Colleges Face New Pressures to Define Themselves

Chapters

0:00 - Intro
2:17 - Four Tests Colleges Should Have for Offering a Degree
8:16 - The Challenge of Measuring Student Outcomes
10:33 - Facing the Realities of the One Big Beautiful Bill
13:00 - Is Coherence in AI Policy a Bug or a Feature?
18:10 - MIT’s ‘Clarion Call’ About AI
19:51 - Cheating Is Not the Problem
21:02 - Is College Still Worth It?
24:30 - College Is More Than Just Classes
27:47 - Unpacking the Linda McMahon Letter
29:50 - Colleges Try to Be Clearer About Price
30:54 - Can AI Reduce Administrative Costs?
32:16 - But Aren’t Students Still Clamoring to Go to College?
35:31 - Is Dual Enrollment the Answer?
38:41 - A Growing Student Loneliness Crisis
40:26 - Will the University of California Bring Back the SAT?
41:41 - Previewing Future Episodes

Relevant Links:

“Leading Faculty in an AI Era,” by Jeff Selingo.

“From Programs to Payoff,” by Jeff Selingo.

“The Value of Live in a World of Abundant AI,” by Michael Horn on Substack.

“For Those Who Think Earnings Premium Accountability Started With OBBB,” by Phil Hill in OnEdTech.

“AI can now credibly complete most undergraduate assignments, MIT warns,” in The Washington Post.

“McMahon’s ‘National Call to Action’ Draws Measured Response From Higher Education,” in US News and World Report.

“UC Expedites Timeline for Determining Whether to Restore Testing Requirement,” in Inside Higher Ed.

“Even College Students Have Stopped Hanging Out,” in The Atlantic.

Transcript

Michael Horn

We're back, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, Michael. And believe it or not, it's season 10. Ten seasons we've been together. So we have a lot to catch up on.

Michael Horn

Indeed. And for better or or worse, just depending on your perspective, we spent a fair amount of time with each other this summer in DC at dinners, Future U. events in California and New York, working on a variety of projects together. But even with all that time together, it's left me wanting to ask you a bunch of questions and some of the biggest topics staring down higher ed right now.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, Michael. So let's tackle some of those topics and do our usual brief recaps of our summers. Does that sound good to you?

Michael Horn

Sounds good to me, Jeff. So so let me start with this. We'll do a little navel gazing, if you will. It's the first time I think in three years that neither of us have a book coming out in the fall. Is that a relief for you? It is for me.

Jeff Selingo

Oh definitely a relief this past summer. Right? Because two summers ago, it was about writing the book. This last summer, it was about getting ready for the book launch. And so it was very nice not to have that hanging over your head. Of course, then what you have hanging over your head is everyone asking you every five minutes. So what's your next book going to be about? I don't know how often you get that.

Michael Horn

What have you done for me lately? 

My new statement on that is I don't want to write a book for four or five years, and then let's talk. But I don't know if I'll hold to that.

Jeff Selingo

Well, it's interesting. You know, David Epstein had this thing about how long it takes to write a book, your second and third and fourth book. And he has talked about how it actually becomes longer after your first book to write your second and then your third and your fourth. 

So Michael, we might be retired maybe by the time we write our next book.

Michael Horn

I hope so. Although, I think we've defied ... I look at our trajectory, and I think we actually increased our cycle time. So I I think we put books out a little quicker than David does, but, who knows? That said, though, you did have some meaty projects that came out this summer, Jeff. A couple new papers, I think?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. I had two actually, three big papers. One of them we've talked about before. One of them was around thinking about the faculty and AI and really how this is a culture problem on colleges and university campuses and not as much of a tech problem. I think a lot of this is about a sense of loss that we're seeing at colleges and universities. 

And then the second paper was around something that I think is in the news all the time now, which is this idea of academic program management at colleges and universities. In other words, the number of programs that colleges have, which generally, by the way, you have 80% of your students major in about 20% of your programs. 

And so I always tell parents when colleges and universities talk about all the programs that they have, really ask about the programs that you're interested in and whether they're going to be around. Because what we're seeing in Indiana, at Syracuse, at the University of North Texas, right, we've seen a lot of closing of programs. 

