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In today’s issue: College presidents on what ails higher ed; looking back on the first 100 days; and what the big shift in college majors will mean for the future of the workforce.
🏈 The Pope Effect?The Flutie Effect is named after Boston College’s former quarterback Doug Flutie, who in 1984 threw a Hail Mary pass to win a game against the University of Miami.
The subsequent rise in applications for admission to Boston College the next year led to this idea that success on the college field or court could lead to an admissions bump.
Now with the first American pope elected yesterday, an alum of Villanova University—Robert Francis Prevost, who took the name Pope Leo XIV—the question is whether the blessings of the Flutie Effect will extend from the Vatican to Villanova.
EVENT
🎓 The “Next Office Hour” | Thursday, May 15, 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT
Just in time for graduation season, our May episode will explore how colleges can better prepare students for an AI-powered workplace. I’ll be joined by:
👉 Register here to join us live or get the recording. (With support from Adobe)
THE LEAD
I’ve been moderating discussions at the Milken Institute Global Conference for about a decade now. This annual gathering in Beverly Hills is a who’s who of finance and corporate America, and always includes a slate of sports stars, Hollywood heavyweights, governors, cabinet secretaries—oh, and, university presidents.
It’s an eclectic mix reflecting the varied interests of the conference’s namesake, Michael Milken, the former Wall Street tycoon who pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy in 1990 (and was later pardoned by President Trump). The mix of content makes it like a master class for those of us who want to learn about the state of finance, sports, media, or politics.
Over the years, I’ve seen Tom Hanks and Ron Howard debate the future of movies, Tom Brady discussing his diet, the commissioners of the major sports leagues talk about the global impact of athletics on their business, and CEOs deliberate what’s next for talent, skills, and education.
Normally, the higher ed session I moderate with university presidents is just another one on a packed schedule. But this year, given all that’s happened in the last 100+ days in Washington, the higher-ed session ended up with a full house in one of the signature rooms at the Beverly Hilton.
Then a month ago, the Milken conference planners asked if I’d be interested in leading a second session: a one-on-one conversation with the investor and Harvard alum (and critic) Bill Ackman. More on that later.
The presidents of Dartmouth, Yeshiva, UC-San Diego, Stanford, and the CEO of ETS at the Milken Institute Conference earlier this week.
In advance of moderating a session at any conference, I think about the narrative arc of what I want the audience to walk away with. For the big Milken panel, here was my general plan in three parts:
A look back on the golden era of higher ed and what went wrong.
The big issues driving the higher ed news cycle: federal research funds, DEI, and international students.
What a future system might look like.
The more people on the stage, the more a moderator also needs to design a plan that ensures some equal time for everyone. For this first session, we had only 50 minutes and five people. So I also decided to go in-depth on a few topics, with one or two of the panelists weighing in on each. I’d then intersperse those big topics with a few quick lightning rounds for the whole group on other subjects. This plan also would hopefully allow for some spontaneity.
Here’s what resonated from that first session for me:
🎯 Diagnosing the problem
University leaders offered starkly different explanations for higher ed’s troubles:
Loss of mission: “We are education institutions, we’re not political institutions, we’re not social activist institutions,” said Dartmouth College’s president, Sian Beilock, who argued colleges have strayed from fostering diverse viewpoints.
Credential factories:Yeshiva University’s Ari Berman lamented universities shifting from “core curriculum” focused on “great conversations” to “career credentials” and open curriculums.
Degrees without value: “Having that diploma is not proof of readiness,” said the CEO of ETS (Education Testing Service), Amit Sevak, who noted more than 40% of college graduates are underemployed.
A bifurcated system:Jonathan Levin, Stanford University’s president (and son of former Yale president, Rick Levin) said higher ed isn’t one system, so there isn’t one problem: Elite universities are challenged by politics and values while maintaining their role as “aspirational places” for all Americans. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of American higher ed, “it’s hard to deliver a high-value education without students incurring a lot of debt.”
🧠 The mental health factor
The presidents connected student anxiety to larger issues of community and purpose on campus.
Beilock, a psychologist, emphasized the need to reframe student well-being: “Mental health and well-being is a precursor to academic excellence.”
She argued that institutions should foster not just safety, but courage: “I don’t want to create safe spaces. I want to create brave spaces where students can be uncomfortable, where they can challenge, where they can lead across different views.”
Berman linked rising anxiety to students not feeling part of “core communities,” and chastised his counterparts in higher ed for not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campuses. “Antisemitism is not about Jews. It’s about hate. And hate attacks the foundation of the university—academic freedom.”
