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In today's issue: Why there's no "right size" college, no matter what students say they want; the AI question college presidents are more anxious about than cheating; and why grad schools are already cutting prices ahead of new loan caps

⛱️ The first Dream School book talk of the fall is a summer edition at the Edgartown Library on Martha's Vineyard on Wednesday, August 19 at 6 p.m. Register here. 

EVENT

The “Next Office Hour” is back in early September for a conversation on college fit. We’re trying something different with this one with a series of one-on-one interviews about different dimensions of fit:

• Fit vs. Prestige: Whitney Soule, Vice Provost and Dean of Admissions, University of Pennsylvania

• Mentors and Belonging: Beth Pontari, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Furman University

• ROI (Return on Investment): Michael Itzkowitz, Founder and President of The HEA Group and former director of the College Scorecard

Here are the details:

🗓️ Wednesday, September 2

⏰ 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT

👉 Register for free and get a recording afterward (with support from Furman University)

TODAY'S EDITION OF NEXT 

It's always been hard to write a single newsletter for an audience as varied as this one.

A college president, a trustee, a chief financial officer, a high school counselor, and a parent all open the same email and need different things from it. Usually I split the difference. Usually that means everybody gets something slightly off.

🧫 So this week we're experimenting. Two slightly different versions of Next, written for the two different segments of our audience.

You're getting this one because you're on the student side of this, either in the middle of the college search or guiding other people through it.

If we segmented wrong, hit reply and tell me why. That's the part we’re trying to learn from.

The Missing Middle Among Colleges 

I've started the college search with my oldest and I'm living what I preach on the road to parents: start broadly, trying to get a sense of what's out there before putting any school names on a list.

My oldest kid doesn't know what they want to do or the type of campus they want to be on. So we're testing sizes and locations now, and one thing has become abundantly clear: when it comes to size, the Goldilocks principle doesn't really apply to higher ed.

There is no "just right" sized school. When you survey the higher ed landscape, three things stand out.

1. There are a lot of small colleges. Of the roughly 1,580 four-year colleges and universities in the country, 400 enroll fewer than 1,000 undergraduates. Nine in ten of those are private. Widen the lens and the picture holds: seven in ten four-year institutions enroll fewer than 5,000.

2. There are very few large universities but that's where the students are. Only 100 four-year institutions enroll 20,000 or more undergraduates. That's under 7% of the sector. They educate 40% of all undergraduates. The 400 or so small colleges, by contrast, enroll 2.4% of them.

3. The middle is thinner than it looks, and the private slice of it is its own barbell. Between 5,000 and 20,000 undergraduates there are 344 institutions. Three-fourths of them are public: regional universities, the so-called directional state schools, the campuses that aren't the flagship. Fewer than 100 are private.

🔗 Those don't hold together as a category, however.

• Roughly a third are the highly selective research universities, like Duke, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, and Emory.

• Another eighteen or so are adult-serving and largely online, so they clear 5,000 undergraduates precisely because they aren't residential. Both groups are off most families' grid, for opposite reasons.

• Which leaves something like 45 mid-size, residential, private colleges that an average applicant could actually attend, including some of my 75 “New” Dream Schools, such as Elon, Dayton, Marquette, and Fairfield.

Because big publics seem popular–especially in the South–everyone assumes that’s what today’s students want.

But a recent survey of nearly 1,500 prospective students from the TIAA Institute found that only 14% said they prefer a university of 20,000 or more.

• Two-thirds favored the middle, institutions under 10,000 students.
• Size ranked among the top five factors for only 12% of students, far behind cost, aid, and academic quality.

Students say they want the middle, but they end up at the edges because there isn’t enough of what Baby Bear found: the “just right” middle ground.

The size students say they want is the size Harvard is. Harvard enrolls 8,844 undergraduates. Yale 6,814. Princeton 5,813. Duke 6,523. The exemplars of the mid-size residential experience are institutions that admit around 4% of applicants. Families picture that campus and correctly conclude they can't have it—when what they actually can't have is the selectivity, not the size.

I asked the higher education historian John Thelin why higher ed is so thin in the middle. Thelin is a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher Education.

“The dilemma is that at some point growth over a certain number includes a qualitative change,” for a college, he said, such as larger class sizes, residential life that’s more spread out, and a different student experience.

