Is Grade Inflation Deflating Trust in Schools?

Relevant Links:

“Education Secretary Says She Wants to Shift Away From Higher Ed,” by Ryan Quinn in Inside Higher Ed.

“UC San Diego Sees Students’ Math Skills Plummet,” by Emma Whitford in Inside Higher Ed.

“High Grades are Presumably the Goal. So Why is Everyone Freaking Out?” by Michael Horn on Substack.

“Colleges Have Struggled To Curb Grade Inflation. Can Harvard Beat the Odds?” in the Harvard Crimson.

Sen. Al Franken’s 2002 Class Day speech at Harvard, from CSPAN.

“Accommodation Nation,” by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic.

"Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List for Company Recruiters.” by Lindsay Ellis in The Wall Street Journal. 

“AI Changes Nothing About What Students Need to Learn,” by Rick Hess in Education Next.

“Fall 2024 IPEDS Data: Profile of US Higher Ed Online Education,” by Phil Hill In OnEdtech.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction

1:34 - Are Those 2026 Coming True?

2:26 - Why Grade Inflation Is a Big Story Now

4:55 - How the Grade Inflation Issue Has Changed Since Al Franken Joked About It in 2002

6:43 - Why Professors Shouldn’t Grade the Students They Teach

8:38 - What If Mastery-Based Learning Upends Grading?

10:43 - Encouraging Students to Focus More on Feedback Than on Grades

12:16 - Has We Become an ‘Accomodations Nation’?

13:09 - Colleges Are Returning to Admissions Tests

15:01 - AI Could Help Admissions Officers Analyze Transcripts

19:17 - Are Elite Colleges Back at the Top of the List for Company Recruiters?

26:28 - Entry Into the Job Market Is Not Linear

27:55 - Sponsor Break

28:36 - What If AI Changes Nothing About What Students Need to Learn?

35:23 - New Data On Who Offers Online-Only Education

Transcript

Michael Horn

This week on Future U, Jeff and I have a quartet of topics to tackle, namely, grade inflation, the implication for colleges of employers changing, which colleges they're recruiting from, whether AI ought to change what schools teach, and some recent data around online learning and what it may show around the distribution of where that is occurring.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Michael, some juicy topics there, so let's dive in on this episode of Future U.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org. Subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends 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.

Michael Horn

So Jeff, when we record these, we're generally not supposed to, you know, do time stamps and references to where we've been. But we just got back from a couple days together in Boise, Idaho at the College of Western Idaho. And it occurred to me as we were spending some time there and we were talking about the future of where higher ed is going. You made some juicy predictions on our year-end show ourselves. 

The last time we did this one-on-one. You were saying Jim Ryan is gonna come back as the UVa president. It seems like you've already struck out on that one. 

But then on the plus side, if I've got it right, Jeff, you said Trump administration, they're gonna worry less about higher ed in the New Year. And then lo and behold, Linda McMahon, the education secretary came out and said, we hope to worry less about higher ed in the New Year. 

So I think you're maybe one for two at the moment if I'm counting correctly.

Jeff Selingo

Well, first of all, Michael, jeez, you haven't even given me a month, and you're already bringing up my predictions for 2026. But whatever. I'll give you a pass on that. I probably am doing better on this than I'm doing on my college football pool. So fair enough. 

But that still sounds like an a to me even getting a 50%, which is a perfect launching pad for our first topic, which is grade inflation. 

So why grade inflation now? Why should we talk about it at this point? 

And I think it's largely because there have been so many big reports, so many headlines in the news, Michael, the last couple of months. 

There was one that I've mentioned in in my newsletter that got, an op ed also in The Wall Street Journal, and that was this report from the University of California at San Diego, which found that in the last couple of years, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicated they couldn't even meet middle-school standards, grew nearly three thirtyfold despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the required math courses for UCSD.

Michael Horn

Yeah, those A-G requirements.

Jeff Selingo

Yep. And in fact, many of them had gotten A's in high school math, and they couldn't even do middle-school math. 

And one of the takeaways from that report, which we'll talk about, is to potentially bring back [admissions] testing in California. As you might recall, the University of California is test blind, meaning they don't even look at either the ACT or the SAT. 