And the paper that I wrote is, 'Okay, now that we've closed some of these programs, what's next?' Right? How do we really decide, especially with some of these new federal regulations about payoffs of programs in order to qualify for federal financial aid? How do we think about creating new programs? 

And Michael, one of the things that I talked about was this idea of four tests that colleges and universities should have for any degree. Right? And how they think about launching, growing, or even retiring programs. 

One is a simple demand test, right, looking at regional hiring signals, especially regional hiring signals, because I think one of the mistakes that most colleges and universities make is they look at national trends and jobs, and we know that most jobs are regional. How durable are those trends? Right? 

Remember, a couple of years ago, everybody said, 'Oh, we need to start an AI degree.' And it was all about prompt engineering, which nobody ever talks about anymore. 

Second is the premium test. And this is gonna be more critical now given these new federal regulations. How far can you move graduates from where they start? Especially if they have to borrow for that program. So what's the ROI for your university on this program? Is it just gonna cost simply too much for students to go to these programs and are they not really gonna get the ROI? 

Third is the mobility test. Are these programs that are gonna allow people to move up and out in their jobs? So are they gonna be able to get promoted within their fields, within their companies? And are they going to have the mobility to move throughout their career? Or is this just a degree that is gonna get them a promotion and not really get them any further? 

And then the fourth, I think Michael is perhaps the most important. Just because you can start a program, doesn't mean you should start a program. 

And this is really one of the things that I would love to talk about more this year, Michael, is this idea, and we talked about this a couple of years ago where I mentioned this end of the idea of the comprehensive U. Meaning the comprehensive university, right? Everybody wants to be that comprehensive university. And I think one of the things we're seeing in the retrenchment right now at these institutions that are closing academic programs is that they've come to the conclusion, we can't do it all. 

And so I wish and I hope that in applying these four tests I just laid out in that last one, meaning, can we actually win at this? Can we actually do a good job at this? Does this program fit into our overall portfolio? 

Because I think what ends up happening or what has happened in this growth era of higher ed over the last 50 years is that because a school down the road was offering it, we felt we had to offer it. 

Or because a college that we wanted to be more like, or an institution further up in the rankings offered it, we felt we had to offer it. And I think those days are simply over. 

And so now, as you think about what does it mean to be a university — this idea of the  comprehensiveness of it? We have to offer programs in arts and sciences and in the hard sciences and STEM and in health care. We have to offer undergraduate and graduate. We have to have students from all 50 states and all these international countries. 

And oh, by the way, we have to field 28 sports and all these other things that we do., I think those days are over for most colleges and universities.

Michael Horn

I couldn't agree more. 

I wanna stay on it for one second because I think this is maybe the biggest thing holding this back in my observation, Jeff, is the internal culture at universities themselves. It's not even necessarily ... 

I mean, look, It's a feeling that, yes, families are looking, do you have an English? Do you have a Spanish major? Things like that. Does that make you a real university? 

I think that's sort of a myth. Right? 

People are being a little bit pickier about where they're enrolling. I think for colleges, though, internally, they have to get a lot more comfortable saying, 'We can be a valid, fantastic university without an x program, and that doesn't question our identity.' Let's not judge the other institution that has chosen not to do something because it strengthens other parts. And we have to be, I think, less judgy internally, but also externally of others along those lines. 

Your premium point also gets to something that I thought was really interesting that I wanted to raise with you, which is that Phil Hill, who continues to just churn out fantastic stuff. Yeah. 

He wrote a piece about how someone based in The UK, Omar Khan, of the Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education Organization, published a piece arguing essentially that UK policy on graduate earnings is contradicting itself. 

And his argument basically, Omar, was that on the one hand, it says that colleges should result in earning more than high school. So this is a little bit of the premium idea. Right? If you attend college, your earnings on the other side should be more than you would get if you just graduated from high school and didn't go to college. 

And on the other hand, the UK is also pushing that pathways outside of college should be just as valuable as college. Right? So it's like an in internal contradiction. 

It's not hard to extend the argument to the US, which is what Phil essentially did with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the high school earnings premium. Phil has picked on this a number of times in the past because of the imprecision, right, of basing that premium on a number around state averages, which masks very big differences in regionality within a state. But now he's making the case that in my opinion is something that has to be reckoned with whenever this education sector talks about, frankly, economic mobility. 

