A New Era for Higher Ed?

Links We Share

“Which Colleges Always Lose Money?” by Robert Kelchen

“Where the Grass Is Greener” by Robert Shaw, Harvard Magazine

Chapters

0:00 - Intro
01:49 - A Year of Reckoning for Higher Ed
09:57 - The Changes Needed
16:51 - Quick Hits: Athletes as Employees, Hostile Competition, and More
26:37 - Expanding Research Outside of Academia
30:58 - Shortening Degree Programs

Transcript

Michael Horn:

Jeff, we are almost a month into 2025 and yet, while we both got each other gifts for the holidays and I promise yours is still coming, we haven't yet said Happy New Year to each other on Future U.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, Michael, it's good to see you again. Happy New Year. I like to think of this month as the halfway point of the season, so maybe let's take a moment today to delve into the storylines that we think are going to shape 2025 that's ahead on this episode of Future U.

Sponsor:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student educational success. This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org. For affordable degrees in education, healthcare, nursing, business or leadership, choose American College of Education. ACE hasn't raised tuition since 2016 and 86% of students graduate debt free. For programs designed for today's working professionals, visit ace.edu. Subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, send it along to a friend so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

Michael Horn:

I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff Selingo:

And I'm Jeff Selingo.

A Year of Reckoning for Higher Ed

Michael Horn:

Alrighty Jeff. So we've got five topics that I think we both want to dig into. We both authored our own version of predictions sure to go wrong for 2025 around higher ed. I had my usual one of more college closures, but then a bunch of things around more work based learning, experiential learning and the like. And then you rolled out your crystal ball as well, and it also forecast more experiential learning and work based learning or whatnot. But you also had this bigger one that I thought we'd dig into about why 2025 could be a year of reckoning for higher ed and how while that sounds bad on the surface, it actually might be a good thing. So I thought we'd start our show there because that is very intriguing. What do you mean by a year of reckoning for higher ed? And why could that be a good thing?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, so Michael, I think 2025 will be the year when higher ed really does start to face the consequences of its past missteps. And the biggest one perhaps is what it didn't do last decade to prepare for this decade. Right. We knew a decade ago for example that the demographic cliff was coming. We started to see as far back as 2012 a fall off in undergraduate enrollment. We saw in 2016 the consequences of a national election on higher ed policy in D.C. right., where we saw a drop off in foreign students that mostly drive graduate programs. And then in 2017, we saw the beginning of an erosion in the college going rate of high school graduates. You know, I could go on and on and on.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this frankly drove a lot of the college closure conversation on our end. It sounds pretty apocalyptic. So where's the good side of this?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, well, maybe, Michael, and it might sound like I'm quite worried right, about the year ahead for higher ed, but actually it's quite the opposite. I find myself feeling kind of remarkably hopeful because I think some institutions will feel that the financial, demographic, and political trends already taking shape well before this year started will kind of finally allow them to break free of those legacy models.

Michael Horn:

So what are some of those storylines or trends, Jeff, that you're keeping your eye on?

Jeff Selingo:

Okay, so there's a couple that I'm looking out for, Michael. First is what I call the trifecta in Washington. You know, I really don't think higher ed is ready for. What's with the GOP fully in control of Washington, House, Senate, you know, and the White House, you know, we're thinking about higher taxes here on big endowments. Right. Restrictions on foreign students, budget cuts, especially with Elon Musk in charge of that stuff across agencies that supply a pipeline of research dollars to universities.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. So if I'm sitting in a higher ed leadership seat, that doesn't sound that good, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo:

