No Relaxing Summer for Higher Ed

Publications Mentioned:

The Elite University Presidents Who Despise One Another: Inside the civil war between the Ivy League and the South in The Atlantic

Great Expectations, Fragile Foundations in On EdTech

Transcript:

Jeff Selingo

So, Michael, the summer has long been a moment to rest, reflect, and plan in higher ed. But this summer of 2025 certainly wasn't that for colleges and universities. The intensity of last spring has just seemed to continue on.

Michael Horn

Yeah. This was not your vacation, you know, sun-by-the-beach sort of summer, I think, for most higher ed leaders. And as a result, we certainly do not have a shortage of topics and stories to catch up on with big implications for the future of higher education as we open up for, get this Jeff, season nine 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.

Jeff Selingo

I'm Jeff Selingo. 

Michael Horn

And I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff, welcome back. It's good to see you in this forum. I'll tell you — I mean, you know, but I'll tell our audience — that we kind of stay in touch a lot over the summer as we work on various advisory projects together for university presidents. We like to gossip about what's going on in the higher ed landscape, check in on each other's families. So even though Future U may stop, we're in pretty constant touch, I dare say, but listeners don't have that insider's view. So before we, you know, dive into the episode itself, why don't you catch folks up on how your summer was?

Jeff Selingo

Well, it's been a great summer, Michael. We started it together in Omaha, Nebraska, which is forever going to be known as the birthplace of Future U, of course. It came full circle this summer. We appeared before the Bellevue University trustees, which is exactly how Future U started many years ago, where we addressed them, and they asked us back again this year. But what was different about this time, Michael, is that we got to go to the College World Series together. We saw an awesome game. It was this incredible comeback in the ninth inning by LSU. And I remember, Michael, at the end of the game there were these tears on the field. Which for all the talk about how professionalized college athletics is becoming, you know, it's still a game, right, with the emotions of teenagers playing it, and you noted that that night.

Michael Horn

Yeah, it was. I mean, it was striking for me, Jeff, because it was a crazy ending to a game. Like, the last two, three innings was just action-packed, really fun, and then it was heartbreaking. Like, two I don't know if they scored them as errors or not, but, you know, two mishaps on the field essentially.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. That would have ended the game with LSU losing.

Michael Horn

Yeah. LSU losing. And we saw those players, those kids crying on the field, and I just felt so bad for them in that moment. My kids, when I came back, they kept saying, ‘Oh, you were in O-ma-ha because they're very big into “Wicked” right now. But, otherwise, it was a relatively chill summer for me, with less travel, especially coming out of our Africa trip in May and so forth. We had a small New England-based vacation, which was, I would say, a welcome change for just a little bit — you know, staying in New England. It's kind of the nicest time to be up here except maybe the Fall. So that was pretty good, but I also wasn't gearing up like I was last year for a major book launch, which you've been in the throes of. How's that going?

Jeff Selingo

Well, I know people who follow me on social media and my newsletter are probably sick of the book by now. But we've been spending all summer planning for the release. I got to do two cool things this summer that I didn't get to do with any of my previous books. The first is I've always wanted to see the book being printed. And, you know, digital technology has clearly taken over the printing business, but it's still kind of a craft, Michael. I got to go to Fairfield, Pennsylvania, which is literally down the road from Liberty Ski Resort, where I've taken my kids skiing in Southern Pennsylvania, not far from Gettysburg. And, you know, it was really interesting. Two of the men who — and they were men — who took me around the printing plant. You know, they didn't go to college, Michael. They started working in printing in high school, and they turned this into a career. And let me tell you. First of all, they were so excited that an author showed up and wanted to see their book being printed, but I was amazed. They just spent hours with me talking about their craft. This is an art. 

And like so many of that generation, they talked about getting ready for retirement. And looking around the plant, there were clearly young people working there. But to them, it was just a job for them. For these guys, it was kind of a calling, and it really made me think back to our time at the College of Western Idaho last year, where we were in that mechatronics lab, if you remember, and it was people going into their second career there. There weren't a lot of 18 year olds, and it just keeps bringing me back to this long conversation that we've been having, and I think American education is having, around all these jobs, which are still going to be jobs, I think, even in an AI era that may not require a traditional college education. But for some reason, we still can't get people either interested in them or find a pathway into them. And it was just an incredible thing to see this book being printed. 

