Tuesday, April 7, 2026 - As winter thaws and spring arrives, Jeff and Michael reflect on six big issues facing higher education. First up, why they think the campus building boom is over — and what comes next. They also discuss how AI is changing both higher ed and the world of work; what recent scandals involving college presidents mean for the sustainability of that job; and why the finances of college sports just don’t add up. This episode is made with support from Ascendium Education Group.
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“From Building to Stewardship,” by Jeff Selingo.
“Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence,” by Anthropic.
“AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense,” in The Wall Street Journal.
“2026 Survey of College and University Presidents,” in Inside Higher Ed.
0:00 - Intro
1:59 - The Campus Building Boom Is Over
4:30 - Moving to ‘Facilities Stewardship’
12:47 - Is Higher Ed Too Negative About AI?
17:47 - ‘AI-Native Universities Will Be Pretty Disruptive’
21:13 - Why the Cost of Acquiring Students Is Key
23:13 - New Report on How AI Is Changing Jobs
29:22 - What’s Happening With the University Presidency?
32:00 - New Survey of College Presidents
33:22 - Why the Finances of College Athletics Don’t Add Up
Jeff Selingo
So Michael Horn, we just saw each other up in Boston, and I must say, landing there and taking a cab from Logan into the city, I was like, what happened to all that snow that had just come, like, a couple weeks earlier?
You just had quite the thaw. Like, I mean, a real thaw quickly.
Michael Horn
Yeah. Really quickly too. Right?
It was like Jason Tatum started playing for the Celtics again, and all of a sudden, the snow lifted, and everyone started, like, smiling again up here. So, you know, correlation, causation, we're a little always careful here because there's generally, Jeff, one April fools or maybe two snows, in our future still.
But, it was fun seeing you certainly up in my part of the world.
Jeff Selingo
Well, and I think we are ready for a spring thaw, in so many ways. I know it's baseball season for me, which you know I love. It was a tough winter here in DC as well.
And so today, we are going to take a chance to start thinking about spring with a potpourri of topics today 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. 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, good way to line us up, if you will, on the top there with a potpourri of topics. I like the choice of words.
We've got six for our audience today that we'll go through.
I'm gonna start with topic one because this is why you came up to have a conversation around this, around facilities in higher ed, but it was built off this bigger paper that you did that Aramark sponsored, around the built environment and sort of a changing way to think about facilities management.
What did you learn that surprised you? I think you had some recommendations that came out there, or at least four big sort of strategies that it seemed to me as I read the report.
I'd love to hear your voice over, from that report, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo
Well, Michael, I think the big headline is the campus building boom is basically over.
It doesn't mean that, obviously, campuses will never build buildings again. But, you know, we have seen over the last two decades a lot of building on college campuses. And what they haven't done a lot of over those two decades is basically maintain what they've had. Right?
And I think that's the big problem now. Not only is there a huge deferred maintenance bill that is coming due, but as we have talked so many times on this show, is that you've built this house essentially. So think about it with homeowners now. I know, you know, we've been in our house that we remodeled ten years ago, and we're like, 'Oh, if we only have done this because now we're living differently.'
And I think the same thing is true of college campuses. Right? Students, especially post-pandemic, are taking more online classes, more hybrid. They want different needs. And so how do you build a campus around that?
You know, the numbers, Michael, in this report were just striking to me. Higher ed as a whole faces this maintenance backlog of nearly $5 trillion. A lot of campus space just honestly sits empty. You know, classrooms are only used about 60% of the time, you know, even during the academic year.
And as I said, you know, we now have Gen Z fully into higher education, and, you know, most of these buildings were built 20 to 25 years ago for a very different generation of institutions.
We know though that campus infrastructure is a huge part of how colleges sell themselves. It's why the college tour, which I'm now starting with my own oldest daughter, is often called, you know, the million-dollar walk, right, or the golden mile because it really feeds the enrollment machine in higher ed.
And I'll tell you, after going on some of these tours now, you know, when a campus feels tired or neglected, the physical plant quickly shifts from a selling point to a liability as a result.
So what do we do? Right? In talking to CFOs, in talking to facilities, deans, directors, and other people who are thinking about the built environment, we're really starting to move to a different type of mindset about facilities.