So I guess it gets to your mobility point more broadly, which is by definition, not every employee can be earning, quote, unquote, above average. 

Like, it's a mathematical impossibility that every single individual in this country will be in the top two fifths of earners. I kinda hate when our sector makes mobility at the expense of others, if you will, or about relative position rather than, like, you know, do do you earn enough that you can make a good living, take care of your basic needs, live a life of joy and purpose? And I think this is maybe a problem with with the one big beautiful bill act. I've been a fan, net net, about the focus on ROI, as you know. But I don't love the high school earnings test of this for this reason as well. Because why aren't we just looking at the ROI? Like, if you choose to pay this much money and if taxpayers are paying this much money together, does the salary on the other end pay for it? If yes, great. I don't know if I care about that relative, jockeying if you will. And so I think that's an important piece, Jeff, that maybe the policy has gotten wrong because I think what we wanna do is have a number of pathways into these good lives. And really, this is about looking at the numerator, but also the denominator, not just one side or the other.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And I think, Michael, one of the other issues for the One Big Beautiful Bill, because by the way, now we're into the the implementation of this on many fronts. And I think one of the things that we're going to have to see is, one, how is this going to play out on two other provisions of that bill that now are in effect. 

One is on graduate versus professional programs around how much you can take out. And right before the implementation went into place on July 1, there was a court decision that expanded the number of professional programs that would be covered under the One Big Beautiful Bill. And they expanded it, and one of reason that's important is that students can take out more annual and cumulative dollars around that. And so, but the department is and the administration is fighting that. 

So there's going to be a little bit of push and pull, I think, on colleges and universities, because many colleges were preparing for graduate students who wouldn't be able to take out as much in federal loans as they used to. And they were trying to figure out what impact that would have on enrollment. And I think it may actually now take another year or two to see what impact that might have. And then the second piece of this is on the Grad PLUS loans...I'm sorry, on the Parent PLUS loans.

Michael Horn

Parent PLUS loans.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, the Parent PLUS loans, which again are putting limits on how much parents could take out. 

And Parent PLUS loans in particular, when you look at the data, it's really interesting, is that mostly it's upper middle income wealthier students who were taking out more of those Parent PLUS loans. 

Now, you might say, 'Well, that's good, because that means the private sector will come in. Those are usually people who have better credit scores. And because they have better credit scores, maybe they're going to be able to get private loans.' But we don't know this, right? 

So much of this happened so quickly on both the grad side and the undergrad side. And as you know, Congress passed the bill last July, July of '25. It was going to go into effect July of '26, but you had a year of, you know, regulatory rulemaking on this that and that didn't really come out until this spring. 

So I think we're really not going to see the full impact, including what you were just talking about on the One Big Beautiful Bill probably for another year or two if that.

Michael Horn

Super interesting. 

Alright. Well, so that's the policy landscape of things moving over the summer that we're gonna wanna keep an eye on. 

I wanna turn to the always the question to these days of AI, Jeff. 

And specifically, the question being, is coherence in AI policy a bug or a feature? 

You mentioned you did this big white paper talking about this question, and I'll let you summarize it a little bit in a moment. But the panelists at the Future U. stop we did in California, which will be the third episode that comes out this season, made a strong case, Jeff, that incoherence is actually not a bug. That it's part of being at a university, sort of this thousand flowers bloom faculty driven that that's, sort of the beauty, if you will, of being in the university. 

I closed that episode as people will hear with sort of emphasizing the point and saying, 'Huh, maybe I've been wrong about this. Maybe incoherence is okay.' But as I've reflected on it, you know, a few months later, I'm actually not sure I agree with what I said at the end of that episode. 

And before I sort of give my thoughts, I'm curious where you are, Jeff, because you actually did a lot of the survey work looking at how different constituencies are being impacted by this lack of clarity on campus around AI.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And you saw this in the data. This came from, you know, the Lumina Foundation and Gallup as well as the College Board on both the faculty side and on the student side. 

It really depends on where you go to college. You know, the actual university or college you're at, plus what you major in is how much exposure you're getting to AI in the curriculum. 

