New Formula for Success: Location, Location, Location

Chapters

0:00 - Intro
1:56 - What Should Students Still Have to Work Through?
6:39 - Balancing Mastery Learning and AI
9:55 - Knowing When to Bring In AI
10:49 - Rethinking Assessment
12:12 - A Case Study on Northeastern’s Co-Op Program
18:57 - Geography’s Increasingly Role In Higher Ed
26:03 - Colleges Face New ‘Enterprise Risks’
30:34 - Sponsor Break
31:17 - Colleges Look to Clarify Their Purpose
27:31 - Do Colleges Really Prepare Students for Jobs?
35:26 - Judgement Requires Knowledge
38:14 - Moving ‘Beyond Silos’
41:33 - Making Pathways Dependable
43:51 - Wrap-Up

Relevant Links

“Northeastern University: A New Model for Higher Education?,” Harvard Business School cast study.

“Why some universities are gobbling up campuses all over the place,” by Michael Horn in The Boston Globe.

“After Missing Its Enrollment Goal, Syracuse is Questioning Everything,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training Report,” by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The State of Higher Education 2026,” by Jeff Selingo.

“The Future of the American University,” a report from Cornell University.

Transcript

Michael Horn

Jeff, let's start with the hard question. If AI does the easy work, how do students learn to do the hard work?

Jeff Selingo

Well Michael, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI, says keep it hard and their average GPA hasn't moved in decades and they still keep more than 90% of their first year students.

And their president put it this way, it's not a handout to help students, it's a hand up.

Michael Horn

I'd add one more thing, Jeff. I still have my students write papers, but this year I'm adding an oral defense.

Use AI all you want, but you'd better learn it.

Jeff Selingo

And then Michael, there's Northeastern University and Syracuse University. Over twenty years, Syracuse's yield fell from 31% to 17%, that's the percentage of students who are accepted who actually enroll.

Meanwhile, Northeastern's rose from 24% to 45%.

Northeastern picked a lane and they went to win it.

Michael Horn

And some universities are growing while so many others shrink right now.

Carnegie Mellon just got $3 billion, $2 billion of it for a campus in Florida.

Geography matters more than people think, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

You know, Michael, most colleges wish they had that money because they don't have any cushion.

One in seven lost money over the last decade.

Michael Horn

Plus, Jeff, I think you're wrong about Linda McMahon's letter, and I'll admit where I changed my mind.

That's all ahead on this episode of Future U.

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. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Subscribe to Future U. wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

Michael Horn

So, Jeff, we've both been pretty busy over the last several weeks.

I think it's fair to say maybe full stop, but also busy writing about what colleges need to change right now, and where we're optimistic, where we're bullish, maybe where we have questions.

I wanna start with what happens to learning though when AI can do much more of the work. This is a very live conversation as you know, on campuses everywhere.

MIT did a report about it, which we've talked about. It's... You know, this is a huge thing.

Michigan, obviously, had this policy that drew a lot of comments online.

Jeff Selingo

A lot of criticism.

Michael Horn

Yeah. A lot of criticism where they basically had this...

They were gonna do a pilot in effect. Right? Where they were gonna say, hey. You still get grades for the classes you take freshman year. It will still count, in... Toward your final GPA, but the grades themselves won't show up on the transcript.

I confess as an HBS grad where you're not allowed to show employers your grades, in the classes, like I ... This didn't even hit my radar, Jeff, but nonetheless they then hit pause in the pilot in response to the outcry.

And I think it really landed around this question of... That's not just in higher ed right now, you know, with grade inflation at K-12 and higher ed. Everyone's worried about academic rigor and AI.

You know, again, not that cheating is new, and in fact, I think cheating is sort of an outgrowth of the system as I made the argument the last time we had this one on one.

But really that AI has lowered the cost, if you will, to cheat.

And so everyone's really concerned about this. I know you've had a bunch of conversations as you've been crisscrossing the country quite literally.

What has stood out to you that that is worth sort of bringing into this conversation to fill out the picture?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, so two things, Michael.

First, I did one of my salon dinners in Seattle at the end of the summer. And it was really interesting in that room because the conversation with senior university leaders there, you know, we had people from Oregon and Washington State and Idaho and others.

The conversation kept coming back to what students should still have to work through themselves. What should we deliberately keep hard? What should we deliberately keep social? What should we deliberately keep human, right?