It's really interesting to me, Michael, for this paper, I did a flash survey of CFOs, and fewer than 20% of them felt that their investments in facilities were strategic. It was always reactive.
And I think now we're moving to what I refer to in this paper as, 'facility stewardship,' which is thinking about your facilities in the same way you think about your endowment. Right? They have to be there for the long term.
And so in the paper, and we'll just walk through these quickly, you know, I talk about, what does this mean? What does this shift from, like, you know, just jumping on projects as you need them or doing that master plan? What does stewardship look like? Right?
You really have to start aligning space for what you're really trying to achieve as an institution, whether that's student success or enrollment, you know, rather than just manage buildings as plumbing, which I think a lot of universities do, how do they really fit in with our strategy?
You know, focusing on those spaces that matter most to students, so prioritizing classrooms, residence halls, student center, high-traffic pathways where, you know, condition and care really shape the student experience.
Data. It's really interesting to me, Michael, how data is becoming much more integral to how we use space. So really knowing, not just by anecdote, but like how often are these buildings used and what are they used for?
And then, and I know we're gonna talk about this dinner that I was up there for, how do you engage the board in these decisions? Because I think board members love to build, they love to cut ribbons, and then they move on. So how do you do that?
And I think to me is, how do you think about the campus as a form of capital, much like the endowment? And I think the institutions that are gonna thrive are the ones that really manage their physical assets, with a much different discipline than they have over the last, you know, 50 or 60 years.
Michael Horn
Yeah. And I think we heard that in the dinner, Jeff. It was a collection of leaders from a lot of different institutions, in and around Boston, I guess, is what I would say.
It's interesting. Just a couple things that jumped out to me from the dinner off of the paper and the conversation that you teed up, and you left with boards.
So I'll just say on boards, just we heard the recurring theme, the ability to be vulnerable with your board and have honest conversations. Yes. You need them to, you know, say yes to a bunch of decisions and exercise governance, but you also sometimes want their skill set on the front end to have honest brainstorming conversations and take advantage of their expertise and their expertise not just being, 'I was an alum of the school.' But I'm bringing something functionally, right, to this conversation or something that can help me make a better decision without data before it exists or based on the data that you're saying that they now collect, which is fascinating.
A second thing that I took out of it, which was those institutions that had just committed to like, ‘We're not gonna have deferred maintenance. We know what the costs are to keep these things up. We are gonna do it on a regular basis, and we are gonna have honest conversations with our board, not just about the operating budget and capital budget, but also thinking about that in the context of the income statement, balance sheet, and and crucially, Jeff, I'd say the cash-flow statement.’
Like, particularly right now where I am, cash is king. You need it to stay afloat, and so, you know, you need to manage it responsibly.
But that also means having a view if we don't, keep up with this maintenance. You know, we heard some of the horror stories of how much those bills could get if you let that deferred maintenance get out of control on some of these facilities. It could get pretty ugly fast, or you end up in a very unintentional strategy with a building that's been there for, was meant to be temporary, and all of a sudden, it's like a 50- or 70-year old building, that no one wants to knock down, but it's not doing you a heck of a lot of good either.
I guess just the last thing I would say, and I feel like I often come back to this, but it stuck out to me was ... You were asking at the dinner, Jeff, a lot of, like, how do you organize you know, where does this conversation of facilities sit in the university? Where does it roll up to in terms of the structure of the leadership as well as the board? And I was really struck by some of the conversation where they said, we think of student experience first, and, like, facilities as a part of that conversation, but it's not like its own silo.
And other people were thinking of it as a silo that rolls up under finance. To me, the first is way more attractive. And just from a 'jobs to be done' thinking, as we've talked about, when you really know what the student experience that you want to look like is and it lines up with the progress they're trying to make, then you can really organize, your institution around the demand side as opposed to the supply side language of, you know, admissions, bursar office, like things that you need to do to get the job done as opposed to what the student needs to get the job. And facilities becomes a conduit.
