10/07/2026
I believe in higher education. I teach college students. I have spent much of my life learning and helping other people learn.
A degree still matters. But in the age of AI, we need to ask a new question. What does a student own when they graduate?
Most graduates can point to a diploma, show you a transcript, and hand an employer a résumé.
But what can they point to that they created?
Students create original work every semester. Business ideas. Research. Software. Songs. Lesson plans. Designs. Presentations. Processes. Curriculum. Ministry models. Scientific concepts. Frameworks. Solutions to real problems.
In other words, intellectual property.
College campuses may be some of the most overlooked intellectual property factories in America.
The problem is that most students do not know it. They call it homework.
They upload it. A professor grades it. The semester ends. The work gets buried in a learning management system or forgotten in an old computer folder.
Four years later, the student walks across the stage with a degree but no portfolio, no record, and sometimes no idea that some of their best work could have become the beginning of a business, career, invention, book, nonprofit, research project, or movement.
This summer, I watched students at Cedarville University protect their ideas before pitching them at an entrepreneurship camp.
They produced. They protected. Then they promoted.
This is the habit students need before they enter a marketplace where ideas can be copied, scraped, and reproduced faster than ever.
AI makes this even more urgent. AI can generate an essay, image, business plan, presentation, or piece of computer code in seconds. It can find information faster than any college student.
So what will separate one graduate from another?
Not access to information. Everyone has that now.
The difference will be the ability to think critically, ask better questions, exercise judgment, solve meaningful problems, and create original value.
That is why Cedarville recently launched an opt-in AI and IP Stewardship Pilot. Instant IP®, the company I founded, is providing students, faculty, and staff with free access so they can create timestamped records of their original work.
The goal is simple. Protect before you promote.
Not every student project will become a company. Not every research paper will become a breakthrough. Not every song will become a hit.
That's not the point. The point is helping students understand that their ideas have value and that their original work should not automatically disappear when the semester ends.
For years, college has been mostly about what students know. The future will increasingly be about what they can create, what they can prove they created, and what they can responsibly do with it.
The degree says, “I finished.”
The portfolio says, “I built it, and I own it.”
The future needs both.
Is your University interested in this initiative?
https://www.instantip.today/university
