Tuesday, June 16, 2026 - It’s a time of change in higher education. Jeff and Michael look back on what they learned over the course of this ninth season of Future U in a one-on-one discussion. They recap key moments and share their favorite episodes. And one theme keeps emerging: “it’s all about institutional mission.”
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“Season 9 Annual Listener Survey” - Help us prepare for next season
“2026: The seismic shifts for transforming the future of higher education,” by Jeff Selingo, in The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Sonoma State University is in crisis. Can a new president save it,” in The San Francisco Chronicle.
“What happens when students let an economist pick their college?,” in Marketplace.
“Harvard’s FAS Is Running a $365 Million Structural Deficit. The Problems Started Well Before Trump,” in The Harvard Crimson.
“There is a Fire Sale on MBAs,” in The Wall Street Journal.
“Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education,” by Yale University.
“Designing the AI University,” by Jeff Selingo.
“Leading Faculty in an AI Era,” by Jeff Selingo.
"The Lie at the Center of Higher Education," by Melik Peter Khoury.
0:00 - Intro
1:08 - Many of Today’s Challenges Were Predicted 10 Years Ago
3:51 - Why Mission Is Key
4:56 - A ‘Ghost Town Campus’
12:35 - Big Deficits at Colleges
13:47 - The Fire Sale on MBAs
17:05 - How to Restore Trust in Higher Ed
19:17 - The Many Software Vulnerabilities for Colleges
24:29 - How to Design the AI University
26:52 - Jeff’s Favorite Episode of Season 9
30:58 - Michael’s Favorite Episode of Season 9
33:11 - Thanks to the Podcast Team
Jeff Selingo
So, Michael, here we are, the end of another season of Future U, our ninth season.
Michael Horn
Wow. Nine seasons. We're still not sick of each other — texting more than ever.
But more than anything in this season, I think the one idea that became crystal clear throughout the season was that as higher ed moves into the end of this decade, it's all about institutional mission. What are we really here for?
So we're gonna talk about that as well as some of the other storylines that shaped this past academic year and what they mean for what's next on this, our final episode of this season of Future U.
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Michael Horn
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
And so here we are in this final episode of our ninth season. Michael, I remember early on, we didn't think we would have enough topics for a season. And now here we are, like, you know, eight years later. It is amazing how higher ed is a never-ending fountain of stories.
And, you know, there was this recent episode, Michael, with Doug Moore, whether you wanna call him the college closer, the grim reaper. You know, it really struck a chord with listeners. There were so many comments on a LinkedIn post I did about this episode.
And like me, I think listeners were both fascinated by the precision that Doug brings to closing a college, but also the emotional toll on him and many of our listeners who told me they've been through this, or they worry more so that they might be going through it.
And it really was among my favorite episodes of the year, and we're gonna get back to what our really favorite episodes were in a minute.
But in one of those comments on LinkedIn, and this is where it gets me to the storylines, an old colleague of mine on LinkedIn mentioned, 'Hey, Jeff, you know, back a decade ago, you wrote this thing called '2026: The Decade Ahead, the Seismic Shifts for Transforming the Future of Higher Education.' It was a report I did for The Chronicle. I went to look it up, and it actually published on May 18, 2016 to be exact, so almost ten years, basically ten years ago.
Michael Horn
Ten years. Yeah.
Jeff Selingo
We'll yeah. We'll link to that in the show notes.
But, Michael, looking back at that report, you know, some of what has happened was predicted, a decade ago. Right? I mean, we've known demographics were gonna be a problem more than a decade ago.
Michael Horn
No. Don't leave us hanging, Jeff. Like, I'm the one that's often hung up, for better or worse with predictions. You know, that was a year and change before we started this podcast then, when you published that. Does the report stand the test of time? How'd you do?
Jeff Selingo
Well, I'm not quite sure it stood the test of time in all fronts, but definitely, we said that these challenges were going to be coming.
You know, we knew that the faculty were gonna be shifting. We thought there were gonna be more retirements by now, but we knew this enrollment cliff was coming. We knew the financial crisis that, you know, started in the early 2000s, mid 2000s. We knew that that was going to have longer-term effects in higher education.