And I guess that was the last thing I had is a few people pointed out very few people actively you know, like, you look at the Gallup-Purdue research around what makes a great higher ed experience, and it's generally around having a faculty or mentor, you know, opportunity, having a paid work experience, things of that nature, Jeff. And they were like, you know, buildings doesn't necessarily show up. But then as someone else pointed out, but, ‘Man, if you get a bad building on your tour, they might not even come here.’ Right? If the first-year dorms look terrible, you might be off the list.
And I guess I was thinking about the Kano model, that we've talked about in regards to that, this notion that there's basic features you just gotta have. And if you don't, you're off the list. They're not gonna even hire you. Performance defining where you get that, one-for-one investment produces more satisfaction, and then the exciting features that sort of, like, just delight you when you see them.
And I was thinking, you know, in some regards, certain of these facilities that we think of as opulent, that first-year dorm experience that with its own bathrooms and great HVAC experience and so forth, it's kinda become basic in some ways, on certain campuses, Jeff, and you might not get credit for it. But, man, if it's not there working the way a student expects, you're certainly gonna get dinged for it, it seemed to me.
And so I think organizing this as a tenet of the student experience rather than thinking of it as a separate thing. And then probably for a research university, you do the same thing around research for facilities and the like.
And so those were a couple of the thoughts that occurred to me. I'm curious if you have any reactions.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. I guess there are only two reactions.
One is, I think we tend to forget, and you have reminded me so many times when we're talking about somebody you got to know very well at Yale, of course, Rick Levin, and talking about what he came to as a situation there in terms of deferred maintenance. I think people really do forget just how bad a shape Yale was in in terms of its physical plan when he came there and and really put an emphasis on that in a way now that, like, people, again, forget that it even it was even as bad as it was, and I think we have to remember that.
The second thing that struck me at this dinner in particular is just how siloed these conversations are. As somebody said at that dinner, they've combined buildings and grounds and finance, on their board, but 90% of the conversations are about finance. Right?
So I still think that even when you try to cut down these or break down these silos, we're still forgetting, I think, little bit about what you talked about, the 'jobs to be done,' you know, leading with the student experience and then kinda coming back to the buildings.
So let's go to topic number two, Michael, which is a sharp turn here to AI doomerism, I guess I'll call it.
And what's interesting here, Michael, I texted you a couple weeks ago because, you know, as you know, I'm a big fan of the Pivot podcast, with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. And there was a discussion on there about, 'Are we too negative on what is happening with AI?'
In other words, you know, every story you read is about how AI is taking over the world, and maybe it's not gonna be as bad as we think it's going to be.
You know, we talked a lot about AI in higher ed, but this seems to be a changing story, a moving target. I know that we've had some recent discussions about this and I kinda want to get a sense of where you sit.
Like, when you see the most positive arguments and the most negative arguments, how are you calling the balls and strikes on this?
Michael Horn
Yeah. I've been working on a piece about this more generally, actually, so out of the education lane. But just sort of like, what's AI gonna do? What can we learn from others?
And it strikes me, Jeff, that the most doomer takes on this are from those people that see AI is gonna create abundance in everything, which, 'good,' but therefore means humans don't need to do anything, 'bad.' Right? And so sort of a world devoid of purpose, if you will.
And my read of the way the world works is that when one part of a value chain becomes abundant, the other parts around it become scarce. And we can't imagine that in advance. Right? And so, you know, I think we're seeing it. We had this conversation with the president recently where all of a sudden you realize, you know, local sports as people maybe have more time, all of a sudden is the scarce resource. People wanna see live action sports. Right? And the cost to go to a Major League game or the cost, to to fly somewhere to see, LeBron James or whatever it might be, if if he's even in the lineup, is hugely expensive. Right?
And so what felt abundant all of a sudden starts to feel scarce because the step next to it becomes extremely abundant.
And I think we lack imagination historically on, like, what those shifts actually look like.
Our friend Paul LeBlanc loves to tell the story if you had told the people in Hooverville in the 1930s that, 'Hey, guys. In just 20 years, trust me. It's gonna be abundance of, you know, safe, shelf-stable food in things we call cans, and there's gonna be tons of houses in these things called suburbs. You're not gonna have to worry about any of this stuff.' They would have thought you were absolutely nuts.
These things shift in ways that we can't imagine, but I feel confident to say they do shift. And because humans are constantly seeking progress, we're always seeking struggle, Jeff. Other parts of society become scarce in ways that we can't imagine and that creates opportunity for human beings, I think.