This idea that the college experience itself, you know, the 18-to-22-year-old residential learning experience is still maybe perhaps the last fully analog experience that most of these people will have in their lives.

And, you know, there was one provost in particular who said, ‘We just need to come up with harder problems for students to work through because, you know, AI is going to do the easy stuff and for... to get students to learn, we have to understand what they're doing with AI. And then we have to give them those harder problems.’

And that was followed, Michael, by a conversation that I had with Marty Schmidt, who was supposed to be at a dinner that we hosted this summer in New York City. He never made it because of Amtrak. He's the president of RPI, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. And he helped kind of make that question of hard a little bit more concrete for me because he said, you know, if AI handles more routine work, how do students then develop the judgment to handle the harder work? Where do they get that practice?

And, you know, in this conversation I had with him I started to think, what does that do to the student success movement? Because I think there is now a growing tension between our definition of student success, which has of course been this big movement on campuses over the last 20 years to help students, you know, kind of get in, get through college, stay in college and get out. And what learning in the age of AI is going to require?

As he said, you know, students need more reps, they need more struggle, They need more opportunities to fail and recover.

But at the same time, Michael, we have spent years, decades designing institutions around removing barriers, improving grades, retention, and student success.

So I guess the question is, can we make learning harder while still helping students succeed?

And I think RPI is a pretty interesting example here, you know, because Marty was really adamant with me about maintaining rigor. Right? He says, you know, their average GPA at RPI is basically, it hasn't changed in decades. He said freshmen often struggle, but retention is still above 90% because they built support around that struggle, including having upper-class students tutor and mentor freshmen.

He had a great phrase that he used with me. Right? He said, it's not a handout, but it's a hand up.

And I thought that was really important to think about how we think about, you know, this tension between struggle and student success.

Michael Horn

Yeah. I... It all lands for me, Jeff. I mean, I think it's interesting.

Obviously, I advocate a lot for competency based learning, and so the grade question would just look different in my head.

But I think of it as more rigorous, not less. Right? Because you have to really show mastery, and that in certain cases will mean without AI. That... Right?

I don't know if you'll find this interesting or not. I still have my students write two papers in my class, but this year I'm adding an oral defense component for the final paper. not because I tell them to not use AI, I tell them to use it, but they better learn it, right, which means that they have to grapple with the arguments themselves and be able to use, in my case, my theories of innovation, right, to analyze a problem in education or a case study that they've sort of picked.

And I guess my other thought on this... So I guess in the current system, I would say, I agree, like, you can't reduce the academic rigor. That can't be the answer.

And in many cases, my read of the research, Jeff, is that the people who get the most out of AI are those that have really mastered the knowledge. Right?

Like how you ask it, how you talk to it, how you fill in context, like even with it getting better at understanding context, being able to pull in data from different places, my understanding at least is that's remained stubbornly true.

And so in many cases, think like novice learners in particular, they have to build that foundational expertise. And I think the trick is we're gonna also have to give them opportunities to be using AI once they get, you know, over that novice hump, if you will. Right, Jeff? And into the more expert learners. They're gonna have to be able to use AI to increase the value of the products, services, the outputs that they're putting forth as well.

And that strikes me as like one of the tricks in all of this.

I'll say it this way. A lot of people are very angry about Alpha Schools right now in K-12 education. There are many critiques I'm sure that are okay.

One of the critiques goes like this, which is ‘Why are they trying to accelerate learning? Why are they trying to speed it up?’

Jeff Selingo

Right. We need to slow things down.

Michael Horn

We need to slow it down.

And I actually have a slightly different take, which is I wonder if with AI targeted at the right level for each student and so forth, can we accelerate the foundational learning so that more students come better prepared to higher education ready to tackle those, like, bigger questions and more, you know, expert learning situations, if you will.

And I don't think this is, like, cute tricks or something like that. There's a lot of evidence around the importance of narratives, for example, in learning things, Jeff. We learn through stories. How many social studies classes in K-12 education or science classes leverage stories to teach things? Could we build foundational knowledge if we had better narratives, through these things?

Just enough to really help people develop fluency and mastery so that they could do more with AI when they get into higher education.

It's a thorny problem where I think all sides really do need to come together on it, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. So Michael, I guess I buy your point there, but how do we know when someone's gotten over that hump, right, that knowledge hump, right? What is that tipping point?

You know, I think we need to figure out which repetition students actually need, right, before they could responsibly hand a task to AI.