You know, we didn't predict, obviously, the pandemic or the Trump administration and its impact on higher ed.
But to me, we really did know this was coming, and I do feel like the last decade has been kind of a lost one for higher ed to prepare for what's coming.
Michael Horn
Super interesting. Super interesting.
And to me, again, we tease this upfront, but I really do think a lot of these conversations about how institutions chart forward, you know, goes to this mission question, the 'What are we here for' question. And different institutions, I think, should have different answers to that.
But this question of mission has just come up again and again, Jeff, this season, whether it's been in episodes around mergers or closures or athletics or funding formulas and incentives, AI, you know, in terms of, like, 'What's the value of college these days?,' 'Should we still have college?,' that listeners have asked us?
And for all of those, you have to think about mission. And this just keeps hitting me as we think about the present moment, so ten years after you pen that report, Jeff. But then ten years from now, the future of higher ed, it just seems mission, mission, mission hits at all of these, in some cases, existential questions, but certainly sort of questions of enduring value for society, the institutions themselves, and the individuals attending, those, those institutions, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah, Michael. So as you know, we text back and forth for weeks before we record an episode. So I think we maybe just take our text chain from the last month, let's run through some of these headlines, as well as some of our favorite episodes from this past season that kind of all fall under this umbrella as you just laid out of mission and what we're here for.
So let's talk about number one, which is there is this headline from The San Francisco Chronicle, what's been described as a ‘ghost town campus.’
So Sonoma State University, as part of the Cal State system, they've lost nearly 40% of their enrollment over the past decade. They've eliminated, you know, their entire athletics department. They laid off a quarter of its faculty. The university now has roughly 5,000 students. It's lowest since the 1990s, and it faces these merger speculation with two other struggling Cal State campuses, San Francisco State, which had some of the steepest enrollment declines throughout the whole 22-campus university system, as well as Cal State East Bay, which projects a budget deficit of around $13 million this fiscal year.
And, Michael, what I think this really says to us, you know, these are regional public colleges, but this whole idea when we think of college and higher education in America, we tend to talk about it as this monolithic thing. And what has really happened, especially around geography, and I pointed this out in a piece that I wrote recently for The Atlantic, is that we think, well, everyone goes away to college, and the reality is is that about half of students at four-year colleges attend one within 50 miles of home.
So there is this kind of local and national market that has evolved over the last 40 or 50 years as enrollment has expanded. And so you essentially have one national market that's built on national brands that draw these high achieving students no matter where they live, And then you have another group of institutions, a much larger group of institutions, by the way, that really serve local and regional and mostly place-bound students.
And there's been kind of a resorting over time. You know, economist Caroline Hoxby talked about this back in 2009, and she said, you know, top students basically now choose colleges based on their resources and peer groups, like who they wanna be with rather than geography. It used to be they would choose colleges by geography. Now they just say, 'I wanna go here no matter where it is.'
And a lot of that has been driven by technology and travel. You know, in the 1980s, you know, even as late as the 1980s I remember when my older sister went to college. Right? She mailed letters to home. I remember that. Right? I used to love that as a kid in elementary school. She used to call once a week, you know, from a dorm room or not dorm room. It was actually in the hallway.
Michael Horn
It was a payphone. Right?
Jeff Selingo
A payphone. Right? Payphone. She used to do it late at night, because that's when long distance rates were cheaper.
And so now just think about that. Right? Like, now we have, and for those watching us online. Right? We have these devices, palm of our hand, that you could FaceTime, you know, your kids, text your kids at any moment of the day.
And so that's what's happening now. And so, you know, a parent in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania or Maryland where I live, you know, 'So what? You send your kid to California. It's not a big deal anymore like it used to be.'
And I think that's why college admissions feel so competitive now compared to, you know, back in the even the '70s and '80s, because now you have the best students from Buffalo and Atlanta and California all going to the same places.
