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In today's issue: Why geography still traps small colleges; what I learned at ASU+GSV about the AI skills gap; and the college president willing to speak up.

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⚡️ BREAKING: A new report is out this morning from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center on the more than 3.4 million students who earned some kind of undergraduate credential in 2024-25, up 3.2% from the year before.

Key findings:

• As high schools have expanded access to college-level coursework, students are arriving and completing higher ed credentials earlier than ever. In the last decade, the number of 18- to 20-year-olds who receive an associate’s degree has increased 48%.
• For the first time, students age 18 to 20 surpassed those age 21 to 24 as the largest share of first-time associate degree earners.
• The under-18 crowd with college credentials is rising fast, too. Some 52,000 students younger than high school graduation age completed certificates or associate degrees last year, a number that's nearly quadrupled over the past decade.
• Undergraduate certificates hit a decade high, with 579,400 completers earning one as their highest award.

👉 Read the full report here.

Stuck in Place

✈️ We tend to think everyone goes “away” to college. The reality is that about half of students at four-year colleges attend one within 50 miles of home.

For generations, what’s been said of politics also applied to higher ed—it’s all local. But over the past half century, that’s changed.

As enrollment expanded, higher education split into two distinct markets: one built on national brands that draw high-achieving students from everywhere, and another serving local and regional, place-bound students.

This “re-sorting” by geography was first identified by economist Caroline M. Hoxby in a 2009 paper. Top students, she found, increasingly chose colleges based on resources and peer groups as distance became less of a barrier.

🗺️ Campuses that once felt far away now seem much closer. In the 1980s, when my older sister went to college, she mailed letters home and called once a week from a dorm pay phone, usually late at night, when long-distance rates were cheaper.

📱 Today, a campus a thousand miles away can feel next door, thanks to cheap flights and constant connection.

That shift helps explain why admissions now feels so competitive and anxiety-inducing. As I wrote this week in The Atlantic, it’s not just that there are more strong students, it’s that top students from Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Buffalo are all applying to the same selective colleges, where the number of seats has barely changed in decades.

Applications to the most selective campuses have surged: from about 800,000 two decades ago to more than 2.3 million today.

The Atlantic piece happened to publish the same day, unbeknownst to almost everyone, that Hampshire College’s Board of Trustees voted to shut down the institution after a failed effort to increase enrollment and refinance debt.

While Hampshire is well-known in the media judging from the number of press inquiries I received this week, it’s firmly planted in the local/regional bucket where most institutions sit.

As recently as 2022, here is a geographic breakdown of the majority of its freshman class:

Massachusetts: 25%

Other New England states: 17%

New York: 12%

In trying to save itself, Hampshire College was pushing against powerful headwinds.

📉 The Northeast will see some of the biggest declines in the number of high-school graduates by the 2040s, a 17% decrease.

📍 The Northeast has one of the highest density of college campuses all competing for a shrinking pie of prospective students. Massachusetts alone has 72 different private colleges.

🏟️ Student preferences are shifting, too, away from the type of small campus, liberal-arts experience that Hampshire was offering. Large public flagships increasingly draw students from across the country, closing in on the distance gap that private institutions have long enjoyed.

“All other things being equal, we're seeing larger schools grow more and smaller schools not grow at the same rate,” Michael Koppenheffer, a vice-president at EAB, an enrollment consulting firm, told me.

Stuck in place, many colleges now face pressure from two directions. Their traditional nearby market is shrinking, and the students willing to travel are bypassing them for large flagships and brand-name institutions.

The typical response by the colleges left out, Koppenheffer said, is to chase students by recruiting in markets farther from home.

“It’s one of our perennial challenges in working with new partners,” Koppenheffer said, “who hire us because they want us to get them students in a distant city in California, Florida, the Pacific Northwest, or wherever.”

The strategy rarely works. “We find more often than not, they have opportunities in their own backyard that they have not maximized,” Koppenheffer added.

🚨 An analysis by EAB of roughly 200 institutions found that students within 50 miles were five times more likely to apply than those over 1,000 miles away, and nearly twice as likely to enroll, even though students responded to a college’s marketing, such as clicking ads and checking email, nearly the same no matter where they lived.

What’s next: Hampshire won’t be the last to close this spring/summer as the results of another enrollment cycle arrive in the coming weeks.

• A study of 300 private, tuition-dependent colleges enrolling more than 1,000 undergraduates by Steven Shulman, an entrepreneur who has consulted for major colleges, examined how long each institution could survive based on their cash flow available for operations.
• Assuming enrollments remain steady, which is unlikely on some of the campuses, more than one-third of the colleges studied have less than five years before becoming fiscally insolvent.
• If enrollment falls by 10% over the next four years, nearly half of the colleges would have less than five years of financial runway.

Bottom line: Not every small, tuition-dependent college is in trouble. One worry I have based on emails and DMs I get from parents is that news of a college’s demise or program cuts (like Syracuse just did) makes prospective families think many more colleges are on the brink than actually are. Syracuse and other colleges trimming programs are making the necessary decisions to improve their financial standing.