And then, of course, there was that big report from Harvard in October about grading and workload, which found in 2005, A's accounted for about a quarter of all grades awarded in Harvard College. In 2015, it was about 40%, and now in 2025, it's about 60%. I guess those kids at Harvard just keep getting smarter and smarter. But, of course, what it found was that students went to Harvard for other things besides grades and that the focus, at the institution was moving away from grades and more toward, essentially the professionalism as we know of the undergraduate college where now more than I think it's a third of students go into essentially three career fields, and that's really what students are going to Harvard for. They're not going there to study, but they're going to actually get the job afterwards. 

So, Michael, there's so much, and there's many, many more reports we could talk about over just the last couple of months. But what's your take on this? I know that you recently wrote about grade inflation, and it seems like these debates about grade inflation tend to spark up every couple of years. Is this one different?

Michael Horn

Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, so we can link to what I wrote, but I confess when I started reading this round of it, I was like, I feel like we had this conversation and it was like a correction done to it back in 2002. I don't know if listeners remember Al Franken, delivered the commencement speech at Harvard that year, and he made a joke about this sort of thing occurring at Harvard.

Al Franken

And to those of you who are graduating with honors, congratulations on doing some of the reading and on going to many of your classes and getting notes from friends on the classes you didn't go to and on handing in most of your papers on time. Way to go. Good work. To those of you who did not graduate with honors, wow. Woah. But then again, congratulations on your hockey season.

Michael Horn

So now that was about honors, I guess, is the difference. Right? 

Ninety one percent of students who are graduating from Harvard then got honors. And then they did this reform where they capped it at 60%. And so this is now grades. Right? 

And it was interesting, I think some of the articles that have shown up said, you know, Princeton tried to pull this back. And then to your point, it hurts the people who are trying to go in those consulting and banking and law school, etc jobs. Right? And so they felt like they were at a disadvantage for having moved on this. But I think as you said, Jeff, this is why standardized tests exist. They're sort of a check, if you will, an independent objective check on grades to sort of hold that in place. 

I will say my bigger take on this, as you know, is maybe not likely to happen anytime soon, but I don't think teachers should be grading their own students. I think it's a complete conflict of interest that sort of muddies the role, if you will, of the teacher who's supposed to be teaching, coaching, trying to get students to achieve. 

It's a little bit different from the traditional view in higher ed of, you know, the classes that weed out the pretender physics majors from the ones who really go on to do it. But I'm not the only one who said this. Right? Jess Lahey, Carol Dweck of Growth Mindset, Diane Tavenner, others have made this argument as well. And Carol Dweck's argument, Jeff, has long been that it actually sabotages the effort that students put in when they know that the instructor is both theoretically coaching them and then also judging them against a standard relative to other students in many cases. 

And to be clear, this doesn't mean I don't think teachers should be giving feedback and sort of assessment in a formative way and helping them improve. But feedback is very different in my mind from giving the grade.

And I think that's why Western Governors University, you know, in their competency based model, they have faculty who design the classes. They have faculty who teach you and work with you and make sure you're understanding the material. And then they have a completely different set of faculty who are there to say, 'Hey, on this performance task, did Jeff master it or not?' And you can't complain, 'Gee, they said I didn't master it because they don't like me.' They don't even know you. Right? And it sort of gives us objectivity. And then they have some objective measures that I think AI probably at this point introduces and so forth on more knowledge-based questions and things of that nature that are objective checks on mastery. 

And, look, I guess that's my last point is that I think in the ideal world, if I really had mastery-based learning or competency-based learning, I think every student would get an A or an incomplete. You know, maybe you didn't finish it yet and you still have work to do on it. Or yeah, here, you've mastered this set of competencies, if you will, to a certain standard. Now how would this get actionalized in districts? I think it's hard to imagine if we're being honest. Right? Like, they don't have the scope and capacity of, say, Western Governors University. But I think you could imagine through some combination of artificial intelligence, new assessments coming online... 

You and I do some advisory work for Bellevue University. They're doing some really interesting stuff around this. You could imagine ETS is partnering with the Carnegie Foundation around reimagining the credit hour. Ironic since they created the credit hour. But they're trying to assess sort of these durable skills, habits of success, social emotional learning sort of competencies. 