And even down to the faculty level, so you might be an economics major, you might be an engineering major. And depending on what faculty member you get, your exposure to AI or how it's allowed, when it's allowed is going to be different. 

And I always thought this was a problem. Right? I did think it was a bug. And then my thinking, just like your thinking, started to change over the summer. 

But I think it really comes down to the word 'coherence' and what we actually mean by that word. Like, how coherent? 

And I think where I have come down is that, and this is what I did put in the paper, is that there really should be an established minimum expectation throughout the institution around AI. To me, coherence doesn't mean that every professor, every department has to do everything exactly the same. Coherence though does matter that there is a floor. There is a foundation at the institution that every faculty member is expected to do x, y, and z, which will lead to these things for the students in those programs. 

So I think to me, that's where I've come down on coherence that the the foundation has to be very clear to all faculty. 

And I don't think that is true at most universities because even at ... I was just with the vice provost for AI at the University of Washington, you know, which has like something like 5,000 faculty members. And he even admitted, right, there's a lot of things that we're doing at the institutional level, but we really don't know what's happening in each and every department. And that is a problem, I think, with any coherent policy that you may have at the university level. 

And people will say, well, that was always true. But I think AI is such an important thing right now. It's such an important discussion point that we need to have more clarity on it for students. E, especially, by the way, they only have four years in the university. They're paying, you know, dollars $100,000 a year or $50,000 a year, whatever they might be paying. I think they deserve to have some level of coherent expectations.

Michael Horn

I'm in the same place as you, Jeff. And so I sort of like was like, 'Huh, maybe I'm wrong. There's something to this lack of coherence and experimentation.' 

And I've snapped back. I think minimum expectation is right. 

And I guess the way I would say it is a couple fold. 

One, there are thousands in our higher ed system of examples of excellent teaching, learning, research, support of students. The challenge is that they are like islands, right, where it's one faculty member, one center, what right, as opposed to how do we systematize some of these principles and bring them to scale even acknowledging that there should be variation within department or certain faculty members or classes and so forth. But, like, where's the consistency? 

And I think what drives me nuts the most about this is the second thing, which is I might think differently about it if most faculty members had been trained and built their courses around the science of learning principles and excellent pedagogy and things of that nature. We know that's not their specialty. Their specialty is their research discipline and so forth. 

And so my concern is just leaving it up to faculty members creates a very uneven experience as you said, and probably some really, really bad teaching and learning ideas cropping up that really impacts students who are, you know, paying a lot in terms of money and time and taxpayers who are, in some cases, supporting this as well. That's just not ideal. 

And I guess the third piece that comes out for me then is I thought the MIT report that came out, the ad hoc committee on AI use in teaching, learning, and research, I thought they nailed it, for from my perspective, Jeff. 

I thought they struck this really important clarion call on how AI has upended 'foundational elements,' to use their wording, of the MIT educational experience, especially for undergrads. 

And they sort of talked about all these pernicious effects that have rolled out about it. And then they basically said, look, quote, 'Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency, and justification about the use of AI within a given subject and across the curriculum.' And so they basically said, we need to do a systematic reexamination of every subject, department, major, and so forth and develop some baseline things. 

It's not to say that every instructor, to your point, is gonna end in the exact same place, but we want a very deep rationale for the practices we're doing, not something that's ad hoc and sort of, just because Michael had a little bit of extra time this summer when he was designing his class and ended up with a better outcome. 

And I guess this gets my last point that I'll just plug, which is I loved, loved, loved, loved that the MIT report called out two things in particular. Not gonna surprise you either one. Number one, I love that they said, 'Hey. Maybe we should reconsider gradinggradingn on a curve and actually look at grading against an absolute standard of mastery.' This is music to my ears. No surprise, to you, Jeff. 

And it gets to my second thing, which I just recently wrote a piece about in my Substack, which is my argument that cheating actually is not the problem at the moment on campuses. As  you've said lots of times, cheating has been around forever. There's lots of data to show that as well. In some ways, AI is just exposing how cheating has always occurred and how much easier it is now. 

The problem is this zero-sum sorting system that causes us to pit our own students against each other as opposed to an absolute standard of mastery. 

Look, when I teach, I want every single one of my students to hit that. I would love nothing more than to see a 100% of my students hit that standard and get an Aa fromfor me.That's not the system in which we have right now because I have to judge my students, and then we get these worries, about and policies on grading curves. 