And speaking of art, I also got to go into the recording studio for the audiobook. Twenty-two hours of recording for what Amazon says is only going to be a nine hour book. So a lot is going to be left on the cutting-room floor. And I will say narrating is harder than I thought. You know, you don't write books for audio, so it's easy to make mistakes. You also need to figure out where to emphasize the words because when you're writing it, you don't necessarily think about that. I will tell you, here on Future U we only talk for, what, about a half hour, or forty-five minutes. Your jaw doesn't get tired.

Michael Horn

Well, it's also the pace, though. Right? Because I read the intro to my book, "Job Moves.” I didn't do the whole thing, but I did the intro. And it was the pacing of it that they really want you to not go too fast as they are reading through it. It's not how we do the podcast, right?

Jeff Selingo

Right. And I tend to talk, as my wife told me before I started recording this, she's like, Jeff, you tend to talk fast, so you have to slow down. 

We had a director and an audio engineer. The director was on Zoom from New York, and the audio engineer was with me in DC. And I asked them that. And I actually also asked them, I said, do they naturally slow down these, you know, in the apps? And they said they don't. It's usually a one-to-one thing. And I was always worried about that. Am I going too fast? Am I? 

But it's really the enunciation that tires your jaw out. But thankfully, I had this great director, an audio engineer. And it's fascinating to me, Michael. I was looking at the sales figures for the last book. You know, audiobooks do better than ebooks for some reason, at least for "Who Gets In And Why." We sold way more audiobooks than we sold ebooks, which was pretty interesting to me because perhaps just like podcasts are hot, I guess audiobooks are hot.

Michael Horn

It's interesting. I didn't know. Now I'm now I'm curious. I'm gonna go back and look at our own sales numbers.

I want to dive into the substance in a moment, but one more important piece of housekeeping as we're kicking off the season. I do want us to introduce the team. You just talked about how you had people coaching you through reading the book. We have people behind the scenes here, so to speak, and so I want to introduce that team. First off, I will say coming back to us for another year — somehow he has decided to do that — is our producer, Michael Peloquin and his team at Borderline Media Company. Michael, let's actually let you say hello.

Michael Peloquin

Hello everybody. It's been a fun five years.

Michael Horn

Has it been five years? Wow.

Michael Peloquin

I think it was 2020 when I started working with you. Maybe it was 2021. Yeah, the beginning of. But it has been fun seeing this podcast grow and getting to hear the conversations. It's one of my favorites to do.

Michael Horn

Well we appreciate you. And for those who don't know, we go live on campus tours and things like that, you're always there as well. So huge thanks for being behind the scenes again. We'll let you go back to where you're maybe more comfortable. 

Michael Peloquin

I’ll duck behind the curtain.

Michael Horn

Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Michael. We appreciate it. And then, Jeff, we also have two other folks, one familiar person to us, one new. Why don't you tell about them both?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. So first is Kiri Mohan, who has been with us for a couple of years, helping with guest bookings. So it's great to have Kiri back with us this year as well. 

We're also welcoming somebody else new to the team, Jeff Young, who was most recently an editor, writer, and podcaster at EdSurge. Jeff's gonna be our new content producer, really focusing on the content of Future U. 

You know, I first met Jeff way back in 1997 when I first joined The Chronicle of Higher Education. We were known back then, Michael, as the Chron Kids because we were all in our early twenties. Well, we're not kids anymore, clearly.

Jeff, has been reporting on the intersection of technology and learning, and it's really been something that I've turned to for years since we both left The Chronicle. I've also been really inspired by his own move to audio. He moved to audio well before we did, with Future U. In addition to Future U, Jeff is launching his own new podcast called Learning Curve, which is exploring what it means to teach and learn in the era of generative AI. And you're going to be able to hear some of those early episodes. We're going to put them on the Future U feed. So if you subscribe to the Future U feed, you're going to get some of those early episodes from us. But we're really excited to have Jeff and Kiri and Michael back with us this year.

Michael Horn

Yeah, and speaking of enunciation and great voices, Jeff Young has one of those. 

And Kiri is from Bedford, Massachusetts near me, so I'm psyched about both of them being with us as well. 

Let's dive into some substance now. The topics, as we mentioned, from the summer. There is a lot from which to choose. 

When we were planning for this, Jeff, I was like, 'Oh, there's not that much.' And then I kept unfolding. And so we're going to sprinkle it in throughout, but we're going to also try to limit ourselves a little bit so we're not here ‘till, you know, midnight recording. And we will have guests coming on, including an incredible reporters' roundtable to bring you all that will help us get into some of these issues a little bit more deeply. 

But what's been interesting to me as I was looking at the headlines is a lot of them are actually extensions of things that we were starting to hit on at the end of last season. 