And I think of this regional versus national realm because, you know, as you know, Hampshire College just announced that it was going out of business. So I looked up where they get their students from. Right?
Michael Horn
Okay. Where Yeah. Right?
Jeff Selingo
And they're firmly planted, by the way, in this regional bucket. So as recently as 2022 here was their geographic background:
A quarter of their class, from Massachusetts.
Other New England states, 17%.
New York, 12%. Right?
So basically …
Michael Horn
Yeah. Quick question. Let me interrupt you one second.
So, like, that's a little over half, right, from the surrounding region. How does that, like, how does that sit on this continuum from a college perspective? Like, you're almost all nonregion versus, like, you're almost a 100% region.
Where do they sit in that spectrum? Does that make sense?
Jeff Selingo
You know, I think that... Yes. I think they're basically with the majority of colleges and universities.
Now you will see most colleges and universities tout, oh, we have kids from all 50 states Okay. And x number of countries. But if you really look at the data, they were lucky to get that, like, one kid from Wyoming, and they were, like, able to tout that. Right?
Where if you go to these national brands, yes, they may still only have one kid from Wyoming, but they, if they're in the East, they have a lot more kids from California than a Hampshire college would have.
And so I think what happens is for these regional colleges, and this gets us all the way back to the headline, by the way, for Sonoma State, is that they are really kind of pushing against these really strong headwinds because in many places, their local market is shrinking. It's disappearing.
And, you know, student preferences are changing as well. Right? Students don't wanna go to small liberal arts colleges. They often don't wanna go to regional public universities. They wanna go to these bigger brands, whether those are state flagship universities or whether they are, you know, big, private, well-known, institutions.
And so where does that leave these institutions who want to try to compete with these national brands, but they really can't.
And by the way, they're also losing their local market at the same time.
Michael Horn
Yeah. It's interesting. And this connects obviously to mission. Right? Like, who do we actually serve? What do we wanna serve them with?
And I think part of that is schools ... It's hard, right, when you're a school just clamoring for anyone you can get in the door. But in some ways, like, schools have to be clear about who we serve and who we're gonna fire. Not because it's selective admissions of, you know, sort of like you're not quote unquote good enough to get in, but more like, 'Hey, we're not the right school to serve you. Here are three colleges that actually would do a better job.' So that we can get the students that are better fit for us. We'll have better success rates with them. They'll have better experiences. That creates better word-of-mouth. That sort of ...
It's a long-term thinking. Right? It's not gonna solve a year's admission cycle, but I do think, you know, it always comes back to that Joseph Aoun, Northeastern president, quote he said to us where higher ed is diverse but not differentiated. Being differentiated means saying no to students not in the opaque way we do today and as though it's like your, quote, unquote, ‘Didn't make the cut.’ But, like, 'Hey. Your job to be done, your circumstance, what you would be awesome at, it just doesn't match up with the programs and supports and offering we have. Let us help get you to a better place.'
I think that sort of thinking actually could change around the fortunes of some institutions. It's still a zero-sum game at some point, because I think very few institutions can play this 'all things to everyone.' We say this all the time.
You know? It's probably not a viable mission unless you're Harvard. But maybe even Harvard, Jeff, can't do this anymore, because it gets us to our next headline that we texted about, which was…
You know, big deficits at schools and Harvard among them with a, get this, $365-million structural deficit in the arts and sciences, school alone, just FAS as they would call it.
We know that small colleges are bleeding cash all the time. And the takeaway, right, it's not just emotional to close a college or merge a college. Gosh. It's emotional to make any cuts in higher ed, as it is in any industry or organization, but there's a certain expectation, I think, Jeff, higher ed that cuts are not something we do. Right? Like, that's not how this place operates. We're not gonna do what Syracuse did and close an entire department or thinking back to past episodes, Harrison Keller and what North Texas did with closing entire departments and things of that nature. That's not something we do.
And yet, gosh, as you figure out who you are and who you can serve and who you're not gonna serve, that's a pretty big part of the equation, think, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. And I think, Michael, we don't have the levers we used to have to generate more revenue.
