☕️ Good Morning! Thanks for reading Next.If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here.
🏎️ And we’re off…with another season of Future U., our 10th! Highlights below from the first episode of the podcast's new season…
…but first, the latest State of Higher Education report returns next month. Last year’s inaugural deck was our most-downloaded and shared resource, and I ended up talking to more than a dozen boards about it. Think more slide deck than report that helps leaders understand what’s happening to higher ed.
More details to come, but we’ll be covering the highlights of the report in a Next Office Hour, our regular webcast series, next month:
🗓️ Tuesday, October 20
⏰ 2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
👉 Register for freeand to get a recording afterward (with support from Google)
Five Lessons From Northeastern’s Rise
Northeastern University was largely a regional brand just thirty years ago. Today, it's one of the most sought-after schools nationally, with a trajectory many higher ed leaders would like to mimic.
How Northeastern became more selective and shot up the rankings is a story that’s been told often, including in my book, Who Gets In and Why.
But less understood is how the university added campuses, expanded its research portfolio, and turned its co-op program into a point of distinction just as families put a growing premium on work experience in college.
Those are among the topics in a new Harvard Business School case study about Northeastern. HBS is best known for dissecting the strategies of businesses. It’s rare that a university gets that treatment, and this one offers lessons well beyond Northeastern.
Here are my five takeaways from reading the case study:
1️⃣ Northeastern used periods of disruption to expand. During both the Great Recession in 2008, and the pandemic in 2020, the university saw opportunities that other universities couldn’t or wouldn’t take.
When the Great Recession hit in 2008, many of the selective universities Northeastern was trying to compete with saw their endowments decimated.
Northeastern’s endowment fell too, but it contributed very little to the university’s bottom line. Tuition accounted for a lot more—77% of the university’s revenue in 2008, compared to 45% among a comparison group of 17 institutions.
As other institutions froze hiring or laid people off, Northeastern’s president, Joseph Aoun, saw an opportunity to “double down” on co-op, make Northeastern more global in its focus, and recruit faculty. Co-op essentially supercharges internships by making work part and parcel of the curriculum.
During the pandemic, while most institutions looked inward, Northeastern looked outward, assembling a team to evaluate dozens of struggling colleges for potential mergers and acquisitions. This eventually resulted in two acquisitions: Mills College in Oakland and Marymount Manhattan College in New York City.
2️⃣ Research and career preparation grew together. While research universities might view career preparation as too vocational for their mission, Northeastern embraced both by expanding its legacy co-op program while building its research capacity.
The university hired more than 500 tenured or tenure-track faculty during Aoun’s first decade and achieved the top research status for universities, known then as R1, in 2016.
Research grants grew more than sixfold, from $48.7 million in 2006, to $296.3 million in 2024.
The expansion required different academic and faculty models. In 2010, Northeastern divided its College of Arts and Sciences into three colleges: Arts, Media, and Design; Science; and Social Sciences and Humanities.
Meanwhile, research faculty were concentrated in Boston, while regional campuses relied largely on full-time faculty outside the tenure system.
3️⃣ Northeastern’s increased selectivity tells only part of the story. Many top colleges achieve low acceptance rates by blending their admissions stats from multiple rounds (such as binding Early Decision) to make themselves look more selective. Northeastern is no exception to gaming the system with a twist: the case study shows how the university paired a highly selective Boston entry point with other routes into the university.
Northeastern’s reported 5.65% acceptance rate in 2023, only counts Boston admissions against the overall applicant pool.
That fall, roughly 1,500 students began through a program called "N.U.in,"at 11 European partner universities. Other students entered through Global Scholars in London or Oakland, with the option to move to Boston after two successful semesters.
The various pathways into Boston allowed Northeastern to increase yield—the percentage of students accepted who ultimately enroll—from 18% in 2013, to 50% in 2023. A higher yield meant fewer offers were needed to fill a given number of seats making the university more selective.
The differing routes for students to be on the Boston campus also increased throughput: the students from other Northeastern campuses helped maintain enrollment and tuition revenue on the main campus while its students were away on co-op.
With a larger share of admitted students enrolling, Northeastern could fill its class with fewer offers.
4️⃣ Northeastern invested in the people who make co-op work. I’m often asked why more colleges don’t offer co-ops like Northeastern. Short answer: it’s expensive.
Northeastern has 150 professionals working with employers to identify co-op staffing needs.
Northeastern targets two opportunities per student, and during the 2023–24 academic year, the university recorded 25,289 job postings from 4,032 employers in 56 countries.
The academic component of co-op is extensive: Students take a preparatory course, work closely with coordinators on their schedules, and establish learning goals with workplace supervisors.
Nearly 95% of the undergraduate class of 2023 participated in co-op, and among those, more than 83% completed two or three co-ops. The university also reported that roughly 58% of its 2023 bachelor’s graduates received a job offer from a former co-op employer.
5️⃣ The university built a bigger business in graduate education. When deciding where to open regional campuses in the U.S., Northeastern looked for cities that had populations with lower levels of advanced degrees than Boston.
Campuses were designed around working professionals and local labor-market needs, using hybrid programs with online access to Boston faculty and periodic in-person sessions.
Seattle opened in 2013 with 32 students; by 2023, it enrolled almost 1,500 across a dozen master’s programs.
Graduate tuition revenue more than tripled after 2011, reaching roughly $580 million by 2023. Its share of total tuition revenue grew from 26% to about 40%.