So we had the One Big, Beautiful Bill, 'OBB. yeah. you know me.' Congress actually acted, right? But, of course now it has to get implemented. So there's been that strand. 

We had the Supreme Court saying that the layoffs could proceed at the Department of Education, which reversed a lower court's earlier ruling. 

We've had more executive orders. There should be some sort of snooze button on that, I think, at this point. And then we've had settlement deals as well, at the time that we are recording this, by Columbia and Brown University. Whoo. 

Okay. If you're okay, Jeff, maybe let's start there and then work our way back and then hit some other topics because I think the settlement deals have been important. Columbia went first. Most of this is likely familiar to our listeners, but they're going to pay a $200 million settlement to the federal government over three years, plus $21 million to settle investigations involving the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The latter money goes to Jewish employees and two janitors who were not Jewish but were directly impacted and threatened when they were working in Hamilton Hall when the protesters stormed that building. Now Columbia, importantly, did not admit wrongdoing, but in the next sentence, they said, 'Hey, we're not denying that there's some very serious and painful challenges our institution has faced with antisemitism.' So they walked that line, it seemed like. And then the deal unlocked not only $400 million in federal grants that had been frozen, but also the majority of the $1.3 billion a year in federal funding that had been placed on hold. Okay. That's Columbia. 

Then we've got Brown, which similarly did a deal — $50 million in their case. But this is actually, I think, notable from my perspective, Jeff, that it's not going to the federal government or employees or anything like that. It's going to workforce organizations within Rhode Island over ten years. So that's like, $5 million a year to workforce orgs in Rhode Island. Frankly, that's something that Brown might have chosen to do anyway, in my view, in the name of town gown or something like that. Developing other parts of the higher ed ecosystem, not just that upper, selective piece, but really a broader tent. But, you know, just to give a sense of why these universities did these deals, this quote from president Christina Paxton's letter I thought was quite interesting where she said, "Brown has not received reimbursements for expenses incurred for active grants from the National Institutes of Health since early April." The unreimbursed funds currently total more than $50 million and this amount had been increasing by approximately $3.5 million dollars per week. That becomes a pretty big toll on them. 

Other wrinkles here we could go into. But I'll just do maybe a couple of other things just to throw in the mix. UVA's former president now, Jim Ryan, who I think it's fair to say was really beloved in education circles on both sides of the aisle, was essentially forced to resign. And then we know that there's some active conversations going on between Harvard and the White House. An interesting story actually in the Boston Globe about the relationship between Harvard's president, Alan Garber, and the man who leads NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who actually was Garber's mentee, which is really interesting. 

There's active conversations with UCLA, we understand with big price tags being thrown around in the media. Some of this may come out right before we actually release, but there's a lot of emotion. Some folks wanting settlements so they can get back to work and research. Some not wanting Harvard to, quote, give in, if you will. 

So there's a lot of stuff here, Jeff. I'd love you to  take it out of the here and now maybe and think about, 'What does it mean more broadly? What are the implications from these settlements? Can we get back to normal, and just do the work of the university? Or is this going to keep going?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. I mean, I think everybody wants to get back to normal. I'm not quite sure. Pretty soon we're going to stop remembering what normal even was, right? I mean, at the end of the day, Michael, these feel like bounties. right? Like, universities are paying a ransom to unlock dollars that were already theirs. 

And they also feel like kind of random numbers, as you were pointing out there. You know, 'How does Brown end up with $50 million, but UCLA could pay a billion dollars? It just makes no sense given how big Brown is and even their endowment. You know, I'm not denying here, by the way, that higher ed lost its way, especially these elite institutions. I'm not going to defend them in that way. And the universities, I understand, they need to unlock these research dollars, and there really wasn't an indication that they would be able to until they paid up. So I think they were forced to the table. 

You know, these are complicated positions. I get it. These are big moral dilemmas. I'm glad that I'm not sitting on one of these boards or one of these presidents. But I just don't understand. If universities keep backing down, where does it stop? Because there really isn't evidence that this administration sticks to its deals all the time and won't keep asking and pushing for more. And, again, it's kind of random which universities it's going after. So if I'm sitting at a university saying, 'Oh my god, thank god I'm not UCLA or Harvard or Brown.' Well, maybe. But next week, you might be.

Michael Horn

Right, next week you might be. Hang there for one second, Jeff, because I agree with everything you just said. Universities have a lot of guilt and challenges on their hands. In my view, it probably has required external pressure. And I don't think anyone should be excited about, to your point, bounty is the right word. No one should be excited about how, in my view, this external pressure has been mounted, with a lack of due process. I admit, I think if I were in the seats that these presidents are, I'd probably do a deal as well.