Well, it doesn't sound very good for elite higher ed, although I must say I'm not too worried, with their tens of billions of dollars in the bank. Now, if this were 30 years ago, I think the lobbying associations that represent various sectors of higher ed in Washington would kind of band together and fight back. But not only are most of those associations now in a weakened state themselves, but in recent years, I think many of those major associations, whether they represent the private colleges, the research universities, the community colleges, they're really looking after the best interest of their own members, not higher ed as a whole. So what I'm really hopeful for here is maybe this portends kind of a new way of thinking about higher ed in Washington, you know, federal support. Michael, as we know, because we've both spent time here in the city and you've been on Capitol Hill testifying in the past, it kind of remains stuck in the late 60s view of higher ed. That original Great Society Higher Education act signed by Lyndon Johnson and that landmark legislation really has largely favored, you know, the old legacy residential colleges and universities that enroll traditional full time students. And, I think there's an appetite now on both sides of the political aisle for something different. Now where that leaves us exactly with this next Congress and Education Department kind of remains unclear to me, but there are two things that I'm tracking. One is, there's a lot of talk, as we know, about accreditation in D.C. and the role that the federal government does in the accreditation process. And I think there's a lot to focus right now on the outcomes of institutions, particularly in the job market. So I think there's going to be movement on that front, one. And second, we're not going to see an overhaul of the Higher Education Act at least in the next couple of years, but I think we're going to see pieces of it. One that I hear being talked a lot about in town is around federal work study dollars that can actually flow to hands-on learning opportunities off campus, right? The kind of experiential learning that's largely reserved right now with students with financial means. Right. Who could go off and do internships and other types of experiential learning off campus.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. So you’re framing of this as sort of this anachronism, if you will, right of the 1960s stuck in that mindset and both sides being interested in moving beyond that, that's super interesting. I think the federal work study dollar point you just made, Jeff, is super interesting as well. I am surprised that you, you know, you did talk about outcomes in terms of accreditation, but you didn't talk about accountability as one of those pieces of legislation. Maybe that starts to remake the HEA, even, you know, not an overhaul, but as, as a particular, right, piece of legislation, I guess maybe it feels a bit less, you know, certain than what you did list. But I'm not sure any of those are done deals either, even as I agree with you that, you know, clearly the direction is spelled out Jeff.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, I don't think anything is a done deal. Right. We know that what's ahead in Washington is going to be very unknown. We're really going to be navigating through a lot of ambiguity over the next four years. Now, I'll tell you, there is one other thing that I talked about in my prediction newsletter for the coming year and that is campuses that look tired and worn out Michael. So this was kind of the second storyline I'm really paying attention to this year, you know, and I put a graphic in that newsletter that showed, get this, Michael, there were 90 million square feet of space built on campuses between 2004 and 2006. And you know, if you own any sort of property, you know what happens after 20 years, you know, things start to fail. And colleges already face upwards of $950 billion in spending over the next decade for deferred maintenance, facility upgrades, construction projects, that's according to Moody's. And for years colleges have tried to manage this kind of deferred maintenance bill by using extra cash at the end of the year, right? Their so-called margin that many colleges were running, right? So they had a little bit of extra cash at the end of the year and they would drive that into deferred maintenance to kind of fix that proverbial like leaky roof. But what's happening now is that those margins are kind of non-existent and at some colleges they've turned into deficits. So as enrollments shrink, I think space utilization is going to become a much more popular term on campus in many cases. I think it's going to be cheaper for colleges to tear down old buildings than struggle to maintain them. And if you live in urban areas, and we've had some presidents on, like Lynn Wooten in Boston, who talked about how they sold off, you know, underutilized buildings. And I think we're going to see more of that in places where there is another utilization for them. And I think we're also likely to see a lot more public/private partnerships, which is already popular in student housing, where private companies are going to manage and take over some of this space. Now, of course, you have all that space. Colleges have all that space because the third storyline of the year ahead is the disappearing student. Right. This is something we've talked a lot about on the show. So I'm not quite sure I have to take much of a deep dive there.

The Changes Needed

Michael Horn:

No, fair enough, Jeff. But before you sort of move us past that and sort of give us the ultimate so what, the so what that I'm hearing from this is that you may be jumping on my bandwagon and thinking that there's a bunch of colleges going to close or merge. Am I hearing you right?

