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In today's issue: Some real numbers on those new grad loan limits, as colleges scramble to rethink their programs; the skills of the AI future; and what Moodyâs predicts for 2026.
âĄď¸ BREAKING: The online education giant, Coursera, announced yesterday that it would buy rival Udemy in an all-stock deal.
Coursera was founded in the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses)-hype of 2012 by two Stanford computer science professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. The two left a few years later as the company tried to find a business model amid a slow retreat from its higher ed roots.
Now, university partnerships are âstructurally erodingâ according to a new report from The Intelligence Council, an industry publisher. âWhile academic branding remains central to Courseraâs marketing narrative,â the council wrote in its 42-page report, âuniversities account for a shrinking share of enrollment momentum and exert diminishing influence over platform economics and governance.â
In 2024, non-university providers launched roughly three times as many courses as universities, generating 82% of all new enrollments, according to the report.
University leaders interviewed for the report cited friction with the company, including âfrequent turnover in Courseraâs partner-management staff, describing some representatives as âdudsââ
đ Get the full report here (subscription required).
EVENTS
The Next Office Hour, my regular webinar series for higher ed leaders, returns in 2026, with two events in January:
1ď¸âŁ Building a Financially Sustainable Institution A candid conversation on how colleges can move beyond incremental cuts to redesign their financial models for long-term stability.
đ Wednesday, January 14, 2026 â° 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT
2ď¸âŁ Redesigning Higher Ed for Affordability A discussion on how institutions can stop explaining affordability and start designing it, by rethinking operations, delivery models, and incentives to better serve todayâs students.
đ Thursday, January 29, 2026 â° 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT
The fall leg of the Dream School book tour finished this month with a final sprint that began at the 92nd Street Y in New York, where I was in conversation with David Muir, anchor of ABC World News Tonight.
I first met David in 1991, early in our freshman year at Ithaca College. We became fast friends and eventually roommates for the final three years of college. David was one of those people you meet as an undergrad who you just know is going places.
Although we connected in advance of our conversation in New York, I didnât know exactly where he would take it. But several times we circled back to the same theme: the value of college and the skills students need to succeed once they leave campus.
One skill David mentioned repeatedly was networking. That caught my attention because years ago I wrote that colleges donât really teach students how to networkâor, more broadly, how to navigate the workplace. In our conversation, David and I talked about how our part-time jobs in high school played an outsized role in learning how to work with different people, ask questions, and ultimately get a job done.
In the YouTube clip below, David noted that among the many people who come through ABC, those who stand out tend to be curious, engaged, and genuinely interested in human connectionâall valuable traits in an economy being reshaped by AI.
Two years ago, just a few months after ChatGPT was released to the public, I co-wrote a paper with Matt Sigelman on how to make the bachelorâs degree more valuable (work that was later adapted into this Wall Street Journal essay). I often refer to Matt as the guru of skills, since he and his team at the Burning Glass Institute study the pathways from college to career.
A key takeaway from that paper was this: for new grads breaking into the job market, the selectivity of their undergraduate institution and their major matter. Yes, I know, on the surface that might seem to contradict my advice in Dream Schoolto look deeper in the rankings, often where less-selective schools sit.
But we also found something else matters, too: the skills graduates leave college with. Those skills can often trump the name at the top of the diploma and the major listed on it.
Iâve been thinking about that paper over the last few months for two reasons.
One is the nearly endless news coverage of an AI-driven job market that hasnât been kind to new grads.
The second is that as I traveled through 16 cities for more than two dozen book events this fall, I heard many of the same questions about how to ensure college is valuable in a changing economy: Which majors will still pay off? Which jobs wonât be replaced by AI? What if my kid doesnât even know what they want to study?
Families want certainty in both the college admissions process and in the outcomes of this huge financial investmentâand they struggle with the ambiguity of it all.
Just think about how we told students a decade ago to major in computer science, leading to a doubling of enrollment in the major since 2014.
Now, recent college graduates with computer science and computer engineering majors have among the highest unemployment rates.
If families want more certainty, they should focus on gaining durable skillsâthe kind that complement rather than compete with AI. In the paper I wrote with Matt Sigelman, we identified a set of foundational skills that apply across fields:
What stood out thenâand still holds true nowâis that in a world where technical skills have a shrinking half-life, foundational skills give graduates staying power. Iâve asked Matt to revisit these skills to understand whether what we identified in 2023 has been affected by AI. More to come in 2026.
But in the meantime, based on my research and reporting, the durable skills Iâm most convinced matter right now include:
Discernment: knowing what matters and what doesnât in a world of constant information and distraction
Getting things done: turning ideas into action and moving work forward without perfect instructions
Problem-solving: especially when the problem isnât clearly defined and thereâs no obvious playbook
Negotiation: understanding how to navigate disagreements, trade-offs, and expectations in a way that moves things forward
Networking: not collecting contacts, but building relationships rooted in curiosity, trust, and follow-through
Bottom line: Majors and credentials still matter. But skills are what determine how far students can go after graduation and how much flexbility and mobility they have.
1. Final Stretch for Grad Loan Caps
The U.S. Education Department is preparing to formally publish proposed loan caps for graduate programs, a move that would lock in a sharp break from decades of mostly unlimited borrowing.
Graduate borrowers account for nearly 50% of total federal student loan debt, or about $850 billion.
Whatâs happening: Over the summer, Congress eliminated Grad PLUS loans and replaced them with hard caps on federal borrowing for graduate education, forcing a major reset in how students finance advanced degrees.