Jeff Selingo

I think we all would, right? I think we have to.

Michael Horn

But I think the bigger thing is we need to find a way to put the executive back in the box. And I mean, not the executive at the universities. I mean, the federal government executive, the president, back in a box. And, again, I thought Rick Hess had a good piece on this that laid out both sides correctly and then just said, 'You've got to be crazy if you're a conservative and thinking that when the next Democrat comes in they're not gonna roll this playbook out the reverse way, right? I mean, you know, if you think that somehow ten years from now we're going to have rebalanced universities through this, I mean, maybe. But it just doesn't feel like a healthy precedent at all.

Jeff Selingo

No. And I think the question also is how does higher ed even come out of this? There's a divide. There's a fantastic Atlantic story that we're gonna put in the show notes about the divide in the AAU, the American Association or Association of American Universities. So I always get confused. Anyway AAU. Yeah. Between Princeton and Vanderbilt, mostly. A little bit of Washington University as well. And there's always been a divide in the AAU, but it's usually between the publics and privates in that group.

There's now, I think, 68 universities, which include a couple of Canadian universities. And I remember Bernie Manchin when he was the president of the University of Florida telling me this great story about a president of an Ivy League institution. He told me who it was. I will not out them on the show. Who would come early into the room when the when the AAU was meeting, and they would literally change the nameplates on the seats so that this president would sit next to other privates and usually next to other Ivy League institutions because they didn't really see it having anything in common with a public — and especially a public like the University of Florida.

Michael Horn

Can we run a contest where people can write in with who their guess of the president would be?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Now remember, this is a couple you know, Bernie Manchin hasn't been president of the University of Florida I think in 10 years.  Yeah. I would be kind of interested in what people would guess.

Michael Horn

I have a couple of guesses, but keep going.

Jeff Selingo

We could talk about that after the show. But now what's interesting to me about this Atlantic piece is it's between the privates. And I think a little bit of this is Vanderbilt and Wash U kind of wanting to break out. I think they feel like, 'Wait a second, why do the Ivies and Stanford get all the attention? And we're kinda sitting here, and we think we're doing a pretty good job, and we're not getting much attention.' But I don't know. I'm not quite sure the AAU breaking up because the point of the story was how, you know, Vandy and Wash U could kind of start this other organization off to the side. I'm not quite sure that's what higher ed needs right now. I think it needs these associations to assert their importance.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Well, you're right. It was a really good story. So I encourage people to read it, I think, honestly, because the tensions being reported like that, Jeff. Actually that was what caught my attention the most. It felt like the reporter was in the room, frankly.

Jeff Selingo

It was a great piece. Yeah.

Michael Horn

A really well-reported piece. It's something that we're going to frankly revisit a couple times this season because I think it has huge implications. Does it lead to a breakout? 

I wrote that piece around, that the Trump administration is really just not fond of large international presences at universities. And if you look at the SEC schools, by and large, they tend to bwe 10 or less international enrolled students. They really feel like American institutions. We've seen things written about they they want to diversify where research occurs — to have them at different campuses, different ideas, and things like that. I get some of that, and I don't know that this is going to lead to the reordering that people think it will. But there's other wrinkles on this. Right, Jeff? There was also then the executive order on admissions.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, another crazy executive order. I mean, I don't even know what number we're up to now. This there must be hundreds of executive orders, right?

Michael Horn

Well, there should be a ticker. We're not going to run that, right?

Jeff Selingo

But, you know, president Trump ordered the education department to require all colleges in the federal aid programs to submit detailed, applicant-level admissions data that would include race. It would include gender, SAT scores, GPAs of students, both those who were accepted and those who were rejected. Now what's important to remember, we just talked about these Columbia and Brown deals. It was part of that. So, basically, they're just extending that to everybody now. 

You know, colleges, as we know, already submit reams of data to the federal government as a condition of getting federal aid. Much of that data makes its way to the "college navigator" website from the education department. All that data then gets uploaded to these various rankings. Like, everybody uses this data. I'm actually thinking some of this data is pretty good to have. I mean, we should know by race and ethnicity who is getting accepted and who is getting rejected. It's not a bad number to know. But the reason why the administration is pushing for this is because it believes that elite colleges and universities continue to use race in admissions, and they're obviously outlawed from doing that from the 2023 Supreme Court decision. 