And the MIT report made some fun in my institution of Harvard, about that grading curve. And I have to be honest, I kinda loved it, Jeff. 

Let let me switch, one more topic before we go to break, because the question ... the adjacent question that keeps circulating in the ether, is higher ed worth it then in this age of AI? 

Jeff, where where are you at the moment about this?

Jeff Selingo

Well, I still think it is worth it. But there are a lot of questions. I think the questions have evolved from, 'Will my kid get a job because the entry-level job market is being eaten by AI.' I think there's now many more questions about whether that's true, whether those entry-level jobs are being eaten by AI or they're just really being eaten by the sheer amount of investment in AI that companies are doing, and thus they can't hire entry level workers. Right? It's not that the entry level workers have disappeared because AI is doing that work. 

And I think it just keeps coming back to the purpose of college, right? What is our mission? 

And I believe that in this era of post-high school, students still have to go somewhere, right? They're not really matured yet for the workforce or for life. The residential college experience has long been that place where they matured. I'm not saying it's the only place, and I wish that continuing to wish that we could design multiple experiences. One could be, you know, the military, which has also always existed, the workplace, but apprenticeships that are true learning experiences and not just pure work because that doesn't really lead to anything. 

But I still think college is a big piece of that post high school to career point. 

And to me, AI is not gonna make that disappear. The question is how do we help? How do institutions help students learn along AI in order to go into that workforce where AI is still going to be a big piece of it? 

And Michael, I think the problem still is, and I get this question on the road a lot, of parents reading, 'Well, professors are against AI. They're against the … sometimes they're against the environmental pieces of this. They have other ethical concerns about AI. They don't want to teach with AI.' And they keep pushing back and, you know, bringing back the blue books and all these other ideas. 

That is what I think is actually going to reduce the value of college in the minds of consumers if they believe you're going to kind of, as as as somebody just said on a radio show that I was on, like, 'detech' higher ed. Like, take all the technology out. I don't think that's the answer here. 

I think the answer is that parents want colleges to have some sort of guiding philosophy around AI. They wanna know how they're going to use it to help supplement their education and teach their students the proper use, so that when they enter the job market, they know what they're doing. 

And for higher education to say, well, we either have no idea or a part of higher education saying we're gonna ban it. I think that is actually going to eventually lead to this value equation of people saying, 'It's not worth it.'

Michael Horn

Super interesting, Jeff, because what jumps out to me also there is different institutions can have different answers to that question, and that can create actualactually value, right, where a family says, 'Oh, I'm excited about this institution because they share my values around how to think about AI.' Someone else could go somewhere else. 

I think the point that you're making though is have a stance. It shouldn't just be duck and cover, if you will, out of that. 

I also wanted to raise this because I think historically, I've been optimistic about the purpose of college and the value of it in the AI era. 

I'm actually more optimistic, Jeff, at the moment than I've ever been, I think. 

But I think to get there, it requires us to center the student experience outside actually of the traditional classes, and it requires being much more explicit that the value of colleges in many ways around the experience itself, whether that's experiential learning, whether that's the late-night conversations with other students, the campus experience of an exposure and connection to alums and faculty members. 

And in some ways, that requires decentering, I think, the faculty as veto power. 

One of our other interesting conversations we had this summer at one of the dinners we had with some university leaders was around faculty governance. And someone made this observation that the faculty who are most involved in governance aren't necessarily the most energetic faculty members. They're actually the activists, and too often their focus is on process rather than student outcomes themselves. 

And at that same dinner someone suggested that maybe experiential learning will be like sort of a new study abroad requirement. 

I thought those were really interesting points, Jeff, just to sort of hem in on. Which my statement to universities would be, 'You are much more than just your classes.' Right? Like, your classes are sort of an artifact of the experience, but it's this overall totality of experience that I think you need to be much more intentional about clearly shaping. That could be research opportunities even for students where they're in the business of creating knowledge in this era of AI. 

But I think it we have to be much clearer. College is not just classes. It's that overall experience and those sets of experiences that cause you to be able to really discern when the knowledge you're learning is applicable or not. 