Beilock added: “You can’t have free expression that robs someone else of free expression. That means not shouting down speakers… and not setting up encampments that don’t let other people walk across campus.”
🔬Research funding under threat
One area where there was widespread agreement was that the Trump administration’s targeting of university research funding could undermine America’s innovation ecosystem.
Levin said that tech research at Stanford helped establish companies that have generated at least $7 trillion in market value, including Google, Cisco, Nvidia, DoorDash and Zoom. “That model should continue if the U.S. is going to be a leading country in the world in 20, 30 years,” he said. “It’s in the interest of the country to find a way forward.”
Pradeep Khosla, the chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, said his institution stands to lose $325 million annually from proposed cuts to its $1.8 billion research portfolio.
“It’s punishing the country, not just universities,” Khosla warned. “If our lead slips by 1-2 years, the other countries are not keeping quiet. For every 1-2 years we don’t invest, we’ll take 5-7 years to catch up.”
The bottom line: The panel revealed a higher education system at a critical juncture, a breaking point as it faces pressures from multiple directions—economic, political, and social. While their approaches differed, one thing the group all seemed to agree on was the need to clarify higher education’s “value proposition.”
On Stage with a Higher Ed Provocateur
One-on-one with Bill Ackman
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has become a prominent and outspoken critic of higher education—especially elite institutions—and particularly his alma mater, Harvard.
This was one of the hardest interviews I probably ever prepped for because I had 20 minutes under the hot lights and Ackman is someone who is always on TV or in the press—-so there are a lot of statements to parse.
The highlights from my discussion with him:
⚖️ On DEI: “I’m in favor of equality of opportunity. I’m in favor of an inclusive environment. But what the DEI ideology became was fundamentally, I believed, illegal,” Ackman told me.
Are universities doing enough to reverse policies? “It depends on the university,” he said.
How about Harvard? “I think there’s still a problem, lots of problems.”
💸 The Trump administration has huge levers to pull with research dollars and tax status, but aren’t they unrelated to concerns about antisemitism?
“I think they’re directly related,” he said. “Federal funding of a private university is not a right, it’s a privilege. Harvard effectively is a fiduciary for the taxpayer dollar. The faculty growth at Harvard has been nominal, but the administrative growth at Harvard has been enormous. On that issue alone, I would question federal funding.”
🎓 The federal government, he said, shouldn’t “cover degree programs that are advancing ideologies that are anti-American…teaching students to be anti-capitalist, the core sort of principles of America.”
Fact-check: I noted that about a third of Harvard graduates every year go into finance (fact-check my fact-check: about half going into finance, consulting, or technology). “Do you really think they’re, they’re teaching them to be anti-capitalist?”
“They’re not in the Middle Eastern studies department,” he said. “They’re not in the gender studies department…part of the problem here is that some of these issues are focused in certain departments, not the entire campus.”
🔭💊💉 Harvard has redesigned its website to talk about its impact on research. Is he worried that’s at risk? “Harvard’s not making the impact, the impact is coming from individual researchers who would be delighted to do their work elsewhere,” Ackman said. “They’ll go to Vanderbilt, they’ll go to Duke, they’ll go to Dartmouth.”
😮 The money quote from Ackman: “Harvard is a bunch of old buildings.”
✅ Finally, on admissions and athletics: “The only adjustments that should be made, in my view, should be based on the socioeconomic background…that person should get an edge.”
🏀 “If the institution’s about creating the leaders of the future, I do think athletic talent matters.”
🎧 Listen to the discussion from both sessions on special episodes of Future U.:
🗓️ Making Sense of the First 100 Days. On Future U., Michael Horn and I dive into the rapidly evolving higher ed landscape in President Trump’s second term, examining the broader, longer-term implications for colleges by drawing from recent research on campus culture in challenging times. (Future U.)
📝 AI and Cheating. “After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. ‘Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,’ he said. ‘Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.’ (New York Magazine; subscription required)
💼 How Changing College Majors Are Reshaping the Future Workforce. “Students are pivoting into majors aligned to high paying careers,” writes Gad Levanon, the chief economist at The Burning Glass Institute in his newsletter. “On some level, this reflects understandable concerns about employability in an increasingly precarious job market for new grads and ever-rising tuition costs. At the same time, some of the majors in decline portend future shortages in teaching, caregiving, and civic leadership, and may weaken society’s ability to navigate human challenges in an AI-driven world.” (LinkedIn)