And then Khan Academy, they have this schoolhouse.world tutoring site, but peers effectively look at, you know, they would give you an oral exam for a couple minutes on a concept, and then other people who've been certified as masters of that domain say, 'Yeah, like Jeff actually really understands college admissions. He's therefore eligible to tutor on it.' You could scale that infrastructure also as a way to introduce more objective measures at more frequent points in time to allow teachers then to take that and get real feedback into the classroom to better support students. 

So my bigger take is, it's a problem. This is why tests I think will come back. I think it'll be more equitable as they do so. They introduce other sets of problems, though. And I think there's ideally a better way to do it going forward. Right? 

You think about this all the time though, right, from a variety of standpoints. So what are your thoughts?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, Michael. So just a couple of thoughts. 

First of all, I have a feeling we may get some letters and emails and calls on this. Because for some reason, grade inflation is like the third rail of education, I'm never quite sure how it got that way. But I remember even when I was at The Chronicle of Higher Education and would suggest stories on grade inflation there was even debate within the newsroom about whether it existed. 

So I just have a couple, maybe three or four points here I wanna make. 

One is your point about grades versus feedback I think is important. You know, I see this in my own kids, both of whom are teenagers now, middle school and high school, where they focus so much on the grade and less on the feedback that they're getting from teachers. And I keep reminding them that eventually they're going to get into the workforce where you're going to do performance management reviews. And are you gonna be more focused on, 'Oh, did I get a three or a four or five on that?' Or am I gonna focus more on the feedback that I'm getting to improve? 

And I think we want to get people ready for a workplace where, by the way, because of AI and because of the changes and the skills needed in the workforce, that there is going to be this continual improvement needed. Right? 

People are going to need to have a growth mindset that I often think is diminished by focusing so much on the grade, and people who focus so much on the grade in high school and in college then get so focused on, 'Well, did I score a three or four or whatever,' on whatever the point scale is when I get performance management in jobs. 

And so I think we need to better prepare students by focusing more on the feedback, less on the grades. That's one. 

Number two, you might remember this piece that just came out, from Rose Horowich at The Atlantic, "Accommodation Nation." It came out at the end of 2025. It got everywhere. Right? And the number of students getting accommodations, particularly at elite and more-selective colleges.

Michael Horn

Particularly at Harvard.

Jeff Selingo

Particularly at Harvard. Right. 

Again, we're not denying that some people do need accommodations, but a lot of those accommodations were, as we saw in her reporting, were to try to get better grades. Well, if we take the focus on the grades out of this a little bit, will we finally get back to kind of truth and accommodations as well? Right? I'm not saying diminish the importance of the grade, but really focus on the feedback over the grade for both the institution and the class, will we maybe get more back to the reality of what those accommodations really should be? 

Third, you mentioned testing. I mentioned, you know, one of the big storylines that I mentioned for 2026 in my most recent newsletter is a return to testing where I think we're going to see it. We have seen it over the last year. I think we're gonna see a lot more of it. With that UCSD report it seems like the faculty quietly are saying in the University of California system that they wanna bring some form of testing back. I'm hearing this on other campuses where they're not test blind like the University of California, but where they are test optional. 

And, again, I'm gonna hear from a lot of my friends who are  critics of assessments such as the SAT or ACT and think grades are better predictors of success in college. And by the way, they are good predictors of success in college when combined with a test score. We know from research over the years that both a test score and grades are the best predictor of college success over time and not just grades alone and not just the test score.

Michael Horn

Well, and hold you there for one sec, Jeff. 

I think one of the challenges that people raise over time around, say, the SAT or any standardized instrument is that it can be separated from the curriculum that a student has in fact been learning. Right? And that the knowledge, you know, if I test you on baseball, you're gonna do great on a reading comprehension around that because you know a lot about the topic. If I test you on basketball, maybe you'll look a little worse, for example. Right? 

And the reason I bring that up is I do think if you can have assessments that are objective but tailored to the curriculum that students are in fact working on, yeah, that would be an even better signal, right, than would be the sort of the abstract generic, if you will, standardized assessment. Sorry.