The other thing I will say is, to me, the Silicon Valley conversation on this really reduces the human experience to one, maybe two senses. And what I mean by that is these Large Language Models, they're trained on language and arguably sight. But, like, touch, smell, taste, the subconscious, the gut, like there's all these other things that make us human that these things do not do that I think are valuable, and I think we will value. And so I think that there's gonna you know, we're going outside of education here for a moment.
But I guess for me then, as a college or university, I would say, 'Wow. Like, knowing yourself, really important.' Right? The human experience, how I relate to others, really important. And by the way, knowledge still really matters because if I'm gonna have to exercise judgment and ethics and all sorts of things around these... And Daniel Pink, by the way, had a great list of, like, five or six skills that'll be valued in the future. If those things are gonna be valued, to be able to exercise those things, I have to know something. Right? And I can't rely on AI to know it because it's often wrong. Like, there's a very jagged frontier still.
I mean, I've been aggressively using it to create things and code and whatever else. But at least in my experience, Jeff, while I guess there are companies creating agents to test these things, my experience is that that human in the loop still really, really does matter. And I think these shifts are gonna be unpredictable, such that regionality, experience, I think leaning into those things is gonna be critical.
I will say, I do think there'll be some AI-native universities that are pretty disruptive. And if you don't have a distinct 'job to be done' you're doing in a region, I think you're probably in a world of trouble. But frankly, you were before AI as well. I'm not sure that changed that equation.
What about you? Yeah.
Jeff Selingo
And I wanna go back to this idea of the AI-native, university because, Michael, as you know, and maybe you'll disagree because you have obviously written a lot around online, the development of online ed, as well. But I often think about the development of this, of the idea of online education as a disruptive force in higher education going back a couple of decades.
And what was interesting was that when online came to be, you know, online education came to be, it wasn't the traditional institutions that really adopted it quickly, even though, by the way, most of them had distance, quote unquote, distance education operations, at that time. They didn't rush into it. It was really kind of, you know, a lot of the for-profits, you know, a lot of new entrants into the market adopted online education, and they really grew, as a result.
And then the technology got really good, and then we had something, you know, right after the great recession called MOOCs, right, the Massively Open Online Courses. Everybody got really worried. It reminded me of a kind of a mini AI moment, at that point, in higher ed. It's like, 'Oh my god. It's like, this thing is coming for us. It's gonna eat us.' Much like we're talking about AI now.
And the result of that wasn't, MOOCs eating higher ed, it was more of like, 'Hey, we could actually do this.' Meaning traditional colleges and universities could actually do online education just as well or even better than the other native players out there, and that's when we saw real growth, in this. It's not like there wasn't growth before at Southern New Hampshire and ASU, but that's when things really started to take off around that time.
And now, of course, you know, many of the largest online players are what you would call traditional colleges and universities that have been around for quite some time.
And so I'm wondering if the same thing might happen in AI, where maybe AI-native universities or there's a couple of leaders that then pull everyone else along. Perhaps where you're gonna challenge me is that things are moving so much faster that by the time you pull others along, it's maybe going to be too late.
Michael Horn
Yeah. I guess where I'll actually challenge you is maybe I think the other shoe is not fully dropped still in online. Meaning that I think the market the most the disruptive players. Right? The Southern New Hampshire's, the Western Governors, they have targeted non consumption and brought in all these students who were not students of higher ed before. And because of the way the federal government provided the dollars, right, you actually had a lot of online programs at the graduate level in particular, as you were saying, that traditional institutions have been able to offer, but I would argue more as a hybrid as opposed to a disruptive force, and the pricing has been high.
Well, that just changed. And so, you know, the policy just changed there. Let see how this online market continues to develop, I guess, is sort of my take. And I wonder, will AI radically change that?
