🗳️ It's Election Day! Be sure to exercise your right to vote.

• One of my earliest childhood memories was of my parents taking me with them to vote at the armory building a few blocks from our house. I got to pull the curtain on the machine that registered the vote at the end.
• When my kids were younger, I asked to take them into the voting booth with me. It was a no-go. Filling in bubbles probably wouldn’t be very exciting to them anyway. They'd eventually be doing that in school, a lot.

🙏 Thanks for reading Next. If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here. 

🚨 In today's issue: Why AI may force colleges to restore some of the struggle they spent 20 years removing; half of the Class of 2026 ruled out colleges without their exact major; USC’s new president on trust, mistakes, and big swings.

🔀 On the road talking about Dream School, I’m often asked about pathways beyond a four-year college, at least immediately after graduation. To better answer those questions, I’ve joined my Future U. partner, Michael Horn, on a new short-form podcast he created, “What’s Next After High School?”

• We get one question from a parent and then take it to an expert to answer. In the premiere episode, the first question cuts to the chase: What options outside of four-year college even exist after high school?
• We welcome Mary Alice McCarthy, director of the Center on Education and Labor at New America, who previously worked in the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor. McCarthy tells us about pathways that lead to rewarding careers and economic opportunity.

🖥️ Watch the 10-minute episode here (sponsored by Britebound.org)

Where Colleges Should Preserve the Friction

👀 “Look to your left, look to your right; one of you won’t be here at the end.”

Whenever I mention that academic trope to a roomful of Gen X parents, they nod knowingly. Most heard some version of it in college, when a bad grade in a weed-out course was supposed to tell you that maybe you didn't belong.

But they don't want that exact experience for their own kids. When I surveyed more than 3,000 parents for Dream School and asked what makes a college prestigious, a “commitment to student success” topped their list by far.

Colleges got the message. Over the past two decades, campuses invested heavily in tutoring, advising, and early-alert systems to improve retention and graduation rates. The goal was to remove obstacles that prevented students from succeeding.

🦾 Now artificial intelligence threatens to upend that bargain. AI doesn't just help students get through difficult assignments. It can do much of the work for them. And higher ed still doesn't know quite what to do about it.

In August, Dartmouth's provost wrote a Washington Post column about AI cheating. Last week, he resigned after a faculty-led committee found he wasn't forthcoming about using AI in his published writing. If a provost can get this wrong, what are students supposed to think the rules are?

But the Dartmouth debate also shows how much attention colleges are giving to policing AI use, rather than asking what the work students do in college is supposed to accomplish.

At salon dinners I've hosted for college leaders and in interviews for Future U. this past summer, I kept hearing one word that should be a mark of student learning: friction.

“Learning requires struggle. Learning requires effort,” a provost said at one of my dinners in Seattle. He argued that faculty may need to make courses and assignments harder, not easier.

Think about the contradiction. For 20 years, the student success movement has focused on removing barriers. Now AI may require colleges to preserve some of them. If AI does the easy work, where do students get the practice to handle harder problems? How much must they know before it's safe to hand a task to a machine?

My own view is that colleges need to slow students down in some places, not speed them up. College may be the last fully analog stretch of most people's lives, when young adults can be expected to wrestle with problems without immediately reaching for a shortcut.

But parents want rigor and on-time graduation. They want good grades and a clear path into the workforce. Making college harder isn't exactly an easy sell.

↔️ Can colleges have it both ways?

Marty Schmidt thinks so. Schmidt, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former provost of MIT, told me that colleges can challenge students without sacrificing student success. But “you have to build the systems in.”

When freshmen arrive at RPI, Schmidt gives parents his own version of the old weed-out speech.

“Your son or daughter may call you sometime this semester and say, ‘Mom, Dad, I think I’m failing calculus,’ because they might be,” he told me. “If you’re an athlete, you don’t get better by running the same pace.”

Schmidt says RPI's average GPA has barely budged in 20 or 30 years. Yet the university retains more than 90% of its students after their first year.

The old weed-out speech promised that some students wouldn't make it. Schmidt's version acknowledges that students might struggle, but promises they'll have help getting through it. “It's not a handout,” he told me. “It's a hand up.”

What that looks like at RPI:

🤝 Support the struggle. Through I-PERSIST, upperclass students mentor freshmen in calculus, chemistry, and physics. It's academic help, but also reassurance from someone who has survived the same course.

🔧 Let students get their hands dirty. Engineering majors typically spend two years on math and science before reaching the heart of their discipline. At RPI's Mercer XLab, freshmen learn tools, earn badges, and build things they want, like a radio-controlled car. Alumnus Doug Mercer, who funded the lab, has a useful analogy: Cooks follow recipes. Chefs create them. He wants more chefs.

🎓 Rethink the lecture. Here's where Schmidt surprised me. While he wants students to work harder, he also wants to eliminate some traditional ways colleges make them work. “We're very keen on this idea of just nuking the large lectures,” he said.

RPI is piloting AI tutors in five courses across its five schools this semester. They're limited to course materials and designed to ask Socratic questions rather than simply supply answers. Schmidt hopes they can help students master introductory material more efficiently, leaving time for harder, hands-on learning.

RPI has been here before: Its studio physics approach in the 1990s helped change how MIT taught the subject.

What struck me is that Schmidt is trying to make college harder and easier at the same time. More intellectual struggle, but fewer hours sitting through lectures. More demanding work, but stronger support.