And in terms of speeding this up, like, I do think we need to slow things down with students. Right?

Like, I talked in my book, you know, about David Deming really leaning into this idea of exploring and then exploiting. Right? Like, how do we get the knowledge that we need? And then as you say, after we get over that hump, after we pass that tipping point, how do we exploit that knowledge that we have? Right? So we have that basic knowledge. We could exploit it by just through our own human, you know, our own human needs, but then we could also have AI help us.

But I guess the question is, ‘How do we know when a student has gotten over that hump?’

Michael Horn

I agree. I mean, we don't have the assessment infrastructure at all right now, and this is why I think the most exciting opportunity.

If I'm a philanthropy right now looking to make an impact in education, I think assessment is maybe the most interesting place to be digging into some of these questions.

And by the way, It was originally called School of One, changed the name to Teach to One by New Classrooms nonprofit that won Time Magazine's top 100 innovations of the year one year. And for math learning in middle school, basically, has been their area.

And they developed this concept early on, which was ‘repetitions to par,’ basically, to master any given math concept.

So they knew, you know, on average, it takes someone three repetitions to master this concept. It takes someone four days to master this and the like.

And the reason I bring it up is because then they could say, are you above par or below par, things like that, and start to measure it against it.

We haven't really done that work for a lot of things outside of math and I think we need to, you know, dig in, Jeff, and say, ‘What is the foundational stuff?’

And I guess I should also clarify. I think my question is the rate of learning once you've picked. I'm totally in favor of slowing down and letting people explore far more because I think we don't do that nearly enough.

And actually, that's one of the biggest shortcomings, I would argue, of the middle and high school system in this country.

Jeff Selingo

So Michael, I think the idea of experience and like what students are experience inside and of course outside the classroom. We've talked a lot on this podcast this year around experiential learning

It brings me to my next topic, which is what's happening in Northeastern University or a study that just came out on Northeastern University.

Of course, the struggles of Syracuse University, which have been in the news a lot. There's a Harvard Business School case study on Northeastern, which we'll put out In the show notes.

Michael Horn

We're both quoted, Jeff, in the PR write up that Northeastern did about the case study. Yeah.

Jeff Selingo

I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. I saw that. And you know, Northeastern tells me, and you know much more about this and you probably have access to every case study that Harvard Business School has ever done, But they tell me that there's not that many case studies on colleges and universities, from Harvard Business School. So it's just fascinating that they even did one.

And then I read this around the same time The Wall Street Journal did a big piece, a front page piece on Syracuse. And kinda taken together, it was interesting to me about how these two universities, one in Boston, one in Syracuse, made different bets over the last quarter century, basically, since the turn of this century.

And one went in one direction and one went in the other. Right?

So I was looking... I was just putting together a piece on this recently. And so I was looking in 2006, so exactly 20 years ago, Syracuse's admissions yield was 31%, meaning about a third of students who were accepted ended up going to Syracuse. By the way, back then, only about a quarter, about 25% of students who were accepted to Northeastern ended up enrolling. By the fall of 2025, so basically twenty years later, Syracuse had gone from 31% to 17%, and Northeastern went from 24% to 45%.

Now yield tells us, in my mind, something about demand because it means that if you're accepted to multiple schools, that's where you're placing your bet. And I thought it was just really interesting how those two universities went in different directions.

And if you read the Harvard Business School study, which again is fascinating, I think there were four choices that Northeastern did that Syracuse and many other universities didn't do.

One was, you know, Northeastern really changed its enrollment playbook. They really leaned into things like early decision. They leaned into these multiple pathways to get to Boston. So that if for students who really wanted to go to Northeastern, there were different ways to get there eventually. They...

So that was one. Right?

Second, they really invested in co-op as a reason to choose the university. Right? It was both differentiated, but it was also relevant. Relevant at a time, as we know, when parents started to become much more concerned post great recession about their kids getting jobs.

I think it was also really interesting that they expanded during disruptions. During the 2008 recession, this was something I actually really didn't know until I read the case study. Joe Aoun put a lot of money into hiring faculty, really doubling down on research, which by the way is not incompatible with the co-op, right? They could become a research university, which they eventually did become an R1 research university. But as he said, you know, right after the great recession, all these really wealthy colleges and universities because they depended so much on their endowment, struggled a little bit and he was able to take advantage of that.