Jeff Selingo:

Well, I'm still not there, Michael. You know, I know the fiscal reality is pretty dire. You know, somebody we both know, Robert Kelchen, you know, he recently pointed out in an analysis, and we'll add it to the show notes, that more than 40% of private colleges posted a loss in 2023. Let me repeat that. More than 40% of private colleges posted a loss in 2023 and 20% of public colleges did. And as he found, there were like 50 plus colleges that have been running deficits for eight or more of the last 10 years. Right. Essentially regular deficit spending. So I still hold out hope, Michael, for deeper partnerships instead of mergers and closures. But, you know, I think that there are more people in your camp than in my camp because whenever I bring that up, people say, never going to happen. Colleges will close before they really have to partner with their competitors or others or even merge with them. You know, it was once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And what I think is going to finally happen this year, in this year of reckoning, is that persistent deficits really have a way of changing, I think, a college's strategies. But I think two things are going to have to happen for those deeper partnerships or else they are going to go the way you think. I know a lot of colleges are going to go, which is closure or mergers. I think that the two things are going to have to happen. One is leaders need to assign a team or a person to really think about what these deeper partnerships look like. I think too much of this has been done kind of on the side of the desk, and it really requires a lot of brain power and time, and leaders are going to have to assign somebody to do that. The second thing is culture. And this may be a bridge too far. You know, institutions, they're not built fundamentally to work with each other. Right. In many ways, it's why they were created as separate institutions in the first place. And, you know, last fall on the show, I suggested colleges developed this master plan for culture, much like they have a strategic plan. I'm going to be writing about this a lot more in the year ahead. But I think that this idea of shifting the culture of higher ed so that more of these partnerships can happen is going to be absolutely critical.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, well, it won't surprise you, Jeff. I love both those ideas. I think if you don't task someone with it, it's no one's job. And I love this idea of culture, obviously, I've written about it a lot. It's a whole week in my class that I teach at HGSE, at Harvard, and as Diane Tavenner is fond of telling me, every organization has a culture, the question is if it's a culture you like and are intentional about building or if it's one that sort of just bubbles up and happens and frankly then dilutes your strategy. So we will see where that goes. But if that's the state of play, then, you know, what's the so what if you will, what's it all going to add up to in your mind?

Jeff Selingo:

Well, I think it's going to end up, as I pointed out in my piece in the newsletter, right. The end of like this idea of “Comprehensive U,” right. This idea that a university does everything. I think we should expect to see the shuttering of majors like we already have at many colleges and universities, the consolidation of schools within those universities, a rethinking of athletics, the end of graduate programs. We know that Boston University, for example, last November decided to suspend admissions in a dozen humanities and social science disciplines. And one reason was, you know, the academic job outlook wasn't good for those students, so why even have those programs? And I really do suggest that folks go back to listen to that episode that we had with Len Cassuto last year about the future of the PhD and we'll be starting to link to that in the show notes. But I think really, Michael, this is the reckoning that's probably most needed. And if we kind of think about the end of comprehensive U, it really creates this much needed differentiation in the market. So instead of every college trying to be like the one across town or another rung up on the ladder in the rankings, I think the fiscal and demographic realities really require institutions to figure out where they want to play in the decade ahead. And until now, I don't think the realities have been enough to push colleges and universities to shift course. But as we know, and we're going to talk about this hopefully on a future episode of Future U is the Carnegie classifications are changing and that's likely to result in how states fund public colleges and how U.S. News classifies colleges. Those things might be enough to finally incentivize colleges, universities to say, you know what, we don't have to be all these things. You know, twice before, Michael, I love reading the history of higher ed and twice before we went through this period of rapid change in response to shifting societal needs and disruption in the economy. The first was in the years after the Industrial Revolution when hundreds of colleges closed. So it has happened before, but many new ones, including many of today's land grant universities open to serve the needs of society that was being mechanized. The second was in the late 1960s as the baby boomers were graduating from high school and the Great Society programs of the Johnson era were coming into being. It really encouraged higher education to expand to the comprehensive system that we have today. And so perhaps now, Michael, we're in a third era. One where David Brooks pointed out in his much discovered cover piece in the Atlantic back in December that there's this new meritocracy. And as he pointed out, this new meritocracy will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul. Now, great writing by David Brooks, but perhaps maybe a little bit overly optimistic and simplistic on his part. But just imagine if we had this differentiation in the marketplace, you know, the different types of institutions, programs and pathways after high school, that we could finally have that better match up to the goals of students and their families right? It's the. It's the jobs to be done theory, right? It's exactly, it takes all of the writing that you've done in all of your books over the last couple of years and to finally say, yes, we could finally do this.