Jeff Selingo

Oh, no. That's fine. 

And there's just one final point, which is kind of, you know, totally different direction. And this is where I think AI might have an impact on at least grading when it comes to college admissions. Right? 

One of the things that I've talked about consistently over the years since I spent my year inside college admissions for 'Who Gets In And Why,' is the high school transcript. The high school transcript is the most important piece of the college application. It's also the most misunderstood and the most difficult to kinda grapple with if you're an admissions officer. 25,000 plus different high schools. 

In the U.S. alone, everyone uses a different grading scale. Everyone uses different terms for courses. Everyone uses different weighting, honors, non-honors, AP, etc. It's really hard to determine. 

And what big public universities have been able to do ... So I talk about this in the book. The University of Washington, because they get so many in-state applicants and they enroll so many students in state, they know over time an A at, you know, Lakeside, in Seattle, a private school in Seattle, equals this at the University of Washington compared to, you know, an A at a public school down the street. And I'm not saying, by the way, privates or publics are any better. Right. But just two  random places. You know, they know how those students perform because they have so many applications from those places. They have so many enrollments from those places. They know where they end up in college. And so they're able to tell, at least for in-state applicants — and this is true, by the way, of a lot of big publics — they're able to tell, 'Okay. Here's what this A really means at this high school because we have enough performance data on these students once they get here.' 

I actually think that AI overall can really help mitigate this on the transcript. It might be able to help us at least understand, across schools, across the data that we have on students, not only at big publics but at small privates, smaller privates, as well. It might at least be able to give us a transcript that is easier for admissions officers to understand. That might not help out on the grading side, but it will at least help out on the admissions side. 

So I have a little hope for this. I still think we're a couple of years away from that, but I know there are experiments going on with the transcript. And again, this is where I think it could help on grade inflation.

Michael Horn

Well, just stay on that one second, that last piece, which is interesting. Because as you know, there's an  explosion of microschools going on in the K-12 environment right now. It's gonna be even more opaque to admissions officers what these things mean. 

And I think the other thing AI could potentially do against that is like, 'Hey, I'm a student at whatever school that has popped up, and I wanna show that I've mastered such and such competency that, you know, University of Washington really cares about,' or ‘I wanna show my design prowess for RISD,' or whatever it is. Is there an AI-generated or Schoolhouse.world assessment that I can just say like, 'Hey, I want to go sit for that, you know, to assess or validate what I think I've learned and that I've become expert in applying myself here.' And you could imagine through Mastery Transcript Consortium or things like that to your AI point that there's a variety of ways of reflecting the jagged profiles of what you've in fact learned over your high school time. 

And maybe that actually allows for more exploration, more experiential learning, less standardization of the topics, if you will, in high school and frankly less pressure for every kid to ... 'Ya gotta do your four years of math and your four years of this,' right? Which is a little cookie-cutter and limiting, I think, particularly in this age of AI where jobs want you to have experience as we've discussed.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. No doubt about it. And I think, again, this is where I think this could help. And maybe by the way, as you talk about assessments, I should say where AI could help. And as you talk about assessments, we might get into these more mini-assessments rather than, you know, a couple of hours on the SAT or the ACT. You know, maybe lower-stakes assessments that could really judge students and judge the quality of their work.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Big fan of smaller, more frequent, less high stakes. You can do more. You can, you know, take it multiple times to show your mastery. 

Alright. Let's move to our second topic, Jeff, on the list. 

The Wall Street Journal's Lindsay Ellis had an interesting piece headlined, "Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List for Company Recruiters.' The basic argument in the article, if articles are allowed to make an argument, was that large companies with recruiting functions are essentially narrowing right now. the number of campuses they're recruiting from as the labor market has tightened again, if you will. And rather than say, you know, go to the HBCU, they're sticking to some set of highly selective schools plus a set of regional players. Now I wanna go back to we had the podcast at Adobe few times ago, and we had Simon Kho on it. And he made an interesting point that a lot of employers were actually already pulling back from going to campuses for recruiting. 

Here’s what he said.

