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In today's issue: A new feature that will make occasional appearances in the newsletter; what changed in higher ed 5 years after Covid; and what boards need.

EVENTS

🎓 Some 37 million Americans have some college but no degree. As colleges face an enrollment cliff of traditional-aged students, many institutions are looking to re-engage stop-outs. 

On Thursday, April 3, join me at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT for the “Next Office Hour,” where I’ll outline the latest trends with this huge market of potential students, and then be joined by two higher ed leaders who have developed strategies to re-enroll learners who left short of a credential: 

• Lynn Barnes, Jr. from the University of Texas at San Antonio
• Katie Hagan from the UNC System’s Project Kitty Hawk

Register now to join us live and to get an on-demand recording afterwards for free. (Presented with support from Cengage.)

🚨 As we launch a special offer in April to pre-order my new book coming out this fall, we’ll have two special mini 30-minute “office hours” to help with the college search:

1️⃣ Speaking With Teens About College, where I’ll be joined by best-selling author and teen psychologist Lisa Damour. 

⏰ Wednesday, April 9 at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT

👉 Register here 

2️⃣ How to Find Your Dream School, where college counselor and admissions writer Allison Slater Tate will turn the tables and interview me about some of the big takeaways from the book.

⏰ Wednesday, April 23 at 10 p.m. ET/ 7 p.m. PT

👉 Register here 

THE LEAD

The newsletter has been delayed a bit as I’ve been on the road almost non-stop the past few weeks.

So consider this the “catch-up” edition. 

Like many of you, I recently saw five-year-old photos pop up on my phone: a keynote talk I gave to a large crowd of faculty and staff at Miami-Dade College; a dinner I hosted in Dallas the next night; and then the security line at Dallas-Love Field the day Southwest announced domestic reservations collapsed; and National Airport’s main hall as I arrived home for what would be my last time on an airplane for more than a year.

5 Years Later: What Changed?

At SXSWedu last week as a university dean and I swapped Covid stories, he asked me: What really changed in higher ed since March 2020? Rick Seltzer over at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Daily Briefing had some reflections today and earlier this week.

Here’s what I told that dean in Austin:

The admissions playbook changed: Test-optional went mainstream, and despite some institutions going back to requiring tests (including Ohio State University yesterday), it’s here to stay. So, too, though, is the ambiguity about whether students should submit a score or not. As Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions at MIT told me for a New York magazine piece, when he gets that question from friends whose children are applying to other colleges. “I never have a good answer,” he said. “Like, I have no idea.”

“Mission” over money in higher ed no longer holds sway: While the Great Resignation has been declared over, colleges are still finding it difficult to recruit and retain talent. As I found in a new white paper out this week, with support from Workday, a fundamental tension remains on campuses between adapting to the needs of employees post-pandemic while still serving modern institutional demands. 

Students expect flexibility in learning much like everything else in life: A majority of college students take at least one class online now. I often quote Gene Block, the former chancellor of UCLA, about what students want after they got the taste of online learning during the pandemic. “There are students who believe very strongly that every class should have dual-mode instruction,” Block told me and Michael Horn when we took Future U. on the road to Los Angeles in 2022. “I should be able to look through the course catalog and decide which ones I take remotely and which ones I take in person. It turns out to be difficult to provide.”

A new cultural tension emerged on campuses between experiential learning and academic learning: Removed from the classroom, students and parents started to wonder about the real value of college. As Georgetown University’s Randy Bass told those who gathered recently for the 10th anniversary of the Arizona State-Georgetown Academy for Innovative Higher Education, C.P. Snow’s two-culture problem—the tension between science and humanities—is now between experiential learning and academic learning. The value of college is increasingly tied up in the job, as we explored on Future U. last year. 

RIP, Education Department?

The copy edits for my book were due this past week. We’re getting very close to the finished book, which you’ll hear more about starting in the next issue of this newsletter. 

Throughout the book, I frequently refer to U.S. government data on higher ed, as well as Department of Education websites that are helpful to consumers—which led the copy editor to ask at one point: “With the changes in government recently, is there some risk these Dept. of Education websites will no longer be functional?”

Good question! Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know by now that about half of the staff of the Department of Education was laid off this week. What this exactly means for student aid, education statistics, and grant programs is yet to fully come into view, although the FAFSA website was down for a bit the day after the layoffs.

There’s been a lot written and said on this topic in recent days. Here are two of my recent bookmarks:

• Dana Goldstein at The New York Times explained what the Education Department does—and what it might not do after this week.
• Michael J. Petrilli is on the right at the Fordham Institute, but in his 11 thoughts about the massive layoffs, he brings up several that are likely bi-partisan concerns. One, in particular, is elimination of the Presidential Management Fellows program, which brought young people into the government and is likely to wipe away a whole generation of public servants. 