A $20,500 per year $100,000 lifetime cap for most graduate programs starting in July 2026.
A $50,000 per year or $200,000 lifetime cap for a narrow set of 11 âprofessionalâ degrees.
The following degrees, along with closely related fields, qualify as professional: Pharmacy (Pharm.D.), Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.), Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.), Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.), Law (L.L.B. or J.D.), Medicine (M.D.), Optometry (O.D.), Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.), Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.), Theology (M.Div. or M.H.L.), and Clinical Psychology (Psy.D. or Ph.D.).
A lifelong limit of $257,500 for all borrowers, which includes loans from any combination of degrees.
Driving the news: Programs that didnât make the higher loan cap like nursing, social work, education, and public healthâall historically female-dominated careersâhave been the subject of social media buzz in recent weeks, with TikTok and Instagram, in particular, filled with posts claiming the Trump administration doesnât consider them professions.
The term âprofessionalâ degree was a federal definition in the Higher Education Act and had little practical impact before this most recent legislation,Jessica Blake noted recently in Inside Higher Ed.
It âserved more as a guideline for colleges as they decided whether to self-identify their doctoral programs as professional and to distinguish between degrees that led to a career in the field or in academia," Blake wrote.
In nursing, 115 of 140 advanced nursing programs are already within the standard loan limits, Cooper found.
âOnly ultra-expensive nursing programs will be affected by the new limits,â Cooper wrote, âand thatâs a feature, not a bug. A primary goal of the new policy is to curtail loan subsidies to institutions charging far too much, thereby encouraging students to consider lower-cost options.â
What it matters: The transition is likely to be âvery rough,â with graduate enrollment declines and a surge in private lending, especially for high-cost health and professional programs, Jordan Matsudaira, director of the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research at American University, told Inside Higher Ed. Heâs skeptical colleges can offset the loss with more aid or lower prices given broader budget pressures.
Research by Matsudaira projects that programs such as dentistry, osteopathy and medicine will be particularly squeezed by the changes.
The private loan market, which is around $3 billion a year, is one option for students.
But Lesley Turner, an associate professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, cautioned that private loans come with fewer protections and tighter access, favoring programs with strong earnings outcomesâand squeezing the rest.
Whatâs next: The Education Department is expected to publish the proposal in the Federal Register in early 2026, followed by a 30-day public comment period. Final rules would then take effect July 1, leaving colleges and universities to scramble to respond for a new class of grad students that start in the fall.
The College Search Is Broken
The modern college search was meant to empower families with better information.
Instead, decades of mandated transparency, rankings, and digital data have produced an admissions system that overwhelms students and distorts behavior, I wrote recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in the latest adaptation from Dream School.
Why it matters: Families have more information about colleges than ever, but less clarity about what actually matters.
Not long ago, families had almost no data at all. Graduation rates werenât publicly available until the early 2000s. Since then, disclosure requirements collided with the internet, rankings, and social media, flipping the system from scarcity to overload.
Students responded predictably: applying to more colleges, clustering around similarly ranked schools, and chasing narrow signals of prestige. The result is application inflation, falling yield rates, rising recruitment costs, and more anxietyâwithout better decisions.
Between the lines: The problem isnât misinformation. Itâs an information marketplace that keeps making the haystack bigger while the needle gets harder to find.
What the system rewards is volume, not clarity. Colleges compete on the easiest-to-compare numbersâacceptance and placement ratesânot on what most shapes student success: the first-year experience, quality teaching, mentoring, and access to experiential learning. Rankings thrive because they offer a shortcut through the noise.
Whatâs next: The fix isnât more data. Itâs presenting information differently by pairing quantitative and qualitative evidence so families can understand what metrics actually mean.
As AI absorbs routine admissions work, colleges can redeploy admissions officers asinterpreters, helping families make sense of institutional data rather than adding to the noise.
SUPPLEMENTS
đŹ Students Crowdsourcing College Search. Over the past decade, peer-to-peer online conversations about college admissions have grown more than tenfold, as students and families increasingly turn to Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and forums like College Confidential to make decisions, according to new research from Campus Sonar that was based on an analysis the social-listening firm did for Dream School.
Analyzing more than 630,000 admissions-related conversations, the study finds that families are prioritizing ROI, career outcomes, affordability, and belonging over prestigeâand often trust peers more than institutions to explain what those signals actually mean. In 2024 alone, Reddit generated nearly 470,000 admissions mentions, many now surfaced directly in Google search results, making informal peer advice one of the most powerful forces shaping college choice. (Campus Sonar)
đ Moodyâs Keeps Negative Outlook. Moodyâs Ratings says the outlook for U.S. higher education remains negative next year as slower revenue growth collides with rising expenses, federal policy pressure, and a shrinking pool of traditional-age students. The firm projects revenue growth of about 3.5% in 2026, trailing expense growth of 4.4%, leading to margin contraction across much of the sector.
Wealthier and flagship institutions are expected to manage through the strain, but smaller and less selective colleges face tougher choices, especially as enrollment competition intensifies and new caps on federal student loans loom. (Moodyâs Ratings; subscription required)
đ California pushes to overhaul high school learning. The state is exploring a redesign of traditional high schools to move beyond the âfactory modelâ of rigid class periods and isolated subjects, with pilot grants backing schools that blend career-connected labs, personalized pathways, and stronger staff-student connections, according to CalMatters. At CART High near Fresno, students split the day between core academics and long interdisciplinary labs tied to real-world skills like biotech, law, and digital marketing, with high attendance and strong proficiency showing early promise for the model. (CalMatters)
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