Now, of course, for the most part, most institutions are not considering race because they're not selective, so they don't really need to in any way. This is obviously going to pull all of them together whether they are selective or not. So it's going to put another burden on colleges and universities. And what's interesting to me is Robert Kelchein asked the question: 'Who's actually going to analyze this data or look at it because there's, like, four people left in the education department. So I guess we'll know that someday. 

But I think what's more important here is that, last year in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, you know, students don't have to list their race and ethnicity on a college application. And in fact, last year, a lot fewer of them did list their race and ethnicity. So we may want this information. We may not just be able to get it because increasingly, they're kind of checking ‘unknown,’ as a result. So I don't know how much in the end the EO will have that many teeth to it in order to do anything.

Michael Horn

Yeah. I mean, I get the impulse to your point and, I don't know. There's the weird irony of we don't want to consider race, so tell us your race in numbers. There's a weird irony in all that. But the other thing that you said that I think is interesting is this impacts relatively few institutions. And that's the question before we leave this topic that I want to ask you, which is there's a lot of ink being spilled around higher ed. Most of it is focusing on the selective institutions, institutions that admit fewer than 20 percent of applicants. And I know from your upcoming book, we should get a sound effect for this, like book alert, perk alert. Yeah. Michael P, you can, edit that back in later. But "Dream School," your book coming out, students at those schools admit fewer than 20 percent of applicants in the U.S., account for roughly 100,000 students total, which is a tiny fraction of the more than 15 million undergrads. So my question, Jeff, is do we just continue to make too big a deal of these schools? Are we missing the big picture?

Jeff Selingo

Well, Michael, you know I do believe we are, but I'm not sure how you break it. It's like saying your Celtics don't matter in the NBA. It's like my Yankees don't matter in baseball. It's like the Cowboys, you know, America's team, don't matter in the NFL. It's just like we have to get Taylor Swift in here somehow, right? You know, could come back from this long vacation she took after her Eras tour and literally, in 24 hours, suck up all the oxygen in the room. Like, what a marketing machine she is, right? So these elite schools do the same in our collective culture, and there's one data point from the book that I think is pretty critical here. I did a survey of more than 3,000 parents for the book. Only 16 percent of parents in my survey said it was important to them that their children attend a prestigious college. 27 percent said it was important to their children. But then we asked how they thought others in their community would choose, and that's where it got really interesting. 61 percent thought prestige was important to other parents. Right? 

So in other words, even if you don't care about prestige, you think it matters to other parents, and so you're jumping through those hoops as a result. 

And how do you do that? It was interesting. I was talking to a college president yesterday who has a lot of Harvard connections, no longer at Harvard. And he said, I actually think at the institution I'm at right now, we provide a better undergraduate education than Harvard, but nobody will listen to that. And I said, 'Well, why don't you say that more often?' And he said, 'Well, I can't because all my community and all my friends, they all went to Harvard, and so we can't criticize Harvard in that way. It's a cultural phenomenon that's really hard to break.

Michael Horn

Well, it gets a little bit into a few things. One is this belief in the academy that because you're doing the cutting-edge research, therefore, your teaching is the best. And I think that is true in a certain circumstance, but it is not a universal truth, if that makes sense, to your point. I think also, you know, the research — we tend to obsess over the research-based institutions. Yeah. I think that has some reason to it. I think it has some reason, you know, in terms of the 'two lottery tickets versus one,' I think is the way you phrased it in your book, if you go to an Ivy Plus institution. We're going to get more into that when we talk about your book, "Dream School," in our next episode. Get it now. Preorder, if you're listening to this. 

There are reasons for that as well. But I think you're right: Yes, it's way overhyped, but it speaks to the way the media works also. And, you know, Taylor Swift, if you're listening next time, you're welcome to come on our podcast, instead of the Kelsey brothers. But let's maybe leave it there, Jeff, for the moment. Let's actually turn perhaps to coverage of other schools. Let's walk the walk, if you will, and get to some of the issues impacting all of them when we come back. But first, a word from our sponsor, Ascendium, on 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. Ascendium envisions a world where low-income learners succeed in post secondary 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. Let's pick it up a bit, Jeff. I just teased that we would talk about other schools, schools that are not overly selective. So let's start there. You hosted a dinner over the summer, I believe, with a dozen college and university chief financial officers or COOs, chief business officers, etcetera, who were in town for the annual NACUBO meeting. What's on their minds? What'd you learn?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. So, Michael, I'm going to run through these pretty quickly. There were a couple of themes that emerged from this dinner. One was, ‘How do you really kind of balance budgets right now?’ There's a lot of deficit spending happening in higher ed. They really want to return to having some healthy budget margins, and they believe you can't grow to those, but you also can't cut your way. And their belief was that too many institutions are chasing new programs to boost revenue, which never really bring the returns that they think they will, and they're really avoiding the hard conversations about underperforming ones and cutting their way there. And this came up with Rick Staisloff last year in our "Budget 101." It's a combination of both, and no institution is really willing — they all want to lean into the one, which is usually growing revenue, not making the hard decisions.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Quickly on that, Jeff. Phil Hill, I thought, had a great piece about the expectations that people put on their online programs when they launch.