Michael Horn:

So I find it really interesting. I actually think, Jeff, I'm reflecting on this, probably since season two or three, this theme of differentiation and being distinct and making that a part of your strategy, I think has popped up at some point every single season. And we've both said, they gotta go here. I think it's really.

Jeff Selingo:

Now we're in season eight and they still haven't gone there.

Michael Horn:

They still haven't gone there. But I think you have, like, I guess the way I would say it is, I think you are right in that if they are, and this is probably the answer, right, if they're to break out of the prediction that I've made, the way to do it is to focus and stop being all things to all people. Nail the job to be done. To your point, I think you're spot on. I think strategic differentiation would be good, frankly, it would reduce administrative overhead costs. If people want to hear my rant on that, they can find that episode from a couple seasons ago, right, about my view that administrative bloat is a direct function of trying to be all things to all people. I also think, interestingly enough, cutting majors and things like that, there's a whole bunch of tenure considerations they're going to have to get over to make that work. But that may actually be the window into partnerships with other universities. I remember I was advising one president and he said, I don't think we can do like a, I can't remember, you know, English and this and that majors anymore. I was like, well, don't cut it in your course catalog. Just partner with another university and have them give it to you online for the four students that do want to sign up for it, but you stop, you know, incurring all that cost. And so I do think that actually, interestingly enough, maybe the window into the partnerships that you've been hoping for for a while. I also think that the Carnegie Foundation's revised Carnegie classifications when it comes out, may be fuel for this, Jeff, as they won't necessarily encourage comprehensiveness for its own sake and will likely even give R1 status to institutions that have smaller, more narrowly tailored research footprints.

Quick Hits: Athletes as Employees, Hostile Competition, and More

Michael Horn:

That said, I guess I'm curious if you think this athlete as employee trend will continue in force in 2025. I was surprised that our friend Matt Brown, in his recent news newsletter, suggested that it might not.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, I mean, he thinks, and I largely agree with him, that the political environment is a lot more hostile now to organized labor, and that makes it far less inevitable that this is going to happen. And that's especially true because at the end of December, of course, the Dartmouth men's basketball team, which was kind of leading this effort, withdrew its petition with the National Labor Relations Board.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, unfortunately, they didn't withdraw from the season.

Jeff Selingo:

I don't even want to know what the record is. I haven't looked.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, we should have looked that up before I said that. But. Okay, let's do two quick other items, Jeff, before we go to break, because you noted to me in Kansas this, like, bizarre story, frankly, where Emporia State University's president got angry, in effect, at the local tech college, Flint Hills, for competing for students. And then he threatened that legislators could help him do a hostile takeover of Flint Hills if they weren't careful. It's sort of a crazy story. Did I understand it right? Because I'm not sure I did. And what's the bigger, so what beyond a squabble in one state?

Jeff Selingo:

Well, Michael, as you know, when I saw the headline, I sent you the story, and I'm like, this is like. It was like the headline felt like it was from the Onion.

Michael Horn:

Yeah.

Jeff Selingo:

Because who, like, colleges compete with students. That's what they do. And he was, like, really angry about it and went to the legislature and said, I'm going to take them over because they're competing with my, you know, for me, with students. And it's just crazy. But I think it just goes back to this idea that there are so many fewer students out there that this is going to become a lot more common.