It's sort of the art of actually acquiring wisdom, you will, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Okay, Michael. Let's take a break there. And when we come back, we're gonna have some headlines from the summer, and what they mean for the future of higher ed from Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education's letter, to no more grades at the University of Michigan, at least in the freshman year. 

I'll ask Michael if this is what he had in mind when he talks about escaping that zero-sum education system. 

We'll be right back.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U. is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. 

Ascendium envisions a world where low-income learners succeed in postsecondary education and workforce training as paths to upward mobility. 

Ascendium's grantees are removing systemic barriers and helping to build evidence about what works so learnerslearner can achieve their career goals. 

For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Michael Horn

Oh, welcome back to Future U., Jeff. So, I don't know if you heard, there was this little letter from the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, to higher ed over the summer. Not quite a love letter, maybe a retreat though from the higher ed compact, if you will. 

Given our name is Future U., I don't know that I'm gonna ask you to go line by line on the letter. I'm more interested in the overall impact, if any of this, I think. 

What do you think this is gonna be? I mean, Yale had already put out a thoughtful report in the spring around the purpose of the university. Vanderbilt put out one over the summer. 

What's your take? Does this have an impact?

Jeff Selingo

Michael, I think all of these are just a giant distraction from everything else that's happening at colleges and universities — from the loss of international students, to the demographic cliff, to research funding and things like that. 

I mean, part of the issue here is that this administration has about two years left. And many of the changes that it's asking for, especially around intellectual diversity, could take a generation to really kind of come to be. And so we really are not going to know the impact. 

So even when Ron Daniels, the President of Johns Hopkins University says, yeah, we need to have more conservative scholars or others. Just think about the hiring process, where you're going to hire these new scholars and just how long this is all going to take to build. 

So I think a lot of this is still window dressing in my mind, right? It's the administration saying, we're cracking down on higher education. I still think they're gonna continue to go after a specific number of universities around a few of their policies. But I think this is more just red meat to their followers in terms of saying, 'Yes, we're doing something about these universities and particularly around intellectual diversity.' 

But I think at the leadership level, you're gonna continue to see universities kind of focusing on the bread and butter, which continues to be the bottom line, which continues to be those students.

Michael Horn

Probably right, Jeff. And I hope that universities at least take it seriously to start the conversation given how long these trends take, I guess, to get to a better place. 

Let's go next. We have we had a few dinners together with higher ed leaders this summer. We've talked about some of that, already, but one of the biggest things on their mind turned out to be price. And not just price, but it was around price transparency specifically. How much am I gonna pay? Because if I don't know that, they were arguing that is eroding trust. 

Brandeis, as you know, came out with this tool powered by Noodle, that if you sort of have a conversation with this AI chatbot, it'll come out and say, 'Hey. If everything you represented is true and you get in, this is what you will pay.' Hook, line, and sinker, that's the answer. Is that the answer, Jeff, to all of this? Stop engineering the classes and move to something like that, or is it something else?

Jeff Selingo

No, Michael. I think part of this is that, you know, we also had a provost, if you remember, at one of those dinners at a big public university who said, we have like 12 different or a dozen different tuition rates depending on what major you're in, in-state, out-of-state, right? It's really confusing to the average consumer. 

At the end of the day, this is not about tools. This is not just about transparency. I think transparency is important. Right? Higher ed is probably the only thing you buy where you don't know the price until you commit to going to an institution. 

But at the end of the day, this is just about pure affordability. And I think we the only way, and this came up at our dinner in California Michael, as you remember, the only way we tackle affordability is to get at cost and to actually reduce the cost of running these institutions. 

Is AI the answer to that? That came up at the California dinner. Right? Could we reduce administrative costs in particular? 

Now, we tend to talk a lot on this podcast about AI in the classroom, but is there a possibility where AI could be used a lot more on the administrative side so that we could have fewer staff and administrators do the work that they do at colleges and universities? Could that reduce the price or the cost, I should say, of running the university, thus making it more affordable and reduce the price for the American public? 

I actually don't think ... I'm not really confident that's gonna happen, because we've had so many movements towards controlling costs in higher ed, and almost none of them have worked. I'm not quite sure AI is the answer here, but at some point, we have to bend this cost curve.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Well, I think it's gonna take disruptive innovation, but no surprise, that I guess I would say that. So let me ask a different one that's related that also came up at several of those dinners. It was around the trust factor, public opinion of higher ed, more generally cratering. 