And then I think finally, what's really interesting is that since the late 1990s, Northeastern has had two presidents, Richard Freeland and Joe Aoun. And Richard Freeland started this idea that we're gonna become a top 100 university. Joe Aoun got there and he just put on the gas.

And it's not that Syracuse didn't have stable leadership because they've only had a couple of presidents over that time too, but they've... Especially the last two presidents before their current one or their... They call it a chancellor there. They had very... You know, Nancy Cantor and the previous president there who just retired, they kinda went in two different directions in terms of strategy and I think it shows like pick a lane and let's go win it.

Michael Horn

Win it. That's the thing you have kept saying. And that's... I... That the thing that I take away from all this. Right?

Jeff Selingo

Well, I'm a Yankees fan, as you know, Michael. And I'm sorry.

Michael Horn

That's hurting at the moment. That's hurting. That's hurting.

Jeff Selingo

I know we're recording this just after the Yankees tossed the Red Sox out of... Okay. Okay. I wasn't gonna use the word sweep. Well, it's only two out of three. Yeah. It's only a three game series. I mean, does it...

Michael Horn

Swept. Swept. Unceremoniously swept. Yeah. Unceremoniously swept. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was brutal. Let's just say it though. Let's just call it what it was. But the …

Jeff Selingo

Oh, it's basketball season for you anyway.

Michael Horn

So but look, play to win. Right?

And I am struck by so often, Jeff, how when times get tough, leaders not just in higher ed but in large sectors, they sort of like cover, duck and cover. Whereas they don't actually see that when times are tough, that's the opportunity for innovation. That's when reinvention can happen. That's when you can do things differently. This notion of buying low essentially. Right?

You buy low, you sell high.

But people's instincts are often the opposite and play to win, not just sort of like live another day.

Look. If you have that free cash flow, you can allocate to experiments for innovation. Go for it. One other thing on...

In terms of the continuity point, because I think it's huge. Co-op was seen, and the case study makes this point, at the time that Joe came into the presidency as a bit of a noose around the neck, if you will, right around universities. You know, this isn't what serious R1 universities do. And he had the exact opposite take on it. He said, this is our differentiated lane. We're gonna lean into it. We're gonna invest behind it. We're gonna grow. They've got 150 people or something now supporting the co-ops, 4,000 plus employers, I think, across the network.

And look, co-op has hit a bit of a zeitgeist moment. I won't say it's just luck because Joe Aoun certainly made the argument for humanics in his book “Robot-Proof” several years ago, so it was certainly strategic. But it has really hit its moment in this time for a confluence of reasons that you and I have talked about, all having to do with the half life of skills really shrinking and the pullback by employers and the basic training and frankly risk aversion of employers around early career human capital, Jeff.

And so I think in that, you know, macro environment, co-op has not just been differentiated. It's been amplified as, like, the best way to get experience in many cases for students.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And, Michael, that's why I think, you know, it was interesting when that Syracuse piece came out. A lot of comments on my social media, but also the comments on that piece in the journal talked about geography. Well, nobody wants to go to Upstate New York because the weather is terrible.

And, well, I think your weather in Boston is probably just as bad. So I don't think it has anything to do with the weather.

I do think it has industry connections. It has something to do with geography and industry connections, which Boston has in spades, and that helps the co-op.

I will argue by the way that Syracuse could potentially get a leg up here as we know within, you know, within a couple miles of Syracuse and Clay, New York Micron, which we have seen the impact out in Idaho of Micron is opening a new, you know, a new chip plant there. And so that I think offers opportunities for Syracuse to maybe copy Northeastern's playbook here.

But it does get into geography and how that plays into higher education because I think we thought we were coming to a point and I think probably during the pandemic everybody thought, well, borders don't matter, cities don't matter. You know, now we're in a virtual world, you know, universities and knowledge and experience could be had anywhere.

But, you know, we see this news and you wrote about this recently and you could talk more about this in the Boston Globe that, you know, there's this big deal where now we... You know, Ken Griffin gave a lot of money to Carnegie Mellon, and I will let you tell the rest of the story from there.

Michael Horn

Yeah.

Let me just give you your kudos first, though, before I do, Jeff, which is I think Life After College. Was that your book? there's “Life After College” where you made this point that geography, geography, geography really does matter. It's a point you've hit multiple times. I quoted you in this piece in The Boston Globe, because I think it's... People just continually underrate how important geography is.

