Name: Data Centers in Space! Thoughts on the Future of International Education with Matt Tower
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T17:40:09.000Z
Duration: 20 min 40 s
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Welcome back to another episode of Breaking Boundaries, the world's premier podcast for international students, or at least in the top 400.

I'm John Clark with the TOEFL program, and

today my distinguished guest is Matt Tower, the Vice President of Strategy and Research at Whiteboard Advisors.

And Matt, to give you some context, previously on the podcast, we've interviewed folks mostly from universities to give their perspective on their particular schools, offer a bit of admissions advice for international students.

But you are, in my mind, the world's foremost expert on education technology, among other education topics.

Well, I wanted to open up a different can of worms.

You know, in the last two years, there's been a Cambrian explosion of tools often tied to large language models that are disrupting education as we know it.

And as you think about international students who, and

we can use the US As a, as a, as a, as a grounding point who plan to come to study at American universities over the next few years, how do you anticipate the learning experience changing in the near term?

And I'll start with the caveat that I think far too much of our discourse in the education space is US centric and frankly often sort of avoids talking about international students because it gets into thorny issues about enrollment and things like that that are really important to making the industry work and frankly are exciting.

They bring smart young people to the U.S.

I think it's like a complex topic that not that many people are well versed in, so we avoid it.

Which I don't think is great, but makes me appreciate the work that you are doing here.

And Matt, to your point, sorry to interrupt, but

fewer than 20% of international students are actually in the U.S.

and of that 80 plus percent, many are English language programs in countries you wouldn't expect.

So just to, just to emphasize that point, you're right, a US Centric view is, is excessively narrow.

Yeah, I think that, you know, from an experience point of view, I actually sort of hope it doesn't change that much on the ground.

I think that the like, core social experience probably isn't that affected by technology.

It is a relatively small part of the overall college experience for traditional college age students.

actually you would know this better than I, makes up the vast majority of international enrollments is sort of that traditional 18 to 24 year old young person.

I like that you mentioned that the core social experience won't change, and

a lot of that is tied to the success of international students as well.

The temptation to use ChatGPT to write essays.

Instructors using ChatGPT to write essay questions.

Do you think that this heralds a significant change the way university classes are taught?

Or do you think university courses will look roughly the same in 10 years as they do today?

You know, I think they're, I think I sort of break it down into two.

Like a course is trying to achieve one of two objectives, right?

So if we go back to math, it's like you're teaching proofs, which you do often without a calculator, or you're teaching applications, where the calculator is an assumption, right?

You wouldn't do some crazy math sequence without a calculator, right?

And so I think if you bucket it into like, what is this course trying to achieve?

Here's how you structure an essay or like, respond to a question intelligently.

That's something that's evergreen and can and should be done in the same way it's been done since, you know, forever.

If it's an applications course, that's saying like, hey, this is a skill that you will take with you forever.

You know, writing a research paper at an upper level, I, I would hope, you know, chatgpt is assumed, right.

You know, I, I sort of went to school in this middle ground of like, I didn't have to do a ton of like, shelf hunting in the library and like, you know, going to the librarian to ask where certain resources were.

So, you know, I think it's the tools when we're doing practical applications, I think will be an assumption and frankly, it makes those classes more exciting.

Like you'll be able to do far more and write higher level, you know, for writing courses or do higher level things with those tools.

And then, yeah, we'll have, you know, a subset of courses that are just fundamentals, that are like, you know, whether it's you or chatgpt, writing a sentence here is sort of what you need to look for to make sure it's good.

I like your distinction between fundamentals and application.

We've also seen with international Students.

And this is not just a US centric phenomenon.

Globally you've seen a rise in international students pursuing graduate programs and plateau or decline in undergraduate programs.

And I know the motivation for a lot of students traveling abroad, the social component is a big one.

It's hard to overstate the value of learning from students from a variety of different cultures.

But there's also a focus on post study work.

And post study work policies have gone through a significant shift in, in recent, really the last 18 months across many of the major destinations.

So it's difficult to weigh in and forecast with much confidence there.

But you know, with these, with these facts in mind, one is you have a shifting nature of pedagogy tied to changes in education.

Two, a rise in the pursuit of graduate programs with an eye towards post study work.

You know, if you're an international student seeking to work in say, stem, do you think that the STEM job market is going to shrink over the next few years or do you think the world will continue to need more computer programmers, data scientists and the like?

Like, I don't know that we will need, you know, 15% more computer programmers in 10 years or not.

But I can say that with virtually every other technology revolution, it has created far more jobs and far more interesting jobs and, or like, you know, physically easy jobs than the revolution before it.

So like, if you look at, I actually think the raw number of farmers has gone up just because like the world is really big and populations have exploded.

But I think like farmers per capita is way lower even in the past like 50 or 100 years.

And like think most people think that's a good thing.

So, you know, I have no idea what the raw number of computer programmers will be, but

I am like pretty confident that we will find ways to use our time in interesting and lucrative ways.

You know, it could be like I was just reading the other day, there's like a company that's building data centers in space.

I want to like, you know, tell me more about the data centers and space industry and less about, you know, like technical QA for engineering.

Like the entry level software engineering roles.

as I think about like what an international student could do, it's like, where are the most interesting jobs?