Jeff Selingo

Oh, that was a great one. Yep. Great piece.

Michael Horn

Right? We'll link to it as well. Just outsized expectations. The growth is not there. And then, you know, we did a couple years ago on the show, the Burning Glass report around these programs that launch, and then five years later, they have, like, one graduate.

Jeff Selingo

Nobody was graduating with it.

Michael Horn

And so I think you're right. Cutting has to be part of the equation. We have to be more serious. And then cooperation for that one student on your campus maybe who wants that program. Another storyline that got a lot of controversy was PASSHE over the summer said, 'We're gonna do course sharing among the campuses.' And everyone was like, 'How dare you?' We have to, frankly. You can still offer the whatever major that one or two students wanted to take, but the courses might be from other campuses online would be my take.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Michael, the other thing that was fascinating to me in terms of where the biggest bang for your buck could come: They believe that colleges and universities are under-investing in philanthropy. They believe that actually that could bring bigger returns than building new programs faster. It's kind of the first time I ever heard somebody say something like that, that by the way, is not in the development office. 

They talked about ROI is really in retention, right, instead of enrollment. Everybody wants to try to boost their enrollment, but sometimes they do that at the expense of retention, and they believe the more investments they can make in student success, that really is bringing the best return in both mission and margin. 

We talked, of course, about AI because you can't leave a dinner these days without talking about AI. A lot of their boards are pushing them to use AI in back office and student services. They think there's a lot of limitations on them because they believe that AI is just not smart enough yet. But what was more interesting to them was that, 'Okay, even if we use AI to essentially do somebody's job, the culture at these universities is still not there to say, 'Oh, well, now we're gonna eliminate 10 people or 15 people.' As one CFO put it, you can't automate your way around, 'But you know, Jeff's been here for forty years.' Right? 'We can't get rid of him. He's gonna retire in five years. Let's just wait.' And speaking of retirement, the last piece was about faculty renewal. There's no more mandatory retirement in higher ed. You have tenure. Essentially, they're saying faculty aren't leaving, and that is a real big problem for them, because they can't renew their faculty as a result.

Michael Horn

Interesting. Well, as you know, I have a piece in the works doing a deep dive in the financials of some of these schools and some challenges that I was shocked by when I was looking at these numbers. We'll talk about that after it's released, down the line. But one of my takeaways was that phased downsizing, you know, when someone retires not replacing them, has to also probably be a big part of this, and that's maybe where the AI could have an impact as opposed to pushing someone proactively out. But we actually probably should get into AI, but before we do, just one thing on that One Big, Beautiful Bill, which is that there's a new income-driven repayment plan on it, caps on graduate and Parent PLUS loans, new system for measuring incentivizing student  earnings outcomes that holds colleges and universities accountable for poor outcomes. In essence, degree programs where graduates' earnings are too low will lose access to federal funding. 

Phil Hill actually there did another good piece, I thought, pointing out some flaws in this, basically how it's, like, too blunt a measure of high school earnings based on state data as opposed to the local data. Right? And if you're in El Paso, it's very different from, say, Austin in Texas, for example. So here we are, Jeff, but these things strike me as changes that I just listed that actually may have a much bigger impact on the rest of higher ed, the nonselective institutions. And the billing in the media consistently seems to be that this was a bad bill for higher ed. I'm not sure that's my take, but I'm curious about your thoughts.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Well, I think there are some bad aspects of it. It doesn't mean that higher ed can't come out of this by figuring out how to get around some of them. 

First of all, on graduate education, this is going to cause some big problems for institutions that have really relied on graduate education as a cash cow for them. Right? So, you know, between the limits on graduate loans and the elimination of Grad PLUS, which would add on top of a grad loan in terms of what you could take out. 

