🎒 The Decline of Student Choice?

In today's issue: The coming shrinking of majors; creative human skills as a way forward in an AI-world; why new grads might find better luck in the job market in smaller cities.

🖐️ Help with a story: Lots of pieces in this week's newsletter about the impact of AI on entry-level jobs. That's why I'm working on a larger magazine piece about the topic.

• I'm looking to interview recent college grads who might still be job hunting, especially those who thought they had the "right" major for the job market 3 or 4 years ago and now believe AI might be impacting some of the jobs they're interested in (or have been told that).
• I'm also interested in talking to rising seniors in college about similar issues.

➡️ Hit reply if you're interested in talking to me or know someone who is.

📺 Last week, we held our second exclusive webinar for those who pre-ordered Dream School: Finding the College That's Right For You and completed a proof-of-purchase here.

The focus of our discussion: the college-to-career transition, the right way. Three experts on the journey to landing a job joined me for the hour.

Among my key takeaways: 

1. Start early. Build momentum. Students who treat career development as a four-year process—not a senior-year scramble—end up with better jobs and more confidence.

Employers remember the student who started engaging early, Lindsey Pollak told us, not the one who shows up senior year asking for a job. Pollak is author of Getting from College to Career: Your Essential Guide to Succeeding in the Real Word.

Pollak's four-year plan for students:

• Freshman year: Gather information by just going to the career center and trying lots of things. My suggestion: job shadow, if you can.
• Sophomore year: Hone in on your major and the classes you like. Get some work experience. Build a LinkedIn profile and write a resume.
• Junior year: Start informational interviews so you’re more able to say what kinds of jobs you might be interested in. Get an internship, if you can.
• Senior year: If you’ve been building relationships for several years, this is where you ask for job recommendations. "It's the cumulative nature of the search that a lot of people miss,” Pollak said. 

2. Skills change fast—colleges must catch up. Employers say foundational skills like communication, confidence, and project management are essential—yet they’re often missing. And with 37% of job skills changing every five years, students need digital fluency and adaptability to stay competitive.

• Andy Chan, who heads up personal and career development at Wake Forest University, told us how to evaluate a college’s career culture during campus visits: ask about published outcomes data, alumni engagement, and employer partnerships. 

3. Work-based learning is the X-factor. Internships, co-ops, and job shadowing are the clearest signals of a strong career culture on campus. 

• Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, presented data showing that schools with higher levels of work-based learning outperform their peers.

🔔 Don’t want to miss the next exclusive webinar—on how to spot a campus with good teaching? It’s easy, just make sure you pre-order Dream School and complete the proof of purchase to get access to the webinar and other bonuses.  

EVENT

Do you have questions about what the shift in federal policies mean for colleges, how the enrollment cliff might impact campuses, or how to judge the ROI of a degree in a world being reshaped by AI?

Throughout August, I’m partnering with several outside groups to participate in free webinars (open to anyone).

Next up: Road2College, which runs the popular Facebook Group, Paying for College 101. 

📍 Higher Ed in Transition: What Families Need to Know

🗓️ Wednesday, August 13 at 8:30 p.m. ET.

👉Register here for free

THE LEAD

For the last several years, “brands and retailers of everything from toys to T-shirts are cutting back shoppers’ choices, reasoning that less means more for the bottom line,” the Wall Street Journal reported last summer. 

Now add to that list, colleges and universities.  

As reported in the last issue of Next, six public colleges and universities in Indiana eliminated or combined more than 400 academic programs this month before a new state law took effect requiring them to get permission to continue low-enrollment programs.

With many colleges facing budget deficits going into this fall, similar cuts and program consolidations are likely elsewhere in the year ahead. 

Colleges have long bragged about all the majors they offer; prospective students hear about them in the mail they get and on the campus tours they take. But the reality is that very few students major in most of the programs listed in a college catalog. 

On many campuses, half of the students are enrolled in just 10 academic majors. 

One question I get often from parents is whether a college their kid is considering will go out of business; a better question to ask is whether a college has the financial wherewithal to fulfill the promises it makes during the recruitment process—including continuing your major. 

The U.S. Department of Education’s College Navigator website lists the number of degrees awarded by year and program for each college. From those annual numbers, you could infer program sizes over four years. 

But you should also ask about enrollment in your major, because enrolling in a small program can be risky. 