Building an AI-Ready College

Higher ed has long been a pathway into the workforce and social mobility. As jobs disappear because of AI—particularly entry-level jobs requiring a bachelor's degree, how should colleges and universities shift their approach inside and outside the classroom?

That was the question on my mind when we recorded the Future U. podcast at Google's Gen AI & Labs Live convening in New York City recently with government and higher ed leaders.

What a thoughtful panel with Google's Chris Hein, CUNY's Ann Kirschner, and Pace University's Marvin Krislov.

The episode recently dropped. My TL;DL version:

1️⃣ Every organization, including colleges, needs an AI plan.

• “It's particularly true of higher education because…we create new knowledge," Kirschner said.
• At Pace, “every student in their required computer science class takes a six week module on artificial intelligence,” said Krislov. “We are trying to level set, so that when someone graduates with a degree, as well as having liberal arts curriculum, they will have some experience in artificial intelligence.”

2️⃣ Lots of doubling down on how colleges and universities are uniquely qualified to both put the gas on AI, but also the brake.

• "We owe it to our students and our faculty to help them navigate this," Krislov said. "There are a lot of free thinkers in universities, and if you allow them to be involved and critical, they will help you distinguish between when it is good and when maybe it should not be relied on, as well as all the ethical implications as well."

3️⃣ AI requires us to rethink the relationship between education, teaching in the classroom, and experiential learning.

• These are no longer siloed activities. “We have to start to recognize what makes someone unique and special and better when they've got AI as a tool set,” Hein said.
• "Our job," Kirschner added, "is to prepare students for a lifetime of learning and earning. That's our job. The earning part we're a little queasy about. We don't want to be ‘vocational.' One of my least favorite words, as if there's something anti-intellectual about students needing a job."

4️⃣ There’s a future for academic researchers, with AI as a co-scientists.

• AI won’t likely eliminate an entire layer of academic research jobs, Hein maintained. "The amount of deep specialization that's required for so much research that's happening today is to a point where you've got to have 20 years of learning before you can understand so many of the complex different things that interact with each other," he said. "So I don't think that this should be a closing of the aperture where we're seeing less research being done by fewer people."

🎧 Listen to the complete episode at Future U. or on your favorite podcast player.

What Boards Need

One reason I've been on the road is to facilitate retreats with three university boards of trustees in the last three weeks. A few observations about governing boards right now:

1️⃣ Context matters. Board members who dip in and out of paying attention to higher ed are overwhelmed with the news coming at them right now. Just taking the three institutions I was with: they were of varying types and hold different market positions.

So it’s more critical than ever that board members understand the basics of their institution:

🔬 How much does federal research matter to us?

🏟️ NIL and changes in athletics?

💰 Endowment tax?

💳 Percentage of students on Pell and our reliance on FAFSA for enrollment decisions?

2️⃣ The past is catching up. The last five years have been brutal for colleges between the pandemic, then the FAFSA debacle, now Trump + enrollment cliff at our doorstep.

Most colleges kicked the can down the road last decade, but some used the relative stability of the post-Great Recession to get ready:

🔥 Set up external innovation divisions to move faster and outside traditional governance.

🚧 Tackled deferred maintenance.

🎓 Rethought institutional size to prepare for demographic cliff rather than chasing every last student.

3️⃣ Lots of trustees think their problem is marketing…that will be solved by better marketing.

I facilitate about a dozen board discussions a year and always come away impressed with some of the things these institutions are doing. So, it’s true that they need to "tell their story better." But more marketing isn’t going to solve all the problems. In too many cases, colleges need to rethink where and how they spend their shrinking and flat net-tuition revenue.

What they want to market—the distinctive stuff—is often done with pennies while they’re spending dollars on things that don’t matter anymore.

Earlier this week, I was with financial officers at the Eastern Association of College and University Business Officers meeting in Boston. Bill Guerreo, the CFO at the University of Bridgeport interviewed me and he asked a series of live polling questions to the audience.

One question was their biggest challenge working with trustees. The top answer:  42% said they are too in the weeds. Context matters. 

CREDIT WATCH

The best way to determine how a school is doing financially—beyond getting access to internal balance sheets and budgets—is to look at its bond-rating reports. Three major agencies rate colleges: Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch. 

Most of the underlying information is publicly disclosed on the agencies’ websites, although access to the reports often requires a subscription. Much like credit reports for people, bond ratings assess the risk of lending money to colleges. 

In this new, occasional feature, “Credit Watch,” I’ll provide highlights of a recent rating action:

American University. Its outlook was recently revised from stable to negative as its A1 rating was affirmed (see what that letter/number means here). 

Moody’s wrote: “The outlook revision to negative is driven by a 14% decline in undergraduate and graduate enrollment, including international students, since fall 2021.”

📈 The positive: American's "very good brand and strategic positioning as a large comprehensive university." Also, "substantial wealth of $1.4 billion."

📉The negative: "The challenges management will face as it attempts to align expenses with revenues pressured by the declines in net tuition revenue."