from a top university.
“If someone’s able to achieve this, you would put them in the same category as someone who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard or Stanford,” he said at Charter’s Leading with AI Summit, which was co-hosted by The San Francisco Standard on Feb. 24.
“Just imagine something that, as opposed to $400,000, costs $5,000,” said Khan, noting that the program would be open to anyone with the ability to complete it.
Through the program, he said, students would develop the skills they need, and Khan Academy would partner with employers to build recruiting pipelines to help graduates land roles at McKinsey, Google, Goldman Sachs, and other major companies.
A Khan Academy spokesperson declined to provide details on curriculum or when the program might launch, but Khan said he is actively working on it: “In the next few months, you’ll hear much more.”
It’s also unclear what exact credential the program might offer, and what the mix of virtual, artificial intelligence, asynchronous, and in-person instruction might be. Khan separately highlighted the importance of teachers, even as Khan Academy offers AI-powered learning tools.
An increasing number of high school students are opting for trade schools over traditional four-year degrees as AI threatens to reshape white-collar work, and the return on investment for MBA degrees is declining as tuition continues to climb.
Many employers, however, are going in the other direction.
While some have expanded recruiting to students at a wider range of institutions and are de-emphasizing specific degree requirements, the tight labor market and attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have other companies training their sights on a select number of elite schools.
Some 26% of employers said they were recruiting exclusively from a list of core schools, up from 17% in 2022, according to a 2025 survey from Veris Insights. The Wall Street Journal reported that GE Appliances, for example, has pared down the number of schools where it hosts recruiting events, and that McKinsey has removed a statement from its career page that said, “We hire people, not degrees.”
That’s “one of the reasons why a really smart kid with a 1550 on their SAT might decide to go to Harvard instead of the full-ride scholarship at their state university,” Khan said Tuesday. “McKinsey recruits at Harvard, and they don’t recruit at my state university.”
In other words, economic opportunity is still tied to a small number of elite universities that remain out of reach for most. Harvard and Stanford, for example, admitted fewer than 4% of applicants for the class of 2029, at or near historic lows.
Making matters worse, Khan said, many students graduate from these schools saddled with thousands of dollars in debt and lacking the skills to thrive in the workplace.
What Khan is aspiring to build is a global institution that would open its doors to any student with potential. “If you’re capable, we have as much capacity as you need,” he said.
At the summit, Khan also discussed the responsibility of employers to address job losses associated with AI. In a recent op-ed, he argued that companies benefiting from AI adoption should dedicate 1% of their profits to retrain workers affected by job displacement. On Tuesday, he noted that the training should be focused on transferable skills rather than company-specific certifications.
“Right now it’s done in these silos,” he said. “Google might do a bunch of investment and you get a Google certification and then you go to Microsoft and they could care less about that.”
As for the specific skills workers and students should focus on building, “I would focus on the human skills and any other signals that show that you can write well, think well, work hard,” he said. That includes capabilities like analytical thinking, communication, collaboration, and salesmanship.
While technology will play a role in that skill development, there’s no substitute for a great human mentor, Khan said. “If I had to pick between [an] amazing teacher and amazing technology for my own kids, I’d pick [an] amazing teacher every time.”
Watch a full recording of our fireside chat with Sal Khan about the actions companies can take to address AI displacement at Leading with AI.
A shorter version of this piece was previously published on Charter’s sister site, The San Francisco Standard.