And my piece was this broader thing that at a time where higher ed is struggling so much, so many institutions being forced to shrink, closing, merging, under the gun, we can see that it's gonna be a tough decade. There are a series of these institutions that are expanding, not just in terms of number of students, but geographically, opening more and more campuses, in some cases subsuming some of these campuses that were no longer viable, from other institutions.

And you mentioned Carnegie Mellon, a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. That's billion with a B. That's a lot of money. The biggest gift ever to higher education.

Michael Horn

Yep ever and $2 billion of it to set up a campus in Florida.

Vanderbilt setting up a campus in Florida.

Northeastern has a campus in Florida. Get the trend here.

There's something about the macro environment with opportunity there. I mentioned the Carnegie Mellon news. It broke as we were, literally getting ready to release, which gave it a bigger news hook.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. That was like perfect timing by the way for that piece.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Perfect perfect timing for it. but we were really looking at Vanderbilt, Northeastern, and NYU, which arguably pioneered sort of this expansion strategy, basically end of the 2000s, under chancellor Sexton.

So my big takeaway is one, location matters for students in terms of attracting them, but also opportunities, in terms of the clusters, right, regional industry clusters that they will get access to. This is the argument you've been making for years. It matters for faculty in terms of being able to do research and taking down institutional barriers to cooperation. It matters for building the network and the opportunities that will come after graduation, but also as Joe Aoun made the case to me in an interview for building lifelong learning opportunities.

While a lot of institutions, have gone online to serve older students, Northeastern's taken a slightly different approach. They have online, yes, but they ground it in the communities in which these professionals are working or seeking to upskill.

And so it's really a differentiated strategy.

That gets into my second big takeaway, Jeff, as we've seen these expansions, massive expansions both in the country, but also across countries, is that different strategies at work actually create different points of emphasis as you expand.

So I think it's fair to say like NYU, their perspective is global university, global perspectives. Right? They have the location in Abu Dhabi, the location in Shanghai, the location in NYU. There's the ability to go between them. They have many other sites where you can study away for a semester or a year.

But they sort of view that as they have these different campus cultures in different places, there's also a benefit to NYU, which they would say most global city. It's changing the character of that campus as well.

Vanderbilt, I think, is... just to name them, is taking a very different approach here, I think. They are thinking about how does this, really make them... sort of the experiential learning part of what Northeastern does, I think, very important to Vanderbilt. But it's also part of, I think, what they see as reinventing the American research university, an emphasis on the word American there. They're really asking the question, ‘How are we valuable, to The U.S. specifically? And I think it's a different lens as a result.

Third thing I'll say, two things not in the piece. AI, I think, plays a major role in this story. AI hollowing out entry level jobs, experiential learning more important, that means geography is more important. And frankly, I would argue it also means network is more important because that's how people are gonna get jobs. And so if you have more alums in the... I think we...

Years ago, we noted that Vanderbilt has its second most alumni concentrated in New York where it's opening site, that's gonna help those graduates get jobs if they spend some time there.

And this disruption point that chancellor Diermeier at Vanderbilt and Richard Florida, who you've written with before, professor at Vanderbilt, also wrote about in an op-ed, that they see separate campuses as an ability to disrupt the research university.

This gets into something that we've talked about, but they're really thinking it as a by getting geographic space, can you actually reinvent the operating model and operating logic of the research university? TBD there, Jeff, I think, but, I think it's an interesting angle.

And then I'll come back to the one I said upfront. Florida's hot. Vandy, Northeastern, now Carnegie Mellon.

Jeff Selingo

Not just weather hot. Yes.

Michael Horn

Not just weather anymore. It's, you know, that Miami West Palm Beach sort of corridor. Right, Jeff? There's a lot going on there.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. I'm kind of interested to see. Maybe we should have, the leaders of the University of Miami, how they feel right now, because I think they were desperate for attention for all this time, and now suddenly the city is getting it.

But I think, Michael, there's... You know, when that news from Carnegie Mellon came out of that $3 billion gift, you know, my phone exploded in the morning when that came out. And all these people were asking me, oh my god. Like, how do we keep up with this?

And the question I think is, like, what is temporary? Like, is this like a new trend? Is this, is new money and new capital going to flow into higher ed, you know, from... Especially from private individuals? Or or what is... Is this a structural change to higher ed?

And Michael, as you know, you helped me out greatly on a new state of higher education report that just came out. This is a report that I came out for the first time last year. And that's really kind of the framing of that is like, what do we see as temporary signals given the moment we're living in and what is really the structural change that higher ed is going through right now?