Now here's the thing no one solved, though, in this market that really would reduce prices, which is cost of student acquisition. Right? Like so, you know, micro-credentials. Sound great, but, like, if it costs you $6,000 to acquire a student that's going to pay $3,000, it's a terrible idea. It doesn't work. Right? That's sort of the bootcamp problem at some point. And so I think that problem is still there, Jeff, unless, like, there's dramatic network effects, right, to everyone jumping on the AI university from WGU, and that referral, right, that has been so powerful to that model in particular, right, and allow them to acquire students much lower costs than a lot of the other online programs. If that even cranks up further, then this could get really interesting. But otherwise, you know, marketing is still gonna be a pretty big piece of, I think, the program cost, if you will. Right? And so that strikes me. I don't know how to think about it fully, but that strikes me as a confounding factor that perhaps gums us all up.
And at the end of the day, I don't know, the regional ins most people go to college and graduate school within a 100 miles of where they live. Why do they do that? Partially, the advertising of, like, I know the place and I know people who went there and part of it because labor markets are still regional. I don't see that changing.
So to me, that may be the bigger thing that, like, sort of keeps these folks as part of the conversation.
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 postsecondary 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
So natural segue though, Jeff, would because let's stay on the AI topic three. Anthropic put out this very interesting report that its research team in March put out. I know both you and I read it. I argued with AI for a while to try to understand all of the measures, because I sort of the second and third, like the coverage of jobs and so forth.
But maybe you could break down the big headlines of what jumped out to you.
Jeff Selingo
Well, a couple of the key findings that I thought.
You know, the gap between AI's potential and actual use is starting to close. Right? You know, it's coverage right now remains a fraction of what's feasible. You know, even in computer and math, probably which is the most AI intensive field, you know, they noted that Claude, which of course is their AI agent, currently covers only about a third of all tasks.
So I think the lesson here is that disruption hasn't fully arrived, but it's coming. You know, it's clear that college graduates are going to be more exposed here. Right? People with graduate degrees are nearly four times more represented in the most exposed occupations they found than in the unexposed ones. Right? AI is not coming for a lot of the manual labor quite yet. There's a lot of warning signs here for young workers, which I've written about and we've talked on the show about before. They don't really have the experience that has been found in other studies to actually protect workers, at least for now.
You know, occupations that are most at risk are the ones that colleges talk a lot about, including, by the way, computer science. I'm gonna come back to computer science yet again. And, you know, the ones that, you know, the occupations with exposure are already starting to slow down in growth, and particularly, again, that's going back to computer science.
And so what I really wonder about is whether colleges and universities, they kind of keep moving ahead, full steam ahead with the programs they have, building new programs, and, there's going to be a large portion of their graduates very soon, if not already, that are already touched by AI, and this continues to confound me why higher ed is just either they're willfully ignoring this, they just hope it goes away, they don't really understand it, which I think is a big piece of this. They don't quite know what to do about it, so they just keep moving forward.
What was your take on this?
Michael Horn
Yeah. Well, just to stay on, actually, what you just left there.
This may be the bigger threat, right, to universities, is the impact of AI in the job market than, like, the AI-native university to some degree.
I just said I'm not a doomer, but I should add, in the change from, like, you know, what is abundant and what is scarce and the value chain inversion, if you will, of that, that means a whole bunch of new jobs and a whole bunch of jobs that go away.
So that's not to say that there's not a lot of pain and change. And so I think you're right that universities need to be more intentional about real experience ... The things we've talked about in this show. Right? Real experiences as part of the education. We'll hear a lot about durable skills.
To me, that actually means building them in the context of real knowledge. It means the liberal arts, but, you know, there was this great piece, that, out of a Harvard publication about how a class devoted to Plato, they never asked the question, 'What does this mean for your life? What does this mean how you relate to others?' They literally zero reflection on, like, 'How does this relate to what you'll build and professionally?' It was just like Plato in the abstract academically. I think it is a real big reorientation.
And part of the reason universities are struggling with it is their departments are not organized to. Right? They're organized around the research questions that have been central to the field, not what the students are necessarily prepared for. In terms of the report itself, I think one of the things I took away is organizations and business models matter more than, again, the technologists think that they do, and that sort of will create a lot of friction in terms of the adoption. Just because the theoretical exposure is here doesn't mean that's gonna happen overnight.
And then the other thing, they had this great quote, in the report of the track record of past approaches and projections right around, job losses and so forth gives reason for humility. And then they cited, you know, how, like, the government's own occupational growth forecasts, while directionally correct, have added little predictive value beyond linear extrapolation of past trends.