Now one interesting thing that could come out of this, Michael, is the private market could come back. Right. Meaning that you could have all these private lenders working with colleges to help them make sure that their students get the money. There used to be this thing called the preferred lender list, which went away in the early 2000s because there were a lot of scandals by lenders essentially giving kickbacks to colleges, giving kickbacks to financial aid officers, taking them on, you know, the booze cruise essentially during the financial aid officers meeting to make sure that they would get on those preferred lenders list. There's a lot of regulations around that now. I don't think it's a bad thing if some of that stuff came back to help students get that. 

I think there's probably going to be some fixes to this bill over time. I think especially for med school, you know, a lifetime limit of $200,000 on that, I think, is going to be a problem. I think in other places the cost hopefully will come down, but the cost curve is not going to bend overnight. I think it's not going to happen in time to avoid the elimination of a lot of programs. And that's not only at the graduate level, but I think even at the undergraduate level where you have to see this return on investment of these programs. I think you're going to see a lot of programs disappear in the arts, social work, education. I think a lot of that's going to happen. 

And then I guess the final point I'll make here is the changes to income-contingent loans. You know, we're seeing some consolidation in there because of the Big, Beautiful Bill. You know, I'm not saying that what they had previously in the previous administrations were right, but I believe that this idea of income-contingent loans is a thing that should be the primary way we pay back loans in the future, and I'm sorry that we we didn't really have a bipartisan solution on that.

Michael Horn

Yeah. That's a fair point. I have a somewhat different take, I think, on this. I think you're right. Short-term pain, no question. A lot of master's programs that frankly have been keeping colleges afloat, are going to probably go away. And so there's going to be a lot of challenges in the short term there. 

I think long term it sets up the industry, though, for better focus on ROI, which I think will actually make it, more sustainable, more steadfast, ultimately. I think it'll help higher ed thrive, ultimately. 

You know, I put this piece out where I sort of recounted this debate that we've had for a long time where I'm like, 'Higher ed's getting disrupted,' and you're like, 'Higher ed is gonna thrive, despite it.' And my conclusion was, I actually think you're right, Jeff, but I think it will be because institutions get clear about the value proposition. Lower costs, or frankly, new blood comes in, buoyed by new accreditation that perhaps comes in if we have accreditation reform. 

On the med school thing, I feel like I'm in the skunk at the garden party on this one, with Preston Cooper, who just feels like, 'Hey, there's a really high ROI for med students, and so the private loan market can work for that pretty well.' And as Ira Stoll, wrote at his Substack, 'The Editors,' between 51,000 and 63,000 students a year apply for the 20,000 to 23,000 spots that are even available for med schools. So the problem isn't on the demand side. It's on the supply side, in my view, and we should see some innovation around that. 

But, you know, I know that's not a popular opinion, in higher ed, but I think it'll actually strengthen the sector in the longer run even as there will be a short-term hit. 

Alright, Jeff. We have more we want to talk about, but somehow we have already exhausted a fair amount of time. I think our listeners love us, but perhaps not that much. So I think let's start to wrap up this episode, but with the last segment that we are going to be introducing this year on Future U. It's a true lightning round. We're going to ask our guests a couple quick personal questions at the end of each show to get to know them better. It's a little bit like that question we used to ask, 'Tell us about your journey to this position,' But it will be a little bit more short burst and a little bit of fun and humor in it. 

But we felt it was only fair if you and I answered a few of these first. So we've got seven of them that we're gonna cycle through over the course of the season, but it's short enough that I thought, 'Are you game to answer just a couple of them, Jeff?'

Jeff Selingo

I'm ready. If we're gonna put our guests up to this, I think we should do it first.

Michael Horn 

Alright. Well, we can do it, 'you go, I go' style. The first one I will ask is, 'What was the worst grade you got in college? What was the class?

Jeff Selingo

Well, I'm not gonna tell you what the grade was because it's pretty embarrassing. But it was in Spanish. It was a new language requirement for journalism, and I am just not very good with languages, even sometimes my own English language. And what's ironic about this is that my kids are now fluent in Spanish. So it's kind of amazing that I couldn't do it, but they could somehow do it. How about you, Michael? What was your worst grade you got?

Michael Horn

I kind of feel you. I think if I had done more foreign language, I'd be where you were. But mine was multivariable calculus — first semester of freshman year. I'm a statistic that proves a big point in chapter two of your upcoming book, 'Dream School.' I got a B- in the class, which also I think says something maybe about grades even shifting in the 10 years between when we were in college. But I will say the professor didn't speak much English that I had for multivariable calculus. I think he was a postdoc, and teaching was not his passion, dare I say.

Jeff Selingo

Well, and that's what happens when postdocs teach you. Okay. So what was your favorite college class then, and why?