And I think for decades, you know, the answer to every strategic question in higher ed was just to get bigger, right? Add programs, add students, add research and add facilities.

And I think this report really asked what happens when those resources that supported all that — students and student enrollment, international students, graduate students and graduate and research of course from the federal government, federal financial aid — when all of that money starts to either slow down or stop in some cases, how do we keep growing?

And one of the things that I think in putting together this report, Michael, that I came to realize is that there's all of these pressures facing higher education right now. There's all these, what I would call and classify as enterprise risks. You know, what's happening geopolitically with international students? What's happening in Washington with research? What is happening graduate studies and student loan policy? And of course, the demographic cliff. All of these things are coming at the same time. Each one representing an enterprise risk for the institution.

And I will tell you that no governance structure in higher education is built for that. It's barely built by the way to deal with one of these at one time, and now everything is coming at the same time.

And as a result, you know, one number that really stuck with me in putting together this report is that one in seven colleges lost money cumulatively over the last decade. And that to me suggests a much more structural problem with higher education.

Michael Horn

Yeah, I mean obviously I agree that's the number that really stood out to me as well.

It harkened to the research that Steve Schulman and then I published, obviously, his research around how razor thin cash is on so many campuses, Jeff. and it took home to me, you know, I think there's...

We've talked about consolidating industries and are there lessons? Because I think a lot of the story that I've always heard is, like, keep growing because that papers over all the cultural issues, you can, you know, sort of solve these things.

And so we have this rich get richer story that I just outlined of this massive geographic expansion byy these institutions. There are others, by the way. We just mentioned four of them.

I would say though, like, if you're at a place like Syracuse, is there a page you can take from the GE playbook circa 1980 when Jack Welch came i and he basically said, we wanna be number one or two in every single business we're in. Otherwise, we're divesting of the business.

Does an institution like a Syracuse say, like, hey. You know, you mentioned the Micron opportunity. We've got the David Falk College of Sport, the Maxwell School, the Newhouse School of Public Communications. We're gonna lean into those and maybe be less present in other places, and and and really be excellent, and then start growing from areas of strength as opposed to trying to patch over weaknesses.

It's a question, I guess, Jeff, that I have.

But I think there are some institutions that will continue to grow. I do expect that some of the big institutions will copy this sort of playbook we've seen and do more geographic expansion. I don't think it's gonna be for everything. I think it will dilute certain parts of the culture on some college campuses if they just blindly follow it.

This is the part of the piece that I ended on of the questions of is the logic of the corporation really the logic of the university with geographic expansion. I think it's a question mark in some cases.

But I think a lot of other institutions, perhaps the vast majority, should be having a very different conversation about where do we focus, where are we excellent, and you know, the other thing that that report that, the state of higher education report makes very clear is that international and graduate students is not the gravy train, the cash cow that it was to paper over these challenges, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

And I think purpose is really important right now.

Where do we play? Where do we win? And Michael, when we come back on Future U., we'll talk more about that.

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 learners can achieve their career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Michael Horn

Welcome back to Future U., Jeff. You just alluded to it. Purpose of the university, what is it in these times?

As we're recording this, Cornell just a few weeks ago had put out a very interesting report around the purpose of the university, but it should be said as we're recording this. There's been a lot of news coming out of Ithaca, New York right now about Cornell at the moment. It's dominating a lot of headlines.

There's a lot of polarization and hot takes around now. What, I will say for the accuser and the accused, is quite serious. no matter where you come down on it, this is a serious conversation. and I think it's not our place in this podcast to add to that heat right now.

And what we do want to do is tackle the report that Cornell put out about the purpose of the university for which they made a little bit of news, and then it got overshadowed.

Jeff Selingo

Yep. That got overshadowed. Right?

Michael Horn

Yeah. And look, I understand why, but our purpose on this podcast is to think about the future of higher education, not the immediate news cycle. Sort of what's the ripple effect of this? And so I... We wanna tackle that. It's a... It's an important, report potentially. It comes on the heels of at least two other reports about the purpose of the university in recent months from Vanderbilt, as well as Yale University, which we talked about last year on the show, alongside, secretary of education, Linda McMahon's plea to universities to do exactly these kinds of introspective thinking.

You said on our first episode, I believe, of this season that that letter was a giant distraction from the work that actually needs to take place.