“If we were to look at enrollment data from some earlier decades, the middle category was in the mainstream and heralded in American higher education,” Thelin told me. “But the appeal of flagship state universities raises the stakes for those who suddenly are static at 5,000 to 10,000 and feel left out and left over.”

What this means for your list

If your kid says they want a "medium-sized school," ask what they actually mean.

• Students who preferred large campuses in the TIAA survey cited program options, course options, and internship opportunities — not scale for its own sake.

• Students who preferred small colleges cited class size, relationships with faculty, and personal attention. Both groups are describing something real, but neither was describing a number.

Bottom line: Size isn't a preference. It's a tradeoff on experiences. As a tour guide at Tufts said last week while I was visiting, when asked about size by a parent: “I found my people and that’s what matters.” She was right. If you don’t have the right people around you, it doesn’t matter what size college you’re at.

Could AI Make College Even More Expensive?

As we enter the fourth fall semester with AI on campuses, college leaders are still trying to figure out the rules.

🍽️ I recently hosted an off-the-record dinner with a dozen presidents, provosts, and technology chiefs, followed by a Future U. taping at a gathering of higher ed leaders. I've written here before about what to ask on a campus tour about AI.

This is different: it's what the people running these colleges are still figuring out.

Why it matters: the gap between colleges that have figured out AI and those still winging it is widening, and it's about more than classroom rules.

Students are the ones stuck in the inconsistency. The line that landed hardest came from a student, quoted from a campus survey: "Please just tell us what you expect." Leaders admitted their own rules whip students around from from class to class. But the more revealing part was how few could say who on campus is actually responsible for fixing it. That ambiguity—not the technology—is the real tell about how a place is run.

The quiet worry is jobs, not cheating. Families might worry about AI in the coursework. The leaders were more anxious about what happens after graduation: that AI is erasing the entry-level tasks that used to be a graduate's first job. The colleges thinking hardest about this are pushing real-world work—internships, industry projects, capstones—from the margins into the core of the degree. It's worth asking what a college is doing to help students "ladder over" the work AI is eating.

AI won't replace what makes college worth it. The most animated stretch of the night wasn't about efficiency. It was about protecting the human parts: mentored research, real debate, the productive struggle of working through hard problems. One leader called that friction the whole point of college. The schools worth the price are the ones guarding those experiences, not automating them away.

Bottom line: Students already use AI daily. What separates colleges now is whether there's a plan behind it or a vacuum. The candor at that dinner was a reminder that even the people running these institutions are still figuring it out, which makes it fair game to ask them how.

DATA POINT

SUPPLEMENTS 

📜 Grad Schools Blink First. New federal caps limit most graduate students to $20,500 a year in loans, and schools are already slashing prices to match. Emory, Purdue, Johns Hopkins, Santa Clara, and half a dozen others have cut tuition or added scholarships since the caps passed, several citing the loan limits by name. Uncapped loans let schools raise prices without pushback, since the government loans could cover the tab. That guarantee is now gone. How this plays out will differ by institution and program. At the University of Pennsylvania, more than 80 percent of students in one master's program already borrow above the new caps. At nearby Drexel and Temple, almost none do. (AEI)

💸 Aid Lawsuit Checks Mailed. The first checks are landing from a $284 million settlement over price-fixing among elite universities' financial aid offices. Ten schools, including Yale, Brown, Columbia, and Duke, agreed to pay out after a 2022 lawsuit accused 17 institutions of coordinating financial aid formulas in a way that kept awards lower than a competitive market would have produced. Payments started July 20, averaging around $2,000 per student. The settlement covers anyone who got partial aid dating back to 2003 at some schools. The schools admit no wrongdoing. The lawsuit alleged schools violated an antitrust exemption allowing them to discuss financial aid calculations, which ultimately provided students with less money than they would have received if there had been competition. (Axios Chicago)

⚔️ Colleges Fight Each Other. Facing political attacks and a shrinking pool of students, colleges are increasingly turning on each other, Jon Marcus writes in The Hechinger Report. Four-year universities lobbied against letting Illinois and Iowa community colleges award bachelor's degrees, even as those same universities race into dual enrollment and short-term credentials, the territory community colleges used to own. Meanwhile, selective schools lean harder on early decision, and recruiters now poach admitted students well past deposit day, a practice banned by the admissions ethics code until 2020. Fourteen percent of this year's freshmen hedged by paying deposits at more than one school. (The Hechinger Report)

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Until next time, Cheers— Jeff