Simon Kho

That's kind of left. You know, that's not on the table anymore. And you look at kind of what's happened, especially after COVID, like, we've stopped going to campuses. Right? We can do everything through Handshake, 12Twenty, RippleMatch. There are actually tools that will match students with our job profile. So why do we even need to go to schools anymore? So the brand of the school there I mean, it still matters to many people, but probably not as significant anymore, even majors.

Michael Horn

So, Jeff, in some ways, maybe this actually isn't all that new. Although I think there are some twists here where Lindsay's piece argues in essence that the big-brand schools, if you will, they're in the driver's seat. And I wanted to ask you about this because you made the argument in "Dream School" a couple things here that I'd love your take on. 

Number one, you were, I think, making the argument that brands are mattering somewhat less than we think that they do because companies are recruiting from a wider range of schools than we realize perhaps, and it's a little less stacked. So I guess this article might refute that. And then so, you know, do you stand by the current argument? 

But then here, I think this is in favor of what you said, is number two, you did make the argument that where you go to school outside of some set of institutions probably will determine the companies or industries where you're going to have job opportunities, and you may well even stay there. 

You made the point like, yes, people are going to Southern schools. Hey, think about what that means because that probably means you're gonna get access to more jobs down there, and you might, you know your best opportunities will be to stay in those regions over time. 

And in some ways I actually think this article sort of doubles down on that argument. So one may be refuting, one may be actually doubling down. What's your take?

Jeff Selingo

Well, Michael, I think it's complicated. I'm not trying to avoid the question on refuting "Dream School" because you were not the only one who sent me Lindsay's article. And Lindsay's a great reporter, and I really appreciate that she did this piece. 

A bunch of people sent it to me and said, 'Oh, this must really just kill the argument of chapter two of your book where I say the elites, you know, don't matter. And by the way, I didn't say elites don't matter.

Michael Horn

And by way that's not quite what you said. Right?

Jeff Selingo

I think people are truncating that argument. And the argument was the elites still matter, but so do other schools. And where the elites really matter, as we know, are the big banks, the big tech firms. The elite jobs... If you're at the top of the elite institutions, you're gonna do really well in the elite job market. You're gonna do much better than students at any other institutions. 

As I made the point in chapter two is if you're at the mid or low point at these elite schools — you know, those students that Al Franken said just probably went to the hockey game all the time and didn't go to class. Right? Somebody has to come in last at Harvard. You might have a little bit more trouble. You know, Harvard's just not gonna put you catapult you to the top of the recruitment pools of these institutions. And that's really the point I was trying to make. I'm not trying to say the elites are terrible, that no one's recruiting there, but that many, institutions or many companies and firms are recruiting at a broader range of institutions, especially top students that they could get into their pools much earlier on, by the way, than the job market, and this is even in the intern market. 

So I think it's a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more complicated than just to say they're not recruiting at the elites, anymore. 

On the second point, I think the regionality of the job market was really the point of chapter two of 'Dream School." And this is really critical. I was just in Alabama. You had mentioned we were in Boise before, and right before we were in Boise together, I was in Alabama. Said nobody ever has gone from Alabama to Boise except for me probably. But there I did... Because there's no direct flight between those two cities, by the way. 

But I was in Birmingham and spent a lot of time with the community members there as well as with parents and students. And it really is ... You really see when you're in the Southeast, just like when you're in the Northeast, in the Mid Atlantic, in the Midwest, in the West Coast that except for a number of big companies and firms — and, you know, we know this from the Lightcast data that I had in the book — that, you know, the job market is a regional game. And except for Vanderbilt, which largely is able to get its graduates outside of the Southeast among, you know, the SEC schools, for example, is what Lightcast studied, you know, you're probably gonna work in, you know, Birmingham. You're gonna work in Atlanta. You might work in Tallahassee or Orlando or Miami. But you're more likely to be ... There's more of a regionality to the game, and I think that's what we're seeing here largely because companies don't wanna spend a lot of money on recruiting. You know, the people who are recruiting for them tend to be alumni of these schools. Also, job expectations or salary expectations more so are more regionally based. So that I don't think has changed, you know, in the last couple of years, and that really was the point of chapter two of the book as well.