I don't think I agree with you, because I think these sorts of thoughtful takes are helpful in shaping the future of the direction of the university at a time that it is at an inflection point. It needs leadership and vision and to have these sorts of conversations.

But I'm curious what grabbed you about the Cornell report specifically. Has it changed your mind at all?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah Michael, I think there were a couple of things, think judgment, it was around cultivating sound judgment and that students are not quite ready for that in the workforce, right Michael?

We know, you know, if we look at the skills that every new employer or employer of every new college graduate I should say, right, they want discernment. They want knowing what matters and what doesn't, especially in a world where AI is throwing a lot out there.

They want problem solving, you know, especially when students are navigating ambiguity. They want the ability for students to network and build teams.

They want that sense of negotiation so they can navigate disagreements and trade-offs.

And most of all, by the way, they want students to have the ability to get things done.

And what I thought was really interesting about the Cornell report was this idea that the work is hard and that students even at Cornell are having trouble kind of keeping up.

You know, faculty members talk about that lack of those soft skills, the lack of executive functioning skills where students can't do multiple assignments at the same time, they want breaks.

And the Cornell response is like, how do we develop an undergraduate education that both, you know, that tension as we talked earlier between making things hard, but also helping students succeed.

And I think that was really interesting to me. It was almost, and this is my take on it, and I said this, and then somebody wrote to me, and they said, ‘You're totally wrong. Did you read the report?’

You know, I thought it was almost an admission that, you know, employers have long complained about new college graduates, and I felt that in reading that report, it was almost an admission that, you know what? We have always said that we were preparing students well and maybe we're not.

I really do think it was that there was a little bit, if you read between the lines, a little bit of admission in there about that and that we have to do a better job at preparing students for the workforce.

And as we know, employers have long said new college graduates aren't prepared on one hand, and provosts and presidents said, yes, they are.

And I thought there was a little bit of a nuance in here that maybe employers are right.

Michael Horn

Jeff, it's interesting you saying that because, so here's my confession of how I've changed my mind.

When Yale announced the task force eighteen months ago or whatever it was that they were gonna study the causes of the public's disillusionment with higher ed, I was like, really? You need a task force to figure this out?

I thought it was an unbelievably thoughtful report.

The Cornell one, I think you've named the things that it builds on and differentiates from the Yale report, around judgment and so forth. I...

My only adds, I actually have the same read as you do around the employer critique. And my read on it is twofold. One, I want people to understand the connection between the academic rigor conversation that we had up front and the importance of sound knowledge in cultivating judgment, executive function, and so forth, and that these are knit together. They are not separate spheres, because I think that's actually the part of the root cause of some of this problem is that we've treated them as two different things as opposed to an integrated thing that happens in a human, and that they play off each other.

To have judgment, you need to have knowledge so that you can actually judge.

The second part of this is the K-12 piece of it again, Jeff. Like, I... This comes back to K-12 not doing its job. And we know that's in the news for a whole bunch of reasons right now, won't get into.

But the only statement I guess that I hadn't thought about before was there have been a few times in this nation's history where the presidents of universities have had a significant impact on the K-12 system. The Council of Ten, famously in terms of the science sequence and Carnegie units and things of that nature. James Conant Bryant, right, of Harvard, president Conant, literally, you know, helping shape the comprehensive high school in that notion.

Is this a moment where we need that kind of leadership to actually say these are the expectations of what we need K-12 graduates to be able to do? Because, yes, there are some limitations at the university, and this is what we're gonna do, by the way, to help on both sides of it in ways we might change.

Look, talk is cheap at the end of the day, but I also think that talk, has honest talk has too often been, hidden these days in higher ed. And so I'm I'm for one, I stand corrected from my initial reaction I think eighteen months ago or whatever it was, and I'm glad that they've put out these reports.

I hope we see leadership now — this will connect to the other point — continuity and leadership in a direction, to actually do something about the points that they've raised.

Jeff Selingo

Well, Michael, I think at the end of the day, we have to work across institutions and across sectors. So not only do we not work between K-12 and higher ed, we don't work between higher ed and employers, and we don't even work between higher ed institutions or within higher ed institutions.

Michael Horn

Yeah. I think that's right. Okay.

So let's go speaking of across institutions and things like that's a good segue because as you know, along with Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, Angela Jackson, Danny Curtis, we put out six white papers.

Michael Horn

It was gargantuan, like a year and a half of work, called Beyond Silos and and and around Career Connected Learning.