Even in hindsight, the impact of major economic disruptions on the labor market is often unclear. So there's a great set of, I thought there was some great, like, humility put in there.
One last thing though that really struck me was an article from The Wall Street Journal, that someone from Anthropic then flagged for me actually, which was the headline was 'AI isn't lightening workloads, it's making them more intense.' And the point was that as AI... It's not that it doesn't create efficiency, it does, but that capacity it frees up immediately gets repurposed into more work.
So the question I've been wondering, and our friend Allison Salisbury has written some interesting articles about this, but, the question I've been wondering is, in companies where there is still room for growth, maybe people are gonna be working harder. In companies where there's not room to do more and grow. AI might be actually hollowing out those jobs because what do you do with the spare time, Jeff?
Jeff Selingo
Fascinating, fascinating analysis there, Michael, in terms of how this could affect different sectors and different employers.
I guess the next question is, which is our next topic, is, Can AI be a university president? Because, we might need that, at the rate things are going. What's happening here with the university presidency?
Michael Horn
Well, let's talk about the Big 10, which should be called the Big 18, I think, Jeff, because I think there's 18 schools in the conference. But half [of the presidents in Big 10 schools] have left in the last year. If you include, the end of this academic year with the most recent surprise being out of The Ohio State University in a rather, inglorious, shall we say, exit. They've quickly found the replacement. But you know, this is probably a quick topic.
But you've been an observer of the presidency for a long time. I think we did something about the Big 10 last year as well in the revolving door there. What's your take? Like, is this job just impossible for anyone to do?
Jeff Selingo
You know, obviously there's some personal failings here in these jobs, but I think we still value IQ over EQ in these jobs. Right? Scholars over operators, which I think is a very big problem. It's a very big blind spot, not only for search committees, but for search firms. I still think that we're getting people in here who just do not know how to manage complex organizations. And again, that wasn't the case here in Ohio State, but what we're seeing in when presidents fail, they just, they've never really run an operation where revenue growth and cost control, which are two big things right now in higher ed, are core parts of their job. Right? They've never really worked with governing boards or political stakeholders in most cases, and they don't have enough experience working with multiple bosses as they do with boards.
You know, we talked a lot about culture, the culture series that you helped me on last year. They really don't know how to actually start to shift and make changes at their institutions because they, again, never really had to do that. There's a lot of hard decisions they never had to make. Right? There's all of these elements. They are not really experienced for these jobs.
And on top of that, unlike a corporate CEO or unlike most organizations, they have so many more constituencies to please. You know, faculty and staff and boards and legislators and donors and parents and students and alumni, the local public. Right? There's so many people that they have to please. It has made this job impossible.
Michael Horn
Not sure I have anything to add other than that except that...
So this relates to something we also talked about is, Can you make facilities revenue generating, and how do you think about that as opposed to just leaving them dormant?
Cash is important.
That relates to the fifth topic, Jeff, I had, which is, on our list, which is that Inside Higher Ed did its survey of presidents.
The one thing that jumped out to me that I would like to flag, is that their optimism around their finances, at least from my perspective, seemed pretty out of whack. A strong majority of presidents, 70%, were confident in their financial stability over the next ten years. 83% were confident over the next five years. I will tell you, we've enlarged the survey of private nonprofit colleges that enroll more than a thousand students and are largely undergrad tuition dependent to about 300 institutions. 36%, according to our figures, have less than five years of run room until they'll be financially insolvent, assuming no enrollment erosion, which is, like, extremely overly optimistic, I think, for a lot of these places. If enrollment falls by a modest 10% over the next four years, which I think is very likely at a lot of places, then 47% of the 299 schools we have examined, have less than five years of financial runway. 47%, that's a very different number from 83% who are confident about their finances, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo
Well, speaking of finances, Michael, it will bring us to the last topic of the day, which is athletics and finances.
We've talked a lot about athletics in previous seasons on this show, which probably portend a lot of what is now actually happening.
President Trump invited a number of people to a White House roundtable recently to talk about the state of college athletics, but it even seems like he even can't fix what is happening.
