Announcements & Commentary
Rewriting Education’s Design Principles
By Maria Anguiano, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at College Futures Foundation
Albert Einstein once said, “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.”
As digital tools grow more powerful and AI opens new possibilities for teaching and learning, it is tempting to move quickly toward solutions. AI-enabled tutoring, automated advising, and personalized content at scale all offer real promise, and I explored several of these tools in my last post. Yet a focus on technology alone risks missing the more fundamental question: what do learners need to thrive in the future, and how should education be designed to support them?
I began this series by naming assumptions that sit quietly beneath our postsecondary education system: fixed pathways, time-bound credentials, and institutional prestige as a proxy for quality. These assumptions shaped how learning was organized and how opportunity was distributed for decades. They reflected the design principles of an earlier era and a particular set of constraints. The challenge we face now is that those same principles are increasingly misaligned with today’s learners and the future that is rapidly unfolding around us.
It’s time to reexamine those assumptions. When we don’t rethink the problem itself, we default to inherited systems, and inherited systems tend to reproduce the same hierarchies, exclusions, and results.
How We Got Here
Since the second half of the twentieth century, expanding access has been a central goal of California’s postsecondary system. However, the system itself was designed around the constraints of that era. Institutions, instructors, and seats were limited. Knowledge was difficult to access. Teaching at scale required standardization. Degrees and credentials emerged as proxies for capability because they were among the few reliable signals society had.
Those design choices made sense in a world defined by scarcity. Over time, those constraints hardened into structure. Excellence came to be defined by how few students an institution admits, not by how many it helps grow. Quality was inferred from brand rather than demonstrated through outcomes. Sorting and signaling replaced personalization and proof.
The conditions that shaped those choices are now changing. Technology is expanding what is possible and pushing us to reconsider what education needs to deliver going forward
I bring this perspective with humility, because for many of us who are first-generation professionals now working in education, this system worked. It transformed our lives and opened doors our parents never had access to. My educational journey has deeply shaped who I am and the opportunities I’ve had.
Yet access to that pathway was limited. Out of my graduating class of nearly 500 students, less than 10 percent of us went on to a four-year college.
Today, we have an opportunity to design differently. Technology is changing what is possible, allowing us to imagine learning systems that extend education’s transformative power far more broadly. For the first time, it is plausible to imagine learning systems that personalize instruction, practice, feedback, and support at scale, creating the possibility to design learning around individual strengths and goals.
I ended my last blog with the reminder that education is, and always will be, a profoundly human endeavor. That truth has stayed with me as we consider how technology should enhance learning, not define it. What we build next will be shaped by the questions we ask and the design principles we choose to prioritize.
Future State Design Principles
Redesigning education requires holding a longer view than incremental reform, one grounded in the question of what learning should enable across a person’s life.
A future in which education is not confined to a single high-stakes degree or moment in time, but flows through a person’s life, adapting as their circumstances, responsibilities, and aspirations change.
A future where education is focused on elevating the strengths that make us human: empathy, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and ethical judgment. In an AI-enabled world, these capacities give knowledge its purpose and direction.
Our learning infrastructure should ensure that all learning counts for learners. Growth should be documented in ways that travel with the individual and help them navigate opportunity, rather than being tethered to a single institution, credential, or point in time.
A system where opportunity is no longer rationed through scarcity and prestige, but expanded through radical inclusion. One that recognizes learners not just as economic inputs, but as active contributors to the communities and systems they help shape.
Looking Ahead
In my next two blogs, I’ll explore two important components of this future vision in more depth. The first is what it would take to build learner-owned ways of recognizing learning, so that growth, wherever it happens, can be trusted and carried across a lifetime. The second is what it means to design education around human strengths in an AI-shaped world, so learners are supported not just to acquire knowledge, but to build confidence, judgment, and a sense of agency through practice, feedback, and care.
If you are grappling with these questions in your own work or building in this space, I hope you’ll connect and share what you’re learning.