So let's go to another headline. Right? The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about a fire sale on MBAs. Right? And, you know, MBAs, graduate programs in general, international students, online, all of these things used to be levers that colleges and universities could pull to generate more revenue.
And let's just look at the MBA alone. I'm just shocked at some of the data points that they had in this Wall Street Journal story. Right? Like, Purdue knocking 40% off of its online MBA program. Right? University of California, Irvine cutting tuition by as much as 38% in the MBA. Johns Hopkins has given a 50% scholarship to students who graduate from a Maryland college this spring and enter one of its specialized master's programs this fall, including some in their business school. You know, Washington University Biz School is launching — Washington U, in Saint Louis, by the way — launching a $10,000 scholarship for professionals whose careers have been affected by AI for one of their, by the way, get this, AI certificates and concentrations in their MBA programs.
And then you add in, you know, as I said, other graduate programs, international students.
There were all these levers that I think since, you know, since the great recession of 2008 that colleges and universities were able to pull to paper over some of these longer-term issues that we knew were going to come. And then they survived. They succeeded.
And I'm sure that those presidents and those deans that did those are kinda glad that they're gone, if they're gone. And those that are left are like, 'How did I get stuck with this bag of now stuff that I have to figure out what to do with?'
Michael Horn
Quick thought before we go to headline four on this, which is just I think what you're pointing to is cross subsidization, right, has often been the way in higher ed. We have our cash cows. They support programs that we think are important but don't pay for themselves.
The other piece that sort of blew this up, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that put a lot of limits on grad lending for students in a lot of different programs, I think has put a cap on sort of the absurdly priced, if you will, master's program that stands up and creates demand, frankly, because of these loans behind it, a lot of these programs.
And look, MBAs, I would argue, have been challenged for at least a decade now. In many ways, I think they overshot the value that they could provide students. You've seen them get more and more specialized, more and more, you know, arcane in their own way.
And then frankly, though, supply and demand, just not enough people wanting these things, and so you're seeing the price cuts now, I think.
Interestingly enough, that might bring some employers back into the fold. And I think part of the challenge in an MBA program is, like, if the end customer is a financial institution every time, there's only so many of those seats. Let's help prime some people for actual general management in the operating companies again and sort of restore that part of the economy perhaps.
Jeff Selingo
Well, Michael, I think affordability, the outcomes of degrees, all these things have played into this huge trust problem. We know that higher ed has ... Politics obviously has played a role, that was kind of one of the main themes of the Yale report, on why trust in higher ed is eroding.
There was a piece of the Yale report that I kind of found fascinating, which was about admissions. Right? Admissions not being clear. Like, who gets into Yale and why and why not? And there's a lack of trust about the whole system because it's not very transparent.
And it's interesting that as we were getting ready to record this episode that Yale has just announced that they're gonna be bringing back testing, requiring testing. And I think, to be honest with you, that is definitely one of the outcomes of that report because they talk specifically about testing in that report so that you give more transparency to prospective students.
We also see headlines now that faculty in the University of California system, which unlike Yale, you know, Yale went test optional. University of California system said no tests. Right? Test blind. Test free. They wanna bring back testing, as well in order to bring back trust into the system.
Michael Horn
Yeah. And just think about this for a moment. Yale had a bunch of recommendations.
So one of them was mission. They changed the mission.
One of them was around testing. They have testing.
One of them was about, like, phones, right, technology in classrooms. You're gonna see action there.
Grade inflation, gonna see action there.
Harvard, where I teach, there's been action there.
Like, I actually think it's not just reports at the moment. In some ways, the macro environment has created the excuse to have the committees, to have the reports, and now actually take action on a bunch of these things, Jeff. So impacting mission all across the board, though, and as you said, trust in that mission, both from the employers that might wanna hire these students that exit, but also frankly, like, make sure we're getting in students that we know we can serve and be successful with and maintain the rigor at these institutions as they do so.
Let's maybe pivot from our headlines and our random text message threads as we start to wrap up here, season nine on Future U. Let let's talk about some of our favorite episodes and some of those themes that fit there, Jeff. Where do you wanna go with this?
