🦾 Getting College Grads Ready for AI

☀️ Good Morning! Thanks for reading Next. If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here. 

🦃 It seems everyone is time-pressed getting ready for Thanksgiving next week (including me!), so I hope you appreciate this abbreviated version of Next to catch up on some recent higher ed developments.

EVENTS

🗽 A reminder for those in the New York City area... I'll be winding down the fall leg of the Dream School book tour at the iconic 92nd Street Y in a conversation with my friend, David Muir, anchor of ABC News World News Tonight. Tickets for the discussion on Monday, December 1 are nearly sold out, so be sure to get yours today.

🖥️ Join me for the final Next Office Hour of 2025, a timely conversation about how colleges can grow their enrollment by aligning programs to what learners are looking for.

We have a great panel lined up for this webinar, Wednesday, December 3, at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, including:

• Chuck Welch, president, American Association of State Colleges and Universities
• Ora H. Pescovitz, president, Oakland University
• Richard J. Helldobler, president, William Paterson University

👉 To join live or get a recording afterward, register for free. (Support from Risepoint).

Creating, Not Teaching, With AI 

Caption: A live recording of the Future U. podcast last month at Adobe's headquarters in San Jose.

With the latest jobs numbers out this morning, attention will turn to the anemic employment market for recent college grads, how much AI is to blame, and what higher ed can do to help students.

• Going into this school year, the unemployment rate for new college graduates was 9.3%, more than twice the national average.
• The news for the Class of 2026 might not be much better. In a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, nearly half of 200 employers rated the outlook for the Class of 2026 as poor or fair, the most pessimistic outlook since the first year of the pandemic.

What’s happening: At a live recording of the Future U. podcast at Adobe’s EduMAX conference last month in San Jose, Michael Horn and I dug into how AI is reshaping the job market for college graduates.

• Even as colleges continue to argue over AI as a tool for cheating, employers are quietly using the technology to automate the very “starter” work new grads used to do.
• As the bottom rungs of the career ladder disappear, employers are cutting internships and early-career programs. College interns and recent college graduates require time and resources just when many companies are unsure about their future workforce needs.
• “It’s real easy to say ‘college students are expensive,’” Sim Kho told us during the podcast. “Not from a salary standpoint, but from the investment we have to make.” Kho is founder of Kho Labs and a longtime early-careers leader at JPMorgan, KPMG, Discover, and Raymond James.
• It can take roughly 18 months for new college hires to pay off in terms of productivity. And then? “They get really fidgety,” Kho added, and look for other jobs. “So you can see the challenges from an HR standpoint,” Kho said, “‘Where are we getting value? Will AI solve this for us?’”

What this means: Over the last decade, teenagers have largely flocked to what they saw as career-specific majors in STEM and business.

• The panelists—Kho; Allison Salisbury, founder and CEO of Humanist Venture Studio; and Jennifer Sparrow, chief academic technology officer at New York University—all agreed the future belongs to the creatives in every discipline.
• “We have to move from being consumers of AI to being creators with it,” Salisbury said.
• Salisbury was specific in differentiating between being creative and being a creator. “Being a creator is actually bringing the activation energy and the motivation to bring something into the world and then the skill set to do it,” she said. “So it’s the taste to know what matters. It’s the activation energy to do it. It’s the problem identification on what's even worth building."

Yes, but: The upheaval in the early career job market has caught higher education flat-footed.

Faculty adoption is lagging. Sparrow noted that even now 60% to 70% of faculty in many places aren’t using generative AI in their own work, while students already are.

Bottom line: AI isn’t the threat to colleges, staying stuck in their current mindset about AI is. Colleges that redesign curriculum around giving students agency, applied learning, and human skills will graduate students who succeed in an AI-driven labor market. The shift now in higher ed needs to be from protecting students from AI to preparing creators who can steer it.

🎧 Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts (and subscribe and rate us while you’re there).

📺 Watch the episode recorded live from Adobe’s headquarters on our YouTube channel.

SUPPLEMENTS

🎓 College Enrollment Climbs, But Computer Science Takes a Hit. Preliminary data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows total enrollment in higher ed rising 2% this fall, with undergraduates driving most of the gains. Community colleges posted the biggest jump (+4%). Certificate programs continue to surge (+6.6%), while master’s degrees are the only credential slipping (-0.6%). Enrollment among Hispanic, Black, and multiracial students continues to climb, even as White undergraduate enrollment fell 3.7%. The standout reversal is in computer science, which dropped 7.7% this fall and is down 5.3% since 2023, a rare pullback in a field colleges once banked on for nonstop growth. (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center)

🌎 New International Student Enrollments Plummeted This Fall. Efforts by the Trump administration to cut the number of international students on American college campus seem to be working: first-time enrollments fell by 17% this fall, according to data published this week by the Institute of International Education. But the drop-off can’t only be blamed on the administration’s policies because last fall also saw a decrease of 7%, the report found. Even with the decline in new students, the overall number of international students has remained relatively steady thanks to a huge post-Covid bump. (Latitudes)

📉 Education Department Shrinks Even Further. The Education Department signed six interagency agreements this week that will move a wide swath of higher-ed programs to other federal offices as part of a broader plan to dismantle the agency’s bureaucracy. Most higher-education grants are headed to the Labor Department, while language-education programs shift to State, and tribal-college  programs move to Interior. The Department will still set budgets and priorities, but the receiving agencies will run day-to-day administration. The restructuring follows two rounds of layoffs and comes amid Trump’s order to shrink the Department “to the maximum extent permitted by law.” (Inside Higher Ed).

As we head into Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for your support of this newsletter. If you like this newsletter and my books and want to support me, there are a few ways you can:

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Until next time, Cheers — Jeff