The big pieces of news that have come out in recent weeks on this is from Kansas, where they have been running in the red like most college athletics programs. They had an $11-million deficit one year. They had a $14-million deficit another year. And now, by the way, they have to spend even more money, which is requiring them to come use general funds to cover athletic payments to their students.
And the same thing is happening... There's this white paper out of Louisville. They're worried about the same thing there because, again, they are running a $10 million-plus deficit there. As they said, 21 of their 23 teams lose money. So where are they going to get this money from in order to support this?
And really, the discussion, I don't think, was actually that useful from what I saw at the White House. But it's clear to me that the Name Likeness Image, the revenue sharing, all the stuff with the athletes, and how we pay them, something is this is not gonna be long to last, in my opinion, because you're just not gonna have enough institutions, able to do it, whether you're gonna have a spending cap, whether you're gonna have some sort of congressional action, whether Charlie Baker and the NCAA is going to step in.
I mean, it seems to me, in talking to a president about this recently, is that maybe we need to really rethink the divisions in higher ed, you know, division I, II, and III. Maybe you have, you know, seven or eight divisions where people focus on different things, and you have a number of revenue-producing divisions that focus on the big sports. You have a number of others that really focus on student athletes. You have others that focus on the Olympic sports. You know?
Because as long as you have enough, a proper mass of teams able to play each other, do you really need to be running what is it in Division I now? A 130 Division I teams, you know, or programs? I don't think so. Right? You know, maybe just the league you know, if you think about the pro leagues, right, maybe you only need 30 or 35 instead of a 135.
Michael Horn
That's super interesting. And you might think about returning to regionality, so we're not asking athletes to make red-eye flights in the middle of the week for certain sports. Say, if I'm a swimmer, not quite sure the value of going completely cross-country and back, and then trying to do my studies or whatever else.
But I like the thinking that you just proposed there, Jeff, because I think it's highly unlikely we lose. We go back to a full amateur status for some of these revenue-generating sports. I think that is not gonna fly for these students who I think were being taken advantage of on the front end. And to your point, there's just no way that we can keep going down this road. It's unsustainable. You're gonna start to see a big erosion, not just in the athletics, but the institutions themselves. That's what the Kansas story to me is about, is about, about the larger erosion of the academics itself because of the deficit of the athletics, all in an effort to keep up.
Because clearly, the theory of action is athletics has a bigger value for recruitment, marketing, for the overall university standing, reputation, etcetera, etcetera.
And so it's not, you know, in some ways, back to the first conversation we had around view facilities as part of the student experience, that's effectively what they're doing in athletics, but we're not having an honest conversation about it.
Jeff Selingo
No doubt about it.
And again, we may not go back to amateur status, but, you know, as that NCAA commercial has always said, you know, most student athletes go, you know, go pro in something else besides college sports. And so this idea that we have now essentially these, you know, minor leagues sprouting up all over the country for major leagues that just don't have enough room for all these athletes makes me wonder, like, why are we spending this money at the university level?
Especially, again, where I think most college sports fans like me just want good competition. And, you know, maybe yes. Should the players get something? I think we all agree they should get something.
But this idea that, like, ‘Now you're just gonna have a couple of power conferences or you're gonna have a couple of power teams, and then everyone else is left with the scraps,’ or even if that, they're just left to try to deal with the financial ramifications of this, seems like not a workable solution going forward.
So my feeling is is that we move to some sort of middle ground, and the big question is who does that?
I don't think it's gonna be the conferences because they seem to have a lot of power right now. The NCAA, you know, Charlie Baker, I think, is doing a really good job, but the NCAA has really, kind of is just a shell of itself from the organization it used to be on this front. Should the presidents take some action? I don't think most presidents really understand what is happening, college presidents.
Unfortunately, it may require some sort of congressional action or some sort of law to make sure that this is done.
Michael Horn
Well, maybe sports, the big sports will disrupt the NFL and NBA, but we'll hold that conversation for another time. It's a good place to leave it.
Six big meaty topics that certainly affect the future of higher education. Huge thanks as always for tuning in and, sending us your thoughts, on the show. And a reminder to please review, rate, offer comments, and of course, subscribe wherever you're listening, whether it's YouTube or any of the podcast players. And we'll see you next time on Future U.