Michael Horn:

All right, well, there's still time to jump on my bandwagon, Jeff, but I digress. One other quick one before we go to break and that is UT Austin president. So University of Texas at Austin president Jay Hartzell is leaving to lead Southern Methodist University. If you had read this headline a decade ago, speaking of the Onion, you probably would have thought it was in there or fake news. So what does this one mean, Jeff?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, well, you know, both teams made the college football playoffs this year in the expanded playoffs, right? So both SMU and UT Austin both in the playoffs. But Michael, that's probably where the similarities between these two institutions end, right? UT, by the way, is four times the size of SMU being president. UT was kind of the ultimate job in the past and it's just not anymore. And what is amazing to me is that many of these jobs at many of these universities are just not what they used to be, right? Think about it, right? At an Ivy plus university, now you're going to have to deal with these bigger tax probably on endowments. You're going to have to be hauled up to Capitol Hill every couple of months. If you're at a regional public or small private, you really have no money, have no students, you have to figure out how to balance your budget. If you're at a flagship public in, like Jay was in, in Texas, you know, a red state, but a kind of a blue campus within a red state. And so your politics don't align. So you're constantly, always fighting with the legislature, right? Like none of these jobs are fine. So what does that leave? Right? It leaves like these medium sized privates that have money and I would put SMU in that category. And maybe publics out of the limelight, but not many jobs left out there that you would actually want to be president of these universities.

Michael Horn:

Wow. That's a change. I'm going to reflect on that one. But with that we will take a short break and when we come back we will talk about if there's really an outflow of academics to industry as well as this concept of the Accelerated MBA. That's all ahead on Future U.

Jeff Selingo:

Looking to advance your career without high costs? American College of Education hasn't raised tuition since 2016, and by opting out of federal student loan programs, ACE keeps operational costs low, passing those savings directly to students. In fact, 86% of ACE students graduate without debt. Plus, ACE evaluates credit for prior learning to help students fast track their degree. ACE offers affordable, high quality education, healthcare, nursing, business and leadership degree programs specifically designed for working adults. Students learn on their time through an engaging online platform that fosters connections with peers and faculty, and career focused programs prepare graduates to make an immediate impact in their fields. Learn more about advancing your career through high quality education at ACE.edu.

Michael Horn:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners and rural community members. For more information, contact visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Jeff Selingo:

This episode is being brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They are workers, parents and caregivers and neighbors. And colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the Foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.

So welcome back to Future U, and an article, Michael that I know caught both of our eyes appeared in the Harvard Magazine of all places a few weeks back. It was titled where the Grass is Greener: Leaving Academia to Advance Biomedical Research. And it basically interviewed three Harvard professors, or in this case, former faculty members now who had jumped to different jobs outside of the academy at a company called MedX, at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, at Arena Bioworks, a new nonprofit biomedical research and development institute. And there's a lot of reasons that they cited, the bureaucracy, by the way, not just at Harvard, but also from the NIH. I also think that what's happening here is that it's unclear where federal research is going. It's clear that Congress and the White House wants to cut spending. I know cutting spending is a lot easier said than done. You go all the way back to the Reagan administration where they had these special, you know, special commissions to try to look into federal spending, much like Elon Musk is doing now. But, you know, we still have more federal spending than ever before. I think it's very hard, especially around things like healthcare, with the NIH, with science and the NSF. You know, these are big dollars that flow to college universities.