Jeff Selingo
Well, let's start with, you know, somebody I've long respected in higher ed, Matthew Pittinsky. You know, he's the founder, one of the founders of Blackboard who is now coming back to Blackboard. It was kinda funny. It was not funny, I guess, but not for him at least. But, you know, he's coming back at a time when Instructure had this huge data breach for Canvas, which is a highly popular LMS, learning management system, both by the way, not only in higher ed, but K-12 — my kids' school uses Canvas. Yeah. So, you know, it's everywhere.
And, you know, it's interesting, Michael, as we're recording this episode, landing in my inbox was this special report from Moody's, which talked about unresolved software vulnerabilities are especially common across higher education. And they just talked about, like, there's this huge vulnerability to all the point solutions that higher education uses and the data they're holding.
And by the way, I think what was really interesting to me, and again, encourage our listeners to go back to listen to this episode with Matthew Pittinsky is how reliant we've become on technology in higher ed, and that when this goes away, as it did on many college campuses right during finals, as we know, What do we do? Do we bring back the blue books? Is this another reason? AI was the first reason, and now cybersecurity risks are another reason? What do you think?
Michael Horn
Yeah. Well, by the way, just a quick nod to our episodes. Not only Matt Pittinsky just showing us how much technology has changed the university. Matt Sigelman was also making the point of how much we just take for granted now. We can have online degrees and virtual programs and short courses and all these things — all enabled because of online learning, in essence.
To your question, I confess I'm not such a big fan of the just to bring the blue books back per se because I think it misses sort of the bigger opportunity to rethink assessment more generally. And I'm stealing from Paul LeBlanc here, but, you know, as he said if, like, AI can do the assessment, maybe we should think, do we have the right assessments in place in the first place?
I have this testimony that, at the time we're recording it in another few days. But by the time this is out I will have given it up on Capitol Hill to a subcommittee on the House of Representatives around AI and higher education. But, you know, in that I talk about is there opportunity for more performance-based assessments, oral defenses, projects — the expectation that students are learning to use AI in the course of the work, much as you outlined a four-year plan for how to integrate AI into academics rigorously in a white paper you recently did on the topic, Jeff.
And then could AI or, you know, professionals in field actually be among those who are evaluating your work so that they help, you know, solve the grade inflation problem as well because they're really evaluating it along professional expectations of the quality of work.
I think that's an interesting opportunity, frankly, the moment. It gets to the bigger point, I would argue in my testimony, which is that I think AI is really like electricity — a general-use technology. There's this story that is well known now that Ethan Mollick has made very famous around, you know, all the steam-powered factories swapped in electricity, didn't see any productivity gains. It wasn't ‘till you really redesigned the factories, the actual processes and priorities themselves, and used electricity in that context to get their productivity gains.
That's frankly true in all technologies, whether vacuum tubes to transistors, the rise of personal computers, the Internet itself, frankly. Like, we always see this. It's more about the processes and business model and priorities than frankly the tech itself. That's how you get the productivity gains.
Melik Peter Khoury, the president at Unity Environmental University up in Maine, he has a blockbuster essay that just came out recently around sort of the mission, if you will, I'm gonna get the title wrong, but it's like, "The Lie at the Center of Higher Education." And it's all about this question of mission again. But the reason I bring it up here is he says, like, we've just been so fear-based around AI as opposed to thinking, like, are we actually doing what we want? Is this an excuse to reinvent, I guess?
And as you know, Jeff, we're gonna have the opportunity this summer to do a couple live events with Google where we explore this issue much more deeply about the integration of AI, not just to sort of do what we're already doing, but ask these bigger questions around purpose and mission and the best way to actually get these gains both in learning, student success, and the like that we wanna see, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. And I'm really looking forward to those events and taking a deeper dive with some university officials that we're gonna have on those shows that will air early in season 10. But, Michael, probably just two thoughts on this because I just finished, as you mentioned, one of two white papers on AI. One was around designing the AI university. The other was leading faculty in this AI era. And as you mentioned, in terms of designing the AI university, it's really time, I think, that we've gone from pilots to scaling.
