KYIV — Just as French aristocrats under the ancien régime could hardly imagine the abolition of their noble titles, most of today’s university leaders cannot conceive of a world in which the degrees they confer become worthless pieces of paper. The former were in for a rude awakening in 1790; the latter are barreling toward a similar shock. No longer a social service, education has become the new infrastructure of power. Whoever controls the development of technical talent controls the future. The countries that understand this have stopped arguing about teaching quality and started measuring how fast knowledge translates into capability. The rest are reforming a 20th-century system and calling it progress. Large employers like Google, Apple, and IBM now have hiring practices that focus on skills rather than degrees. More than half of employers have gone so far as to drop degree requirements entirely for some roles. Recruiters no longer want to know how much applicants have memorized; they want to know how they make decisions amid uncertainty and how quickly they learn. Y Combinato