Bill Gates Says It’s The ‘Best Time’ To Be A Student (Except When It Comes To Math)

With the availability of a wide range of online courses, taught by globally-renowned professors, students today have unprecedented access to high-quality education, said Microsoft MSFT Cofounder Bill Gates. As a result, the ability to learn from top educators has widened opportunity to a broader swath of students.

“If you are a student, this is the best time ever,” Gates said to an audience during a wide-ranging discussion centered around artificial intelligence (AI) at an Economic Club of New York dinner Thursday that was livestreamed.

“The world’s best professors are incredible,” Gates said, adding that their subject expertise, too, was extensive. “Whether it’s the Bible, the Quran, fusion, it’s all out there,” he said.

However, the tech mogul expressed concern about significant learning gaps in math education and, despite efforts by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to train teachers and introduce new curriculum approaches, he admitted impact so far has not been meaningful.

In 2022, the foundation made grants of more than $1 billion as part of a national plan to improve math education over a period of four years. The concentration on math comes after the pandemic stunted learning in secondary schools and widened gaps based on race in student performance.

“Are our kids, even pre-pandemic, better at math today than they were, say, 20 years ago? Or even 30 years ago? The answer is no,” Gates said. “We are still very committed to that area, but we have not had dramatic success like we’ve had in our work in health.”

Gates acknowledged the difficulty in achieving widespread adoption of the foundation’s programs, attributing it to challenges such as resistance from school boards and unions. However, as math indicators are often used to gauge a student’s potential to remain in high school, he remained dedicated to the cause, adding that personalized AI tutoring could play a role in helping students.

“We’re very focused on math,” Gates said, adding that a student’s attitude towards math in middle school and ninth grade is “a real predictor of whether you drop out of high school.”

Experts have raised the possibility that the poor math skills of American students compared with those of global counterparts could lead to lagging economic competitiveness or even national security concerns. Keeping a global lead on innovation, too, requires a fundamentally sound education system, some research shows.

And, with Google GOOG recently launching what the company considers its largest and most powerful AI model, the stakes in the tech arena are growing increasingly high.

“AI is the most profound change of this era,” Gates said. “You could say it’s even greater than digitization, and digitization is a huge thing. It’s hard to overstate what a profound change that was. Now, AI sits on top of all that.”