And really thinking about kind of if we think about a four-year institution, the four-year trajectory of of AI. You know, what are kind of the minimum expectations for students, particularly, like, introducing them. Right?
Because remember, students are coming to college now with very uneven experiences in high school, and now we expect them to know something when they get to college.
And I think we have to do a little bit more of an introduction. Then we have to kind of let them apply it often in their second year, integrate it into all their other work, in their third year, and then really demonstrate for the job market in their fourth year.
And so I lay this out. We'll put this link to the white paper in the show notes.
But we also know that faculty are key to this. Right? No university is gonna be able to design around AI, redesign even from scratch design from scratch, I should say without faculty at the center of this.
And faculty are often seen as the resistance. But where I think ... What's happening here, and again, this is in the second paper that I laid this out, is it's really challenging. AI is really challenging. You know, many faculty members' sense of expertise, their sense of autonomy, their sense of connection to work and the profession.
And we know from research that when those needs feel threatened, resistance follows. Right?
Michael Horn
Yeah. That's a good point.
Jeff Selingo
We know that research on the workplace, for example, shows that in the absence of this psychological safety, people become more likely to disengage, or they push back, either in quiet opposition, or they're just less willing to experiment.
So, right? We keep telling people, experiment with AI. Experiment with AI. But if you're a faculty member, and you're like, but wait, won't this replace me? Or might this not replace me? Why would I want to experiment with this? Right?
So we have to give them more of a reason to do it. I think that's critically important right now.
And so, Michael, that brings us to kind of taking us home here at the end of this episode, and maybe putting you on the spot about our favorite episode of the year, and I'll give you a second to think about that because I have kind of a dark horse candidate here.
Michael Horn
Okay. Where are you going?
Jeff Selingo
The letters from Brown University. Right? We had the author of this book on kind of letters that Brown University trustees have to write when they leave the board.
And the thing that I loved about that was that — you know, these are going back decades and decades and decades — is it really shows first that, you know, history does repeat itself. Right? There's all these debates right now in higher ed. There's always been debates in higher ed, and you see that in reading your predecessors on the board reading these letters.
But more than that, it shows just the long arc of history of higher education. And, you know, people are pretty dim and dim on higher ed right now. They're pretty negative on higher ed. And a couple weeks ago, as I said before, was at the Milken Global Institute. I moderated a panel of presidents, and Michael Crow, who I work for as a special adviser, made this point that, you know, a majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence went to college. You know, many of them went to college here in a country that really wasn't even born yet. Wasn't born yet. Right?
So we have these institutions that have been around, and, you know, we're saying this as we're about to celebrate the 250th year of the U.S. You know, they've been around for longer than corporations. They've been through World Wars, depressions, recessions, you know, floods, pandemics. They've been through it all, and they're still here.
And I think that we tend to forget in the moment that we're in, and again, going back, and I urge folks to listen to this episode, that there are these people that are trustees, and they're just there for a moment, and they're presidents and even faculty who are just there for a moment in the long history of institutions.
And I get it. Right? We heard from Doug Moore, hundreds of them won't survive.
But hundreds didn't survive the Civil War. Right? We had hundreds of institutions that in that moment closed, and after the Civil War, we had hundreds of institutions open.
And so this evolution, I think, is coming again for higher ed. Some won't survive, some will, others will evolve — evolve their mission, for example. But this is why I'm kind of hopeful about the future of higher ed. Not all institutions, but we do know that so many of these institutions have survived the ups and downs of this country from before its founding?
Michael Horn
This is where we're strongly in agreement. As a sector, I'm bullish. Right? For certain individual institutions, I'm not. But as a sector, I think I am.
And I didn't see you picking this, as your, as your favorite episode. You're right. It's a dark horse. But for this history major, this is why history is awesome. And people often ask, like, especially today, 'Why is history relevant?' 'Fewer people major in history.' It's because it gives you this kind of perspective that gives you an ability to manage and lead in these times of turbulence and these moments because you can say, like, we don't have to go running with our heads cut off. We've seen this before, and we can place ourselves in those currents.