Some folks at the dinner, including you, I think, made the case that while the latest Gallup poll suggests that confidence continues to plummet in higher ed and the drop in Democrats is actually the ones driving the biggest decline, People are still competing for the selective seats. 

So what's really going on here? 

What what's your take, Jeff?

Jeff Selingo

Well, I think this might be just the difference, Michael, between the haves and have nots. You've pointed this out to me, right, when I say, 'Well, all these people are clamoringclimbing to go when you go to college.' And you pointed out, 'Yes, but only about 60% of new high school graduates are going to college.' Which we know has declined by 10 percentage points over the last decade or so. 

So I think part of this might be, Michael, the bubbles that we probably live in where we live. 

Of course, I go ... I've spent a couple of weekends and weeks where I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, which is very different economically from even when I grew up there. And it may be that people there are not clamoring to go to college as much as they used to. I kind of see that. I'm about to go to my high school reunion in a couple of weeks, and I'm kind of very curious, by the way, to talk to my classmates from that era. Because I do think this has changed where when we look at the ... 

I would love to see the crosstabs on many of these surveys because I want to see, you know, what is the economic condition of the people answering this? Did they go to college? What kind of degrees do they have? 

But I think this is really just yet another separation that we're seeing in this country, where those who went to college, those who have seen the benefits of going to college in their own paycheck, in their own lives, in their own mobility, they're continuing to think this is worth it almost at all costs. 

Yeah. They have complaints about the cost, and and they have complaints about political ideology. But for the most part, despite those complaints, they're still sending their kids. 

But for everybody else, I think there's a much bigger question. And I think that's where we're starting to ... You know, that 10 percentage point drop that I mentioned earlier, that's where we're seeing this happen.

Michael Horn

God, I thought we were gonna disagree here. But I think we agree. 

And I look, for my 'jobs to be done' work, as you know, I'm all about revealed preference as opposed to surveys. I think surveys often miss what people actually do and prioritize. You can kvetch about anything. It's what you do that really matters. 

That said, I'll add something else to the 10 percentage point drop in high school enrollees, which is those 43 million Americans with some college but no degree, which means that they haven't benefited from the premium of that degree, Jeff. I think that matters because it influences the policy and funding climate right now, which impacts research, international students, all these big sources of need, frankly, for universities right now. 

And so I think higher ed needs to pay attention to all of those have-nots as part of this conversation, even if they're not their core students that they are serving. 

Where should we go next, Jeff? We're starting to get to the end of this.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Starting to get to the end, Michael. 

But you brought up something really interesting to me over the summer that has gotten me thinking. Because we were working on this project about the state of higher education in 2026. We're working on this project together, which will be coming out this fall. And we talked about those enrollment declines and how to reverse them. 

And as you know, working adults have always been the panacea for colleges to solve their enrollment declines, right? If I hear again, ‘Oh, 39 million adults who have some college credit, no degree, if we can only get a percentage of those back, we'll save our institutions.’ And by the way, I've been one of them saying that. 

But you have brought up this idea, but what about high school students and dual enrollment? We talked a lot about that. And if you look at those numbers, it is really what has carried particularparticularly community college enrollment over the last couple of years. 

And so why not look at those students as the panacea rather than adult students who have dropped out, but the students you don't have yet, but are getting college credit because of dual enrollment. Is that an opportunity there?

Michael Horn

Yeah. My quick thinking is adult students were always gonna be hard because it requires a very different operating model from top to bottom. 

We know the Southern New Hampshire University story of literally creating a separate university in effect, right, to serve those sorts of students. So that has always felt a little bit like, 'Yeah, wonderful if you can do it, but probably a pipe dream.' 

High school students are more the bread and butter. And I think the thinking here is this, which is, 'Yes, there's a demographic decline, but we do not have to accept as a given that only 61% of high school grads are now enrolling in college.' Can we get that back up to 70%, 75%, 80%? Is that possible? 

Obviously, though, it speaks to a couple things. One is affordability, which see our previous conversations, so you gotta make a dent into that in in a meaningful way. 