Michael Horn

Well look, it resonates to me. And I will also say it seems to me much of Lindsay's article focused on those large companies that have big recruiting functions, have some predictability of how many people they're gonna hire and interns and like there's a whole pipeline. A lot of jobs as we know are in the small and medium-sized companies. Right? And those are far less predictable. They are definitely regional. And my take is if they're not showing up on campuses, it's actually a detriment on both sides of the equation and that I think colleges just need to get much more proactive with connecting them. 

And final thing just on regionality, I think it's gonna matter more in the years ahead, not less. I think there's a view that, you know, we showed virtual work works and so forth. Given how everyone's applying to jobs with AI and so forth, I just think the network becomes that much more important. The networks get forged in person largely, and therefore your college and the where you went outside of some of these national brands, I think becomes more important, not less.

Jeff Selingo

And Michael, just one quick point before you take us to break. And that is, as you well know from your own work, the entry into the job market is not linear in any way. And when we start to think, well, college a or university a leads to job b, it just as we all know, it doesn't work that way. 

And so if we think, well, ‘We're gonna go to Harvard and get that job.’ Well, you probably have a better shot of it as David Deming showed in his research that I released in the book. But if you go to college 'not a,' you could still end up at a job b because of what you did while you were at that college, or where that college is located or the person you happen to meet in the elevator or the internship you got to, have. Right? 

We know this is not a linear pathway, and when we start to argue that you have to go to certain colleges to get certain jobs, we tend to see it as a linear pathway.

Michael Horn

Yeah. As our friend Michelle Weise says, it's "spaghetti pathways" in your career. And as Ryan Craig says, after you have your first couple jobs, the job becomes the credential, not where you went to school necessarily. 

So let's take a quick break here. When we come back, we're going to tackle an AI question. Whether maybe we've seen the sort of hype before of ‘AI changes everything’ and perhaps we shouldn't change anything that we teach in schools. 

We'll be right back on Future U.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. Ascendium envisions a world where low-income learners succeed in post secondary education and workforce training as paths to upward mobility. Ascendium's grantees are removing systemic barriers and helping to build evidence about what works so learners can achieve their career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Michael Horn

Welcome back to Future U. 

Jeff, our friend Rick Hess had an interesting piece recently. It was titled "AI Changes Nothing About What Students Need to Learn." Quote, "the disruptive technology of our age will change many things. What schools teach kids should not be one of them." 

And basically, he sort of recounts how a whole set of people are claiming that, "academic content is out, skills and learning and how to think are in." And I know we both loved his list of things that various people have said over the years around how such and such technology changes everything under the banner that everything old is new again. 

He listed, of course, 21st century skills, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity. I think it's the four c's, and showed that the obsession around these things hasn't actually isn't actually all that new. He talked about how back in 1936, Dale Carnegie, you know, wrote "How to Win Friends and Influence People." I had one of my daughters read this, by the way, recently. And, you know, this is all about these skills. 

Rick, he cited Mark Prensky in the 2000s saying kids were digital natives. That was when I was writing "Disrupting Class" actually, and we resisted that temptation to go the digital native route, which I'm glad about. 

And then there was the declaration in the 1980s, this is maybe my favorite, about the fax machine, and that we ought to learn that instead of dissecting frogs to not just learn how to use a fax or photocopier, but to master, "the higher skills that it will enable students to operate tomorrow's office equipment." In other words, they are learning to learn. And Rick wrote, "Look I have no longitudinal data here, but I strongly suspect that graduates who were literate, numerate, and modestly knowledgeable about science fared better over the past thirty five years than those even with a dazzling mastery of photocopiers and faxes." 

So you get the idea.

Jeff Selingo

I mean, what I fear is — you know, I don't know how old Rick is, but I think he's a little older than we are — I just fear that he's going to take one of our predictions, like, 20 years from now.

Michael Horn

I know. And I was glad I didn't show up.

Jeff Selingo

Right? Like, put it on the grill like he just did all these other predictions. 

Look. I mean, he's absolutely right, that we tend to, like a lot of things in politics and a lot of things in education, we tend to take the pendulum and swing it greatly the other way without ever stopping in the middle. And I think that's very true right now around, you know, AI and the skills we think AI is going to be able to do. 