There have been plenty of moments of uncertainty, probably far more uncertainty even than the current moment with AI upending everything. Right? So I love that. It gives us context.
It also helps us understand how we got to this point. It's not inevitable. There were choices made, and we can make different choices going forward. So I love that.
Jeff, I have several favorites from the year.
Jeff Selingo
Ah, you couldn't pick one?
Michael Horn
I well, I will. I will. Okay. Fair enough.
I will say the college closer with Doug Moore was dynamite, but I'm gonna try to avoid recency bias.
The conversation with Michael Bettorsworth of Texas State Technical College would be on my list.
Our episode about your book, Dream School, that, you know, the second episode, I think, of second or third episode, I think, of the season, Jeff. We gotta put Dream School in there. Right?
And then, for my favorite, though, I will go with, navigating a merger as a college trustee. This one sparked a lot of reactions on my LinkedIn. I think yours as well with some members of the community — pretty angry.
But just for those who don't remember, before you go back and listen, it was a conversation we had with Abby Fiorella. She was a trustee at Marymount Manhattan College, which decided last year to merge with Northeastern University, and become a part of Northeastern's global system.
I love this one because it really grappled with this question of mission.
And I don't know if it's hopeful or not hopeful like you said, but I guess the reason I found it maybe hopeful was it was a board really wrestling with, 'What is our mission?' 'What are the trade-offs we need to make to preserve it, and how do we move forward?'
And I think you agree with me that many more colleges need to be having these very hard kinds of conversations in the next few years as all of these issues we've discussed today and during the season swirl around them with incredible complexity.
But the only way to get to the other side of simplicity and have clarity around how to act is to have clarity around your mission, I think. And those are hard conversations to have, but whether you're on the cusp of survival or you're thriving, frankly, I think there are institutions, there are conversations that all institutions would benefit from.
And I think, look, it wasn't easy, but I think here was a college that did it right.
So let's leave this episode, this season, there. It's been an incredible one. I just wanna say thank yous. First of all, to you, Jeff, I continue to really enjoy and learn from you and just so thank you for this partnership.
Jeff Selingo
Well, Michael, I wanted to sneak in there because I want to thank you as well.
And as I said earlier on, I can't believe that we're about to go into our 10th season because I know that first year, we're like, 'Oh my god. Are we gonna have enough topics to discuss?'
And so not only do we have enough topics, but it's been incredibly enjoyable to me. A lot of enjoyment to me to be in this partnership with you over these last nine seasons.
So I'll let you continue on.
Michael Horn
Same feeling. Same feeling. I'm excited and excited for the summer to get together a little bit in person also, not in the context of the podcast.
But let's also thank our other partner. He's been with us for several years now, Michael Peloquin and his whole team at Borderline Media, for all the support and care they give us in crafting this podcast, producing it, the technical they really are the technical backstops and getting it out and so forth.
I wanna thank also Jeff Young, our producer this year, first time with us this year, although someone we've both known for many, many years for a fabulous year helping us.
Of course, Kiri Mohan on your team, Jeff, who's been just invaluable at keeping us straight and scheduled and so forth.
Our primary sponsor for much of the season of Ascendium, they have been terrific, they're thoughtful, they're thinking about how to serve students that need a voice in this higher ed space, and so thank you to them.
And, of course, thank you to all of our listeners. We get a lot of energy from you all, from the comments, from the engagement, from what really sticks with you, from when Jeff and I are on the road and you say, 'Hey, we listened to that episode, and here's what you knuckleheads missed,' or whatever else. We love it. We get a lot of energy from it. So thank you.
And we will see you next year for, as Jeff said, our 10th season of Future U.
So enjoy the summer. Remember your mission.
Rate and subscribe us. Tell us how we're doing on our mission, and we'll be back with you in the fall.
Thank you for joining us once again on Future U.