Expanding Research Outside of Academia

Jeff Selingo:

I think it's really going to be hard to cut back on those. But still we may not see the growth that we have seen over the last 10 or 20 years. And so if you're in academia and you're getting a lot of money from the NIH or in the NSF, you might start to say, hey, maybe the grass is greener on the other side. And I am, I don't want to deal with working at a university. I could maybe make some more money at these places or there's a potential more upside at these places and I don't have to deal with the bureaucracy not only of the university but also of these federal funding agencies. What are some of your thoughts on that?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, well, look, I like that we're talking about this because research is one of the major functions of, you know, top universities, certainly in this country, knowledge creation, right, if you will. And although we tend in our dialogues around higher ed to focus disproportionately on teaching. Research, right, for a certain set of institutions is ideally a big part of what they do. And if the business model, you know, to your point, or the funding around higher ed research crumbles in any way or it shifts in terms of priorities or how it's doled out. I do think it's a big question of what does this mean for universities and can they innovate to create new ways of doing research and perhaps new business models around research. And I think it's important for our society. Like, when I continue to give to my alma maters, a big reason I do is because of the knowledge creation and research that they do. And so I think it raises a big question of like, where will basic research occur and how will it be done? Three thoughts, I will say. One, three is a trend as you know, in journalism. So they have found three faculty members, they wrote, you know, a story around it. Is it really a trend? I don't know. There wasn't data in that article and I haven't seen anything. So I'm not sure. I will say, I guess second, is that there, you know, look, there are some real problems with research in higher ed and the article did a pretty decent job of nailing a few of them. But you know, there's others. Like most academic papers get read by fewer than like three people or something like that. Right.

Jeff Selingo:

And I think we're two of them, by the way.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, we're two. So there, there you go. And they're, they tend to be incredibly narrow, little relevance. You know, we know all the claims. Right. And then as Ira Stoll at the Editors on Substack has noted, there's something interesting going on when both the winners of the Nobel Prizes in 2024 for physics and chemistry both had been employed by Alphabet or what people still call Google in many cases. So two people from Google, DeepMind were the two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And then Geoffrey Hinton had worked at Google for more than a decade until 2023 and he won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. So that feels different. And I guess it ties into the third thing, which, you know, the point you made earlier. Research wasn't always the exclusive domain of universities. And I say it's a point you made earlier in the first half of the show around the evolution of higher ed. You know, this is something really that US universities copied from the German model and grew into over time, right, it's one of these evolutions. But prior to Sputnik, you know, there were places like Bell Labs, IBM that made big research contributions to humanity. And so this notion that universities I think are the only places for, you know, for basic research that might not have immediate commercial application. I don't know if that's true. I will say I think it's valuable to have non-commercial sources of basic research just to blunt ourselves against the narrow interests of companies that maybe just want to keep minting money the way that they always have. But according to Nature, many companies do important basic research today, whether it's LaRoche, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, IBM still, Alphabet. I mean, that's a lot. And given that we've established on past episodes of Future U that there is a limited market for PhDs at universities, there's a limited number of jobs for them. Maybe industry, with its resources and perhaps less bureaucracy and less ideological priors as well, you know, maybe they're a part of the answer, although we'll have to think about how that balances against their desire for profit as well Jeff.