Now I will argue that AI is a little bit different than the fax or photocopy machine. It is a much bigger disruptive technology, you might argue.

Michael Horn

No. I agree with you.

Jeff Selingo

So I just think that he's equating it to some previous technologies that were not quite as advanced as AI. I think that, you know, maybe this you know, we've made comparisons to the Internet before. I would even argue that AI is even different than the Internet, especially when you combine AI with robotics and what might happen there as well. 

So I agree you know, overall, I agree with the, you know, premise that Rick has that we should not, like, kinda throw everything out that we think about education. But definitely, you know, this is a world-changing technology and that we should not kind of say, 'Well, none of these other predictions in the past came true, so this prediction won't come true either. And so let's hold on to what we have.'

Michael Horn

Yeah. I guess we're on Team Nuance together, which isn't a popular place to be, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Well, it's an easy way for us to get out of making any predictions.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Fair fair. 

And I think my take And interestingly enough, Rick interviewed me about this. But my take is the conversation is different from elementary to secondary to postsecondary to some degree. 

And so, like, I would argue elementary theoretically should change very little. I mean, we should do it a lot better than we do right now, but I actually think, you know, learning how to read, learning how to do math, automating fluency, right, of multiplication tables, learning some facts, those are important things in my mind. 

I do think as you go into secondary and postsecondary, more experiential learning is gonna be important, and more projects and so forth. Doesn't mean the knowledge fades in importance in my mind because the way you learn skills is in the context of knowledge. It's one of the reasons sort of like I've had challenges with a lot of the skills-based movements that will say like, 'Hey, every job description in every industry lists critical thinking or communication. Let's just learn that.' And it's like, well, to learn to think critically in a given domain, you have to know the knowledge and the contents of the domain, right, to be able to demonstrate those things. 

I do think, you know, the other piece of this, I guess, Jeff, that does occur to me is we may want to make some trade-offs though on just like how deep and broad the knowledge that we impart is. And I know I'm gonna get a bunch of angry letters saying like memorization's out. I'm not arguing everyone should memorize all 50 state capitals, but I think you ought to know that there are state capitals and here's the function and perhaps do a couple maps to learn some of them.

Jeff Selingo

Although it would be good for trivia night, I guess.

Michael Horn

It's great for trivia night. Right? If you're not allowed to use the phone. 

But I guess my point would be we actually have in fact cut certain knowledge bases out of the curriculum over the years. Like, if you went to a university in the 1800s before, you know, Johns Hopkins, you were learning Latin and Greek. Right? Like, that was a core knowledge base you were building up. We don't do that anymore, and I'm not sure that we miss it. 

And I think sometimes these conversations, to your point of the pendulum, they get all one thing or the other  when it's a both/and. You learn skills through knowledge, that doesn't mean you have to learn the world's knowledge. It's a lot bigger than it used to be.

Jeff Selingo

And as we know, Michael, before we move on to the last topic. You know, you were talking about the differences between elementary and high school and even college. I would argue that as you move through that educational journey, that experiential learning becomes more important.

Michael Horn

Agreed.

Jeff Selingo

Again, I think we think very linearly about... In a linear way about education as well. And I think that, you know, the four years of college should be a mixture, not only of learning, but of experimenting, of experiential learning. 

And by the way, why do we think of what comes in a master's degree as separate from the undergraduate degree? Why can't we blend that? And people say, well, we already do that with, you know, three plus two programs or, you know, three plus one programs or whatever. 

But, like, I do think that there needs to be much more blending, and blending between college and high school as well.

Michael Horn

Totally agree. 

Alright. Let's go to our last topic for today. Our friend Phil Hill took a deep dive into the online enrollment numbers in the latest release of the IPEDs enrollment data from the US Department of Education. And he noted a lot of things, but let's focus on three of them. 

One, fully online education, so not some distance or some online education, but fully online remains highly concentrated among a relatively small set of institutions. 

Second, online ed is being driven by public institutions, especially at the undergraduate level with the pandemic frankly acting as a sharp accelerator rather than a permanent break. So it sort of created the new floor around which online is incrementally growing. 

