I love technology because it offers the accessibility to do almost anything from grocery shopping to learning. It is efficient.

The continuous evolution of technology screams the inevitability of virtual reality for almost all human activities – and I was okay with that, until the moment when I started seeing the harrowing future costs of virtual reality to humans’ critical consciousness.

Technology offers us plenty of routes to make money easily. As long as you have got a smartphone with a decent camera, you can start a vlog and YouTube will pay you a decent, if not extremely generous, amount of money.

The content that gets the highest pay is not necessarily educational or at the very least insightful. Most of the time it is personal lives where the vloggers technically invite the audience to intrude on their lives. If you become some sort of social media celebrity, you could also be an influencer and get decent money to promote brands that you actually have no idea what they are.

And with the right gambling strategy, you could be rich just from “investing” in cryptocurrencies. You do not have to be rich to join the crypto business.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Metaverse, a virtual reality that shortly will be a part of us. There is no turning back once we are in the Metaverse.

And just like any other technological invention, people get excited. Too excited even, that the idea of probable negative consequences is abandoned. What I see is a fast technological development that makes life easier, but on the other hand, because it is easier, it designs the future as a world where money has fully overpowered humans and higher education has starkly reduced worth.

It used to be, and it is still, an ideal path of a human’s journey to go to university before they can enter “real life”. The rationale for this construct is not some ideal notion that knowledge can make us critical beings that can help us overcome any form of oppression.

Paulo Freire’s readers would know that I am talking about his idea of “knowledge as a tool of liberation”. People are told to pursue higher education because it can help them build a career until retirement (in the case of non-business occupations) and eventually die.

The linkage between higher education and employment is older than Methuselah. So, when access to decent paying employment no longer requires a university degree, society loses a reason to pursue higher education.

You can say that as a “Metaverse life crisis”. In fact, many of the founders of billion-dollar tech companies – whose services now dominate our lives, dropped out of university. But they did that because they had the means to quit, while the majority of people at that time did not.

But later, when the youth in the Metaverse are exposed to the reality where anybody could generate a wealthy sum of money without a college degree, they will eventually question the worth of higher education and we must know the answer.

I am on the side of preserving higher education because it will be humanity’s most valuable weapon against any kind of domination that technology could introduce to life. Because of this very reason, I believe that it is time to start the reset process of the purpose of education – before it is too late.

From now on, we need to erase the idea that the main purpose of education is to guarantee employment or to allow for social mobility. I am not denying that we need money to live. Money serves some good functions in regulating resources and encouraging productivity.

But money should not be our motivation. The incentive-based system that gathers us in a trap, as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein says, is one of the reasons we are divided. I fear that it would also create a division between those who see education as an income-generating tool and education as an asset that maintains humans’ critical consciousness. If the future is like the present, then those who disregard education as liberation will win – and we should not let that happen.

What can we do to ensure that higher education is still relevant in the Metaverse? Firstly, it is important to make it explicit that just because technology offers wider, easier ways to make money, does not mean it will eliminate gaps between the haves and the have-nots. In fact, when technology becomes the main employment hub, it drives the attention away from socioeconomic injustice.

The tech founders will resemble the ruling elites and those coming from economically disadvantaged layers will stay on that ladder. And by then, it will be already too late because they have been told that education is for employment when essentially it is by pursuing education that they can acquire their freedom.

Secondly, higher education must not fall into the neoliberal education trap. Marketing the employability rate of graduates is fine so long as it does not make those who are in charge of the higher education’s direction forget the true purpose of knowledge. Rather than putting a higher value on employability, why do we not start putting more worth into critical consciousness? How can education in all parts of the world operationalize this idea?

I will do my part to preserve the worth of higher education in the future. But I cannot do that alone. We must join forces, from your own place, in your own universe, before we meet in the Metaverse.

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The writer is founder and director of JUSTIN (thejustin.org), a platform that aims to continuously produce and disseminate authoritative writing and analysis on global social justice affairs