Shortening Degree Programs

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, and I think part of the answer is key there, Michael. It may be that we're returning to this hybrid research model right where it is companies plus higher ed, where it had been kind of mostly outsourced to higher ed over the last 30 or 40 years. And the thing that I worry about is that that puts a lot of pressure on higher ed in certain disciplines to produce research. It also changes the incentives for faculty members and for institutions as a whole. So maybe bringing some balance back to kind of this research enterprise between private corporations and higher education is a good thing. I want to get your take on one other thing. There was this article in Inside Higher Ed about the rise of the accelerated MBA and how prospective students appear increasingly skeptical that dropping out of the workforce for two years to earn the degree is worth it. It's, you know, it's a space, as you know, you and Clay Christensen wrote about a few times. I know he worried even about the Harvard Business School's business model, you know, what are your thoughts? Is this accelerated MBA going to affect everybody, including the Harvards of the world?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it was one of the ways he was not so popular on the Harvard Business School campus, I think, where there was a headline where it said something like Harvard Business School professor says, you know, drop dead. Yeah, exactly. So, but look, three, three quick thoughts. One, I mean, look, law of supply and demand, right? When you get more and more expensive, you open the window for disruptive programs to come in that cost less, less opportunity cost, we saw the IMBA at Illinois with, with Coursera a few years ago when they dropped the full time MBA entirely at the Gies School, the Quantic School of Business and Technology that I've been on the advisory board. I think they really nailed the job to be done for people that don't want to quit. And what's so interesting about Quantic as a new college focused on the MBA and associated programs around it is I think they recruit like the equivalent of an MIT Sloan class six times over in the course of a year. So, like, these are high caliber, you know, students coming in that are like, we don't want the two year vacation, we want the actual skills and sort of, you know, the up value. I think that ties into second, which is that there is a change in the labor market value of the MBA that does seem to fluctuate, of course, over time. Although consistent, I think, with what you've researched, Jeff, in the undergrad space, it does seem that employers don't want just the generalized degree, they also want the evidence of specific skills alongside it and, I think you've seen that, right? MBA with a specialization in cybersecurity or data science or whatever else. And so I think that's why you've seen that. And then third, I'll just say this, I'll defend the two year degree. I think there's some benefit to it and I'll do it through a different thing, which is one of the bizarre experiences I've had at teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is that a lot of the students who sign up for the LDIT program, Learning, Design, Innovation, Technology, they're essentially looking for the one year MBA, by doing so, they get a lot of latitude to take classes at other places. They feel like the Harvard stamp, particularly for international students, will be just fine. And they sort of say, well, you know, it's only one year, the ROI has got to be higher. And what they find though is that it takes them like a couple months to get their feet underneath them at a new campus, figure out their tribe and then, you know, then it's like the mad rush of finishing up the semester. They get into second semester and all of a sudden they've got to figure out what the heck they're going to do next year. And they've never had a summer internship experience where they could network, meet people, sort of prototype something different from what they'd done before. And I guess what I would say is my takeaway from that is not all important things can be rushed, Jeff. Like there's no question when costs go out of whack, trading off on time and cost of attendance becomes a, you know, a pill too big to swallow at some point. So something has to give. But I, I guess I think this is what's giving is that valuable experience with employers in that summer for networking experience, trying on a new role or identity is maybe getting sacrificed and students, at least that I talk to, have some regret about that, Jeff. And so I don't think it has the same, this conversation doesn't seem to give the same emotional baggage as the three year degree one in undergrad, interestingly enough, although at least that one you still get summers and same with reducing the length of law school. But there is something lost, I think, when you entirely kill those breaks Jeff.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, And I think that's interesting, Michael, because I think it offers lessons for those other things you just mentioned, right. Law school, you know, there's been talk about medical shortening, medical school, the same reason. Right. The undergraduate degree, the three year degree, which we've talked about before, I’m not sure there's ever a perfect time for any of these things, right, a perfect length I should say, should it be two years, should it be three years, should it be four years? And as we know, people kind of this goes back to, you know, something else besides, you know, closing colleges that's on your mind. I know a lot, which is this idea of mastery based or competency based education. So, you know, these are artificial constructs at the end of the day, as we know. And so why can't it just be when someone's ready to move on, they move on. And if that's six months, if that's a year, if that's two years, if they want that other experience, a much more flexible experience. So you have kind of a, you know, a two to four year or two to six year flex and people use it as they want or need it because as you were talking about some of your international students, they may want that summer experience. And so having a second year is helpful for them where other people don't want that or don't need it. And so I think this idea of flexibility is key. And all of that, of course, as we know, is driven by something that you're passionate about, which is this idea of mastery based learning. So Michael, a lot to talk about, a lot to think about for the year ahead here in 2025. Would love to hear some of your predictions out there. So for listeners, please, you know, go to the website go to futureupodcast.com and please send us a note, drop us a note about some of the things that you're thinking about and maybe we'll get to some of those on a future episode as well. But for now, thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time on Future U.