The second thing is, it's possible that it could be four-year colleges introducing more dual enrollment programs. We see some of that. 

But maybe the more likely path is sort of a page from the George Mason U. playbook and the partnership they have with Northern Virginia Community College where the community college does the dual enrollment, but you get accepted as a concurrent, if you will, George Mason students. So you already build that identity, smooths that transfer pathway. 

If I were a college, I think that's the sort of thing I would be looking at to get those numbers up because I think the cost is just too high of the four-year schools to sort of meaningfully serve that population that's on the fringe, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Michael, it just requires such a cooperation and collaboration between institutions. It's interesting, I mentioned that Mason piece a lot because we had the president of George Mason on to talk about that. And that happens in Florida and happens a couple of other places. 

I remember an administrator at the University of Michigan suggesting they do this, and then a bunch of deans saying, 'Nah, never happened here because we just don't wanna cooperate with them.' We don't want them. We basically don't want those students. 

And I think that's a culture change that's really going to need to happen in higher ed. 

Okay, Michael. Let's finish up with just a little lightning round on a few more headlines from the summer. One was on student loneliness and how students are just not spending any time with real people outside of their dorm rooms. 

We talked a lot in a previous episode from last season on gambling. A lot of students spending too much time in their rooms, either playing video games or gambling. Other people just not interacting with professors and students. 

I will tell you, Michael, we started the college search with my oldest daughter, who's a rising junior, this year. And one of the things that I am paying a lot of attention to on the campuses that we go to, especially when there are students there, and as you know, I highly recommend that if you're going to take tours, you try to do it as much as you can during the school year, is, How much interaction are there between students, right?' Are students mostly walking across campus with the AirPods in their ears, looking down at their phone? I walk through the library, I walk through the dining hall. How much interactions are happening? Are they talking to professors? Are they in small groups talking with each other? 

Loneliness is a huge issue in society overall. And as we know, when we went to college, it was much different. That is probably one of the last analog experiences that you're going to have in life, where every day you're just mashed together with people. You know, your peers, people that are older than you, people are just always together. And if you don't really take advantage of that over four years, I think you really have lost a lot in that period of the experience that should be college. And by the way, that's whether you're a residential student or not. 

And then second is whether the University of California is going to bring back standardized testing. 

I think this is going to be the story of the year. As you know, there is a lot of pressure from faculty members in the University of California system. This came up in one of our episodes that's going to be coming up in the next two episodes of Future U., where we asked the chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, particularly about this question. 

But what the University of California does is going to have seismic repercussions across the country because California is one of the biggest test-taking states or was one of the biggest test-taking states before the University of California decided to go test-free during the pandemic. I also think this is gonna be a big political moment because there is a lot of resistance on the left, particularly to go back to testing. 

So what happens in California, I think, gonna be a big story this year, particularly as we talk about this debate over merit and fairness around admissions. 

So those are my two big headlines that people should check out from the summer, Michael. And I think we have come to the end of this episode. 

But we have two episodes coming up around AI. Do you wanna give our listeners a little bit of a sneak peek at that before we head out?

Michael Horn

I'll give them the quick sneak peek, which is just that one was in New York. We had some amazing leaders of institutions and thinking about the future of teaching and learning. 

Fantastic conversation around AI. 

And then we did a similar conversation, but slightly different angle, which will be our episode three out in California. You just teased part of it, Jeff. UC San Diego chancellor. We had the California Community College's chancellor CTO from San Diego State as well. Also a really interesting conversation — got into this question of coherence that we have alluded to today. 

I can't wait for people to listen, Jeff, and send their thoughts and hate mail, our way.

Jeff Selingo

Okay.

Michael Horn

But as you said, Jeff, I think that does it for us today. 

We've blown through a ton of topics. There's more to say on every single one. 

But what we really wanna know is what you all think about it as well. What surprised you, made you curious that we talked about? Where did we get it absolutely wrong? That's the exposure we have on these one on ones. 

So let us know. Drop us a line at futureupodcast.com. On our site there's a way to check, give us mail, or you can always engage with us on our social channels. 

I'm at Michaelbhorn on most of them. 

Jeff is at Jselingo on most of them. 

And as always, thank you for tuning in. 

We're excited for season 10, and we'll see you on our next episode.