And basically, the argument of the six papers was that governors, as you know right now around the country, are calling for better pathways to careers, but they're running into barriers that stand at the intersection of these K-12 higher education and workforce systems that just were never built to row in the same direction, Jeff.

And so when governors issue these clarion calls, people responsible for actually making them in the state governments just don't really know what to do.

And so what we try to do is identify five priorities where we have seen other states take tangible steps, into concrete playbook to tackling these governor questions.

And so priority one is around actually aligning around the view and a vision across these systems.

Priority two, our third paper in the series is to revise requirements to actually recognize learning that takes place across different contexts, not just within an institution.

Priority three is to change how funding flows. Funding is a critical part of this, and it's often stuck in the silos.

Priority four was creating statewide infrastructure to power local programs, not just view this as a state problem, but that these economies to our earlier conversation are often regional.

And then strengthen the pull of career connected pathways was our fifth.

And really, Jeff, each of these papers has three mini case studies of states that have actually made changes to advancing against that priority.

I don't think the takeaway should be that any state has figured it out. It's that, instead, that piecemeal, we have a playbook that we think we can assemble now across the spectrum to meaningfully move these systems together.

And the two lenses we take, one is business model innovation theory, and frankly, I think my own read is that certain institutions may not be fit for making the changes, and there's gonna have to be reinvention or new institutions that come in.

But second, we take Chesterton's Fence, which basically says, if there's a regulatory barrier, before you just simply tear it down, know why it was there and maybe preserve the essence of that even as you create a workaround, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, it's interesting, Michael, because I think this is a problem I hear repeatedly, that leaders want more connections between education and work.

But you know, the funding, the institutions, they're all organised separately.

It was interesting going back to the Marty Schmidt conversation I was talking about earlier, the president of RPI. They have built a pathway around online certificates for community college graduates, including engineering management, data analytics, supply chain. Students can stack those credentials and ultimately earn a bachelor's degree from RPI.

He also described this student driven X Lab where students build things, demonstrate specific skills, by the way earn badges, and eventually help teach others, that gives us again another example of not only experiential learning, but experiential learning leading to mastery that could then, you know, you know, teach others about this.

Michael Horn

Pay it forward. Yeah.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And so I would love to understand from your work, you know, what makes these pathways dependable for students, right? Who recognizes the learning? Who pays for support? How do we make a credential? Actually make sure that that advances someone toward the next step.

Michael Horn

Well, and and I'll just say, Jeff, as people read through it, I suspect they'll have some... They'll say, I'm not sure that solves the problem you just outlined in those questions.

But I'll give one case study that I think does a pretty good job of it, which was Alabama wanted to stand up these student, nurse apprenticeships, in the States. We know apprenticeships are a big deal. We see health care as an obvious area where it could make an impact.

It turned out though, Jeff, that there was this huge problem here, which to your point about recognizing learning and certifying it and the like, is that nursing has long required licensure that can only be earned after completing an approved academic program. And that license is the prerequisite to employment.

But as we know, apprenticeship starts with being hired, with being employed. And so the existing regs in Alabama at the time only allowed colleges to oversee that hands-on experience through clinical learning. So they actually needed legislative change in 2021 so that apprentices could take on nursing responsibilities as their capabilities grew.

That, by the way, created like a cascade of other changes that needed to be made in terms of, laying out the exact skills that would dictate these milestones because patient safety is absolutely critical. Right?

They needed to exempt, certain, parts of the workforce and things of that nature. And so there's like a cascade every time you sort of turned over one stone, it was just one more, Jeff, that you had to go through. Right?

And you really then... you moved all these regulations, but then you needed colleges to actually fill the void and create these new nursing programs so that employment based learning could actually count toward a degree.

So the state had to create an implementation partner.

Fast forward, I'll save all the details, but fast forward to 2026, the cool thing is that there are now 30 post secondary institutions, 30 in Alabama alone, with apprenticeship programs, and over 500 nurse apprentices in the state.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, Michael, I think it just really leads us, I think all of these different story strands lead us to a point like what do we really want students to be able to do when they leave? You know, what do we want them to prove in their learning and what will help them get there?

And as we think about the university of the future, and it's not just this comprehensive university that does everything, like what are we good at? Where can we win? And most of all, where can we help students make these connections to a very ambiguous world they're gonna go into and to the workforce that really needs them.

And so with that, we are going to close out yet another episode of Future U.

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