There are risks. An AI tutor can become another shortcut. Students who speed through introductory material may miss the foundation they'll need later. Some of the repetitive work that feels tedious is exactly how beginners become proficient.

RPI plans to test its AI tutors against conventional instruction. Schmidt doesn't know yet whether they'll work. When I said I'd love to see the results, he replied, “Me too.”

There's also the market for students. Few colleges sell themselves as places where your child might get a C in calculus. Enrollment is one of RPI's top strategic priorities, and Schmidt acknowledges that RPI competes on price and brand. Raising expectations while attracting students is no small challenge.

What makes RPI interesting isn't simply that it's experimenting with AI. It's that Schmidt is starting with what students should be able to do, then asking where the technology fits. Too many colleges are doing the reverse: adopting tools, writing policies, and leaving faculty to sort out what learning should look like.

There's a difference between removing barriers that keep students from succeeding and removing the struggle that helps them learn. AI is forcing colleges to distinguish between the two.

Bottom line: The goal isn't to bring back the weed-out culture. It's to preserve the hard work of learning without losing the students who need to do it. When a machine can complete an assignment in seconds, what should students still have to struggle through themselves? And will college leaders defend that answer when a parent calls about a bad grade?

When the College Major Comes First

Half of the high school graduating Class of 2026 considered colleges only if they offered the exact major seniors wanted, up from 30% a year earlier, according to a new survey by college-search platform Niche.

• The job market is shaping those decisions. Nearly six in 10 students said employment prospects were the primary factor driving their choice of major, while 60% strongly felt they needed to know what they wanted to study before applying to college.

• The sharp increase raises questions about how much room students are leaving themselves to explore once they get to college.

Driving the news: Students are increasingly treating the choice of a major as a career decision, not simply an academic one. A little more than half cited preparation for a specific career as a top reason for pursuing a degree, compared with 42% who cited academic learning and growth.

Why it matters: Academic programs are becoming central to enrollment strategy in higher ed. Colleges can spend millions marketing their brand and campus experience, but if prospective students don't see a pathway to the career they want, they may never put the institution on their list.

The big picture: Students aren't necessarily committed to a particular college. Some 44% applied to at least two more institutions than originally planned, and 38% sent at least half their applications to colleges outside their initial list.

Yes, but: While academic programs get a college into consideration, affordability often determines the final choice. Cost was the most frequently cited factor in enrollment decisions (54%), although 40% of students enrolled at colleges that cost more than they expected. As usual, college admissions is full of contradictions.

Bottom line: If the college choice for prospective students is tied to a job market moving faster than ever before, it presents a challenge to academic leaders as they make multi-year bets on which majors to offer, expand, or eliminate.

What Universities Can't Afford to Lose 

We recently took Future U. on the road to the University of Southern California for a live campus town hall.

Michael Horn and I sat down with USC’s new president, Beong-Soo Kim, to talk about the future of the comprehensive university, the challenges of leading a complex institution, and why growth and excellence aren't necessarily the same thing.

Then we brought in faculty, a student, and an employer to explore what experiential learning should look like in an AI era.

Three things stuck with me from the conversation:

• Governance is a relationship business. Higher ed's governance system wasn't built for this moment. Kim pushed back on the idea that complex universities are ungovernable. His point: Board culture matters as much as structure. Building trust with trustees, faculty, and staff before difficult decisions arise is what allows institutions to move forward.

• Integrity isn't about always being right. Kim wants universities to take big swings, even if they miss. But when things go wrong, leaders must acknowledge mistakes and respond candidly. Integrity isn't perfection. It's being straight with people.

• Learning is social. Earlier that day, we visited USC's Annenberg School and watched students working together in its newsroom. Later, an engineering student described what he'd learned building rockets alongside his peers. Both reinforced something I've been thinking about on college tours with my own daughter: some of the best learning happens through interaction.

🎧 Listen (and rate and subscribe) to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (sponsored by Adobe).

📱 Watch the full episode (and subscribe) on the Future U. YouTube channel.

DATA POINT

SUPPLEMENTS 

📊 Computer Science Enrollment Falls 12%. Overall college enrollment is flat this fall, but the mix is shifting. Computer and information science fell about 12% at both four- and two-year colleges and 10.4% in graduate programs. Health majors rose 6.2% at four-year colleges and 4.3% at two-year colleges. Master’s enrollment dropped 3.7%. Community colleges were the only sector to show undergraduate growth, up 1.2%. Final numbers arrive in January. (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center).

💰 The Richest Colleges Just Got Much Richer. Harvard’s endowment added $11 billion last fiscal year, reaching $68 billion. That gain alone is bigger than all but about 20 U.S. endowments. Stanford returned 31.7%. Washington University in St. Louis gained 37.3%, helped by a $50 million SpaceX investment that is now 10% of its portfolio. Yale now pays an 8% tax on endowment earnings, up from 1.4%. Elsewhere, S&P sees more colleges drawing heavily on endowments as net tuition shrinks. (Higher Ed Dive).

🚪 Higher Ed’s Most Exclusive Research Club Grows. Georgetown University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have joined the Association of American Universities, the invitation-only group of leading research universities. UAB is the first member from Alabama. The AAU now has 73 members. It added no one for seven years after 2012, then 11 universities starting in 2019, including Dartmouth and Notre Dame. (Inside Higher Ed). 

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Until next time, Cheers— Jeff