Michael Horn

That's a harder one because I had some great ones. I got to chase Donald Kagan around for a couple classes on Greek history, Vincent Scully's modern architecture class. I still quote it. It was really cool. I'll go with John Gaddis' class on the Cold War, though, because

he had helped do that CNN series on the Cold War, and it was just cool watching the videos, and then the lights would come up, and he'd be like, 'So let me tell you when I met Condie Rice.' And you'd be like, 'Wow. This is incredible.' 

What about you?

Jeff Selingo

It was Chinese politics, with Greg Deloria. I was in college in the early 1990s, so it was the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, the end of the Cold War — the world order was really starting to reorganize. And during the 1980s, I think it's easy for us to forget now, it was all about Japan, Japan, Japan. Everybody was worried about Japan, and now suddenly people were talking about China. In some ways it was exactly what college should be — allowing you room to follow interests at a moment in time. And I sometimes think that in our focus to kind of get in and get out, we sometimes forget, 'Hey, there's something happening in the moment right now, and I want to go pursue it. I want to go learn about it. And that's exactly what I did with this class. Again, my favorite class in college.

Michael Horn

Love it. Love it. Okay, let me ask you this one, which is, 'What's one higher ed buzzword or phrase that you never want to hear again?'

Jeff Selingo

I will make this very quick. I'm not sure it's higher ed specific. Ideate. 

How about you?

Michael Horn

I'll say, 'We educate students for their lives, not their first jobs.'

Jeff Selingo

Okay. That's more words. Those are buzzwords, but I'll let you go with that.

Michael Horn

Just let me go with it. Alright.

Jeff Selingo

Okay. So we're a little bit of a different generation, Michael, you and I. Yeah. We're not that far apart in age, but we did go to college in two different years. But what's the biggest difference between students now and when you were in college?

Michael Horn

I think that's a good question. I think, now I sense the immediacy — lack of friction is the big thing that I see in their lives that they sort of can't handle, it seems to me. They just expect everything instantly and without friction, is the thing I would point to. 

What about you?

Jeff Selingo

Okay. Well, I'm going to actually just go with a fun one here, and it's athleisure wear. We just wore jeans back in the day. I don't think jeans exist at that age anymore. And coffee all day. I mean, coffee was still a morning thing. Starbucks wasn't a thing.

Michael Horn

That's a very good one.

Jeff Selingo

Also having coffee all day is just like, you know, we would have coffee in the morning in the dining hall, and you really couldn't get coffee the rest of the day.

Michael Horn

That's a really good one.

Jeff Selingo

Okay. Fine. So why don't we wrap up here and say, 'What's the one campus tradition you secretly love?'

Michael Horn

I struggled with this. Yale's rich with traditions, and that's where my head went. I'm going to go with: I was a carillonneur, Jeff, which is someone who plays the carillon, which is a system of bells. And if you picture The Goonies, like the organ. it's like wooden mallets that move these several ton clangers inside of bells. I'm making hand expressions for those watching us on video. But at Harkness Tower on the Yale campus at 12:30 and 5:00 every single day, you can hear a thirty minute concert given to you by the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs  where they play both obscure Carillon music, but also pop tunes by Taylor Swift on the Yale Carillon. What about you?

Jeff Selingo

Wow, very fascinating. Well, my one was at Ithaca, we had these iconic fountains — they were in every viewbook — that overlook Cayuga Lake. And on the last day of classes, seniors would jump into these fountains. They were extremely dangerous to do this because there was a little bit of drinking going on too, I will say, all morning, and then you would jump in the fountains in the afternoon. But it was incredibly fun. You could actually find them on YouTube from some years of people taking old videotapes of them. Now it's actually a sanctioned event. I've actually seen it now, and they do it, during senior week right before graduation. Now the other undergrads are off campus by then. They're gone home. So they're able to do this in a more-controlled atmosphere without all the other undergraduates there. Perhaps it's fun, but I think when it wasn't sanctioned, probably a little bit dangerous, but then all the lawyers and the you know, all the people worried about risk management got involved. And it kind of changed that tradition a little bit.

Michael Horn

I can imagine. And you're on the board of trustees, so I can imagine maybe... Well, anyway, we'll leave it there.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. We'll leave it there.

Michael Horn

I'm so excited for the season. We've got an incredible group of topics and guests already lined up that we've been excited about all summer. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. Can't wait to do it. 

Reach out to me and Jeff online on social media, J Selingo, Michael B Horn. Reach out to Future U podcast. Drop us notes. We want to hear from you. We cannot wait to get this going. And so we will see you next time on Future U.