And third, this was interesting. Online education participation remains highly uneven geographically based on sort of the institutions and the history that you have in those different regions. 

What were your thoughts about this, Jeff?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, it was interesting. And I actually ... Let me start with number three because I actually emailed Phil when his newsletter came out to ask him about this. Because he noted, for example, in New York and California, you know, huge systems, you know, largely place-based campuses, in person, there’s low participation there. But in, like, Arizona, where Arizona State's based, there’s high participation in online. 

Now one of the things Phil did notice about the IPEDS data, as we know, it's where the institution is located, not where the necessarily the students where the students are learning. So I asked him, you know, there's this NC-SARA data out there that we know where, you know, students live and where they're learning from. So they could be living, for example, in New York and learning from Southern New Hampshire University or Western Governors, University. 

And so I asked him. and he's promised to get back to me at some point. But, you know, he assumes, as I assume, that there would be a lot more nuance to the data. Again, using that word nuance. But that he thinks largely the regional trends would still exist, because you have a high relative number of institutions, a high density of institutions, in some of these states. And so some of those students wouldn't feel a need to go to campus or they couldn't go to campus, and that's why they would be online. 

Now I kinda disagree with that. I think that even if you have a campus down the street, if online education for the modern learner works for you better, you're going to do it. And that's because you're time-pressed, that it might be a cheaper degree in some cases. So I think that the regional differences are not as big as we tend to think they are. 

Now on the regionality of this, I do think that students are, you know — and this goes back to number one point — fully online education remains highly concentrated among a relatively small set of institutions. He named those as, you know, WGU, SNHU, ASU, and so forth. But many institutions are in the game because many regional institutions, both public and private, are getting local students who do not necessarily wanna be with these big national brands, and they're able to get students they wouldn't have otherwise been able to get. 

So I think that that trend of fully online education will continue to be concentrated among a relatively small set of institutions. Because I think it's almost too late now, Michael, I think, to become the next SNHU, the next ASU. But I do think it's much easier to become, you know, these institutions that maybe have 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 students online, a regional institution that might have four or five degrees online, and they have a couple of thousand students as a result. So that takes care of number one and three. 

And number two, a point that you made around public institutions or that Phil made around public institutions is really fascinating to me. And I think that this is largely yet another way of public institutions trying to diversify their revenue sources. And it's surprising to me that privates haven't done this as much, and maybe privates think, 'Well, you know, we're going to differentiate ourselves by being the on-the-ground, in person, institution, and maybe they're trying to differentiate themselves from the publics. But, you know, again, we know the modern learner really wants to be more online. And so I'm really kinda surprised about that, that publics are way ahead, because there's, you know, many more unions you have to deal with in the public sector. There's faculty governance more in you know, not necessarily more in the public sector, but they tend to be louder and bigger. 

So I was kinda surprised that he found that.

Michael Horn

Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that piece of it. I will say — recency bias — I was on the phone this morning with a CFO at a small liberal arts institution, and it is interesting. Their lesson from the pandemic was, 'people don't pay for online education.' Which I think, true if you're just taking your class on Zoom and it's still a lecture.

Jeff Selingo

It's not very good.

Michael Horn

But it lacks a little nuance around what online can be and how it looks and regionality regionality regionality matters. And if I was an institution to your point, have some online offerings, but it's really about experience, I think, and getting people together to mix and meet and create connections and experiences and so forth. And, you know, experience, experience, experience. Why do you still go to a brick and mortar store? It's something else besides just, Can I get access to the goods itself? 

So that'd be my take there, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And finally I think that this is just another product offering for colleges and universities. And I think, again, as long as they say, 'Hey, we're gonna get a couple thousand students out of it that we wouldn't otherwise get.' To me, that is the reason to have an online strategy. It's not necessarily to replace what you have. 

And as Phil noted, by the way, there's a lot of students going the hybrid route as well where they're taking in-person classes as well as online classes. 

So, Michael, we will wrap it up with that. It's great to be back here in the new year in 2026 with all of our listeners. We hope you have feedback. If you do, please reach out to us either on social media or through the Future U channels. 

And we'll see you next time on Future U.