⏳ But others are simply waiting it out. After the Hampshire news, one college president in Massachusetts texted me: “Just a few more to go, and then we’ll be ok.” It was partly a joke, but it’s also the strategy many higher ed leaders have adopted.  

The AI Gap and Students

I first went to the ASU+GSV Summit in 2012, back when it was held at Arizona State's Skysong in Scottsdale. It was the third year of the event, with 735 people in attendance.

Fast forward to this year in San Diego, where attendance was roughly ten times that size, bringing together ed-tech executives, investors, and educators across K–12 and higher ed.

I got back in the wee hours this morning from three days at the conference. Here's what I learned. Feel free to join the conversation on LinkedIn:

AI, AI, AI. For the past three years, this conference has been mostly about AI. After moving through the hype cycle—ok, maybe we're still there—the dominant theme in the sessions, hallways, and late-night gatherings was the gap between student preparedness for an AI world and the ability of K–12 and higher ed to close it.

🚨 The numbers are hard to dismiss. Gen Z's excitement about AI dropped 14 points over the last year to just 22%, according to Gallup. The entry-level job market isn't helping: unemployment for recent grads hit 5.7% at the end of 2025, above the national rate, which almost never happens. Meanwhile, a Harvard working paper found that at companies adopting AI, junior hiring fell nearly 8% within six quarters, not through layoffs but a quiet freeze on new positions.

The campus response hasn't matched the moment. More than half of college students say their school either discourages or outright bans AI use, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study.

• Nearly 30% say they're not being adequately trained to use it.

• 16% of college students changed their major due to AI.

What leaders at ASU+GSV argued: The mistake isn't moving too slowly, it's about framing AI as a literacy problem rather than a design opportunity.

• Students shouldn't just learn to use AI tools; they should build with them, developing what several leaders called a participatory, creative engagement with AI, shaping their own learning rather than consuming someone else's.

• The student who will be most valuable combines relational intelligence (empathy, communication, critical thinking) with AI fluency. Neither alone is enough.

The structural challenge is real. I heard yet again how AI is experienced unevenly on campuses: encouraged in some classrooms, restricted in others, unclear in many. That inconsistency creates inequity. What students learn often depends on the professors they happen to have.

The bottom line: The cruelest part of this shift is structural: AI is automating the bottom rungs of the career ladder first, the jobs that teach you how to think, build judgment, and find mentors on your way up.

There was lots of talk about redesigning two underutilized years in the education journey: the senior years of high school and college. Could they include far more work-based learning, for example?

I kept coming back to the three-year, 90-credit bachelor's degree approved by several regional accreditors. Could a fourth year—blending master's coursework and work experience—make that model more compelling?

What else? ASU+GSV wasn't only about AI.

📚 Doug Belkin of the Wall Street Journal interviewed me on the main stage about lessons for education leaders from Dream School. The takeaway: students want more optionality. Right now, college is like walking into a retail store with three SKUs—in-person, online, hybrid. Schools deeper in the rankings have an opportunity to build more pathways.

🏈 College athletics was the topic of a private gathering among presidents, administrators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. With no congressional action in sight on the transfer portal or NIL, the question was how to better prepare athletes for the financial and marketing realities of today's college sports, while preserving Olympic and women's sports.

DATA POINT

40

Number of women's teams eliminated at colleges since last July, as discussed at the ASU +GSV gathering on college athletics

SUPPLEMENTS 

🎙️ A President Who Leads Out Loud. Most Ivy League presidents are lying low, hoping the political heat passes. Not Dartmouth's Sian Beilock. In a conversation on the latest episode of Future U, Beilock explained her approach to me and Michael Horn: lead from mission clarity, and say out loud what the university is not—not a political institution, not a social action organization. That framing, she argues, is what earns public trust. She's also pushing for a guaranteed paid internship for any student who wants one, arguing that colleges, not employers, need to own the return on investment in an increasingly AI-driven economy. (Future U.)

🏫 When the Employer Becomes the University. Infosys didn't wait for universities to close the skills gap but rather built its own. The company's 337-acre Global Education Center in Mysore trains 20,000 newly hired engineering graduates each year in a 19-to-23-week residential program costing about $8,000 per person. Classes run from foundational coding to client communication to assertiveness training, with roughly 60-70% of instruction hands-on. The underlying premise is stark: a degree signals aptitude, not readiness. American firms like Deloitte and KPMG have built training centers too, but nothing at this scale writes Ben Wildavsky in a piece adapted from his forthcoming book. (The Hechinger Report)

🏛️ Yale's Mirror Moment. A decade ago, 57% of Americans expressed confidence in higher education. Today it's 36%. A Yale faculty committee spent a year examining why, and their 58-page report doesn't spare the institution: a $94,000 annual sticker price against a median family income below $84,000; an admissions process so opaque that nearly half of Americans don't believe financial aid of that magnitude exists; grades so inflated they've lost meaning; and a campus culture that chills speech. The report's 20 recommendations include a 3.0 GPA target, device-free classrooms, and curbing legacy and athletics preferences in admissions. (The New York Times)

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Until next time, Cheers— Jeff