That expansion also brought exposure to a particular market: international students made up 69% of graduate enrollment in 2023–24.
With international graduate enrollment falling nationally and tighter federal borrowing limits for new graduate borrowers, this is one part of Northeastern’s strategy to watch closely.
👉 What the case didn’t say: Reading the study, I remembered that Aoun has joined us twice on Future U., first in 2018, early in the podcast’s run. In other words, he has been there a long time (since 2006).
While the case documents his role in Northeastern’s rise, my takeaway was the value of sustained leadership: setting a direction and sticking with it long enough to reshape an institution. Aoun also invited participation among faculty, staff, and students without making consensus a condition for action.
🚨 “We did not ask for a consensus,” he told the case writers, “and we didn’t ask for a vote.”
Why it matters: In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about why Syracuse has become the poster child for what’s happening in higher ed right now, with the university seemingly in the news every week. Afterward, an alum wrote to me suggesting I revisit the tenure of former Chancellor Nancy Cantor.
Cantor, who led Syracuse from 2004 to 2013, prioritized access for low-income students, including those from local schools, and revitalizing the surrounding city. Some faculty blamed Cantor’s strategic direction for the university’s slide in the rankings and its 2011 departure from the Association of American Universities, a group of leading research institutions.
Cantor and Aoun arrived at their respective institutions just two years apart. That made me curious about how the universities’ trajectories compared, so yesterday I dug out my copy of the 2005 U.S. News rankings (choosing the middle year between their arrivals).
Yes, I’m a critic of rankings. They’re a blunt measure of standing, but one that university leaders still watch.
In 2005, Northeastern was tied for 120; Syracuse was tied for 52.
👉 The 2026 rankings? Northeastern is tied for 46; Syracuse is tied for 75.
Future U. Is Back
Season 10 of the Future U. podcast kicked off this week with Michael Horn and me doing our usual summer catch-up on headlines.
But one exchange has stuck with me since we recorded it. We spent much of the summer at gatherings with university leaders discussing whether a college needs a coherent AI policy.
We both changed our minds, a few times, on the answer.
We started out thinking the variation from department to department, professor to professor, was a problem.
Then a panel of California leaders convinced us that incoherence is just what a university is. A thousand flowers bloom. By this episode, however, we had both snapped back.
The distinction that matters: Coherence doesn't mean every professor teaches AI the same way. It means there's a floor. A minimum every faculty member is expected to hit, with room to vary above it.
Most institutions don't have a floor, however. And at big research universities, as one vice provost for AI told me at a dinner this summer, leaders have no real visibility into what's happening inside each of their departments.
Why it matters: Whether students leave knowing how to work alongside AI tools shouldn't come down to which section of econ they landed in.
MIT's ad hoc committee on AI reached the same conclusion this summer, reporting that its own students are confused by the lack of consistency within courses and across the curriculum.
The big picture: A common standard only matters if students can demonstrate that they’ve met it. That’s where Michael’s argument about grading comes in: assess students against a standard of mastery, rather than sorting them against one another.
Bottom line: Colleges need to define what every graduate should be able to do with AI, what they must be able to do without it, and how students will demonstrate both.
🎂 And in celebration of our 10th season this year, I'll be sharing a combination of favorite or relevant episodes from the archives. First up: The story behind direct admissions, which the Wall Street Journal wrote about this week.
DATA POINT
Where the jobs actually are. In a new partnership between Next and the Burning Glass Institute, I'll be sharing a chart from its chief economist, Gad Levanon, on a regular basis. Burning Glass looks at the job market in real time. The chart below shows what Gad is seeing in the payroll data.
By the numbers: Health care and social assistance is up 13.4% since January 2023. That's two-thirds of all net job growth in that stretch, and 91% of it in the past year.
The white-collar core peaked in April 2023 and is down 700,000. In 35 years of data it had only shrunk during recessions.
Recent college graduates now run 5.7% unemployment against 4.1% for all workers, reversing three decades in which they sat below the average.
Why it matters: The majors families think of as safe are attached to the part of the economy that stopped hiring.
👉 Gad writes more about what's happening in the job market with his LinkedIn newsletter, Labor Matters.
SUPPLEMENTS
🏛️ The IRS Enters Admissions. The Department of Treasury proposed rules last week that would deny tax-exempt status to any school the IRS finds is running a racially discriminatory program, including admissions and scholarships. The rules take effect after May 31 and could reach as many as 18,000 institutions, private high schools included. Losing the exemption would mean donors could no longer deduct their gifts. Education groups plan to fight the rules during the comment period, and a legal challenge is likely. (The New York Times)
💰 A Tool to Compare Aid Offers. The Education Department is building software that would let families put one college's award letter next to another's and actually compare them, Undersecretary Nicholas Kent said last week. Congress has tried and failed to standardize offer letters for more than a decade. The current fix is voluntary: about 700 colleges have signed on to the College Cost Transparency Initiative, out of roughly 6,000 nationwide. No timeline yet from the department. (Politico)
🎯 Agency Is the New Skill. David Deming's latest podcast episode features Cate Hall, whose book with Sasha Chapin argues that high-agency people, the ones who know what they want and go get it, have an advantage that's widening. Tech executives have started saying agency is what they're hiring for now that AI handles the tasks a résumé used to prove you could do. Hall's own path went law school, poker, addiction, recovery, biotech CEO. Colleges reward students who do what's asked of them. Hall's argument is that the job market has started rewarding the opposite. (The Context Window)
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