• For starters, small programs might offer required courses infrequently and not necessarily when you want them, so you might not (without waivers) get the classes you need to graduate in four years. 
• And smaller majors without strong reputations or that don’t serve up required introductory core classes for everyone else on campus are prime candidates for cutting if a school needs to trim expenses.

The question is as schools cut and consolidate programs, will fewer choices hook students like they have discriminating consumers in the retail world or make undergrads feel like they’re getting a thinned-out experience?

Len Gutkin, writing in the The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Review newsletter this week, argued that the “serious reading," which had long been a hallmark of many of the programs facing cuts now, is “simply less attractive, and also harder, than it used to be” for students.

So don’t blame the university leaders cutting programs; the demand is simply not there.

But if colleges all end up cutting many of the same academic programs for lack of demand, then all they’ll do is end up replicating one of the problems they’re trying to solve: differentiating themselves in the marketplace. They’ll once again look like other universities, just less comprehensive.

Complementing AI, Not Competing 

🎓 As anyone who graduated from college this year knows, those with newly minted bachelor’s degrees are struggling to find good jobs in a market already being shaped by AI. 

The big picture: AI is especially influencing work where creativity is at the core—which is to say almost every knowledge job—including marketing, customer service, and product design. 

• 7 out of 10 non-creative job roles now require creative skills.
• Colleges “must move from teaching knowledge to teaching the integration of knowledge,” said Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University and author of Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “A machine doesn’t understand context. That’s the human edge. And it starts with students mastering the integration of tech literacy, data literacy, and human literacy.” 

🦾 This tremendous potential for AI to revolutionize entire fields is forcing a reckoning with how colleges prepare workers, according to a new paper I recently published, “The AI-Ready Graduate.”

What’s happening: Students are discovering that generative AI allows them to engage with creative disciplines they might never have explored otherwise.

• 71% of businesses use AI primarily for innovation and creativity—not automation.
• Workers with creative skills see salary increases 2-3x higher when changing jobs.
• One-third of students already use AI to create images; 16% make music.
• Academic leaders and faculty members tend to view AI-assisted creative work as empowering, compared to AI-generated essays or problem sets, which they see as cheating. 

What's shifting: "Creative processes like graphic design will increasingly be the domain of people with ideas rather than those who spent years honing their technical skills," says IBM's Matt Candy.

Bottom line: Students entering college today will graduate into a job market where AI fluency isn’t optional—it’s essential. The paper offers a framework for colleges and universities to consider adopting.

• “For a student to navigate four years of college, then to hit the world of work, and not have had any exposure on how to use AI? That’s a disservice to the student,” said C. Edward Watson of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and author of Teaching with AI. “It’s very clear within the world of work that you’ll be left behind if you’re not using AI.”

📍 Download the white paper, “The AI-Ready Graduate.” (with support from Adobe)

CREDIT WATCH

💳 An occasional look from a recent bond ratings action in higher ed.

The institution: Furman University 

Rating: Moody's affirmed A2

Outlook: Stable

📈 The positive: 

• Solid fundraising and regular reinvestment in facilities “is evidenced by a well-maintained campus with good curb appeal.”
• Fall 2024 total enrollment increased for the second consecutive year, up 3%.
• Endowment income, including recurring gifts from The Duke Endowment, and Furman's equity interest in the Hollingsworth Funds provide some buffer.

📉 The negative:

• Weakened operating performance reflects both student market challenges, demonstrated by a rising total tuition discount of 60%, and elevated expenses to support Furman's high-touch operating model.

SUPPLEMENTS

🏙️ The Rise of the Rest. America's biggest cities aren't the best ones to find your first job, the Wall Street Journal reports from a new study by payroll-services provider, ADP.  The top 5 cities for job hunters: Raleigh, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Austin, Birmingham. Meanwhile, LinkedIn identified “25 emerging metro areas where hiring is accelerating, job postings are surging and talent migration is reshaping local economies.” No. 1 on LinkedIn's list: Grand Rapids, MI. (Wall Street Journal, gift link; LinkedIn)

👨🏻‍💻 Gen X Feels Unprepared for Jobs. A new study that polled thousands of 16- to 24-year-olds, parents of young adults, counselors, educators and employers found a clear divide on how each group viewed today’s job market. The report from the Schultz Family Foundation and HarrisX found parents and educators draw on their personal experience when giving career advice although they don't always line up with the rapidly changing labor market. (Schultz Family Foundation)

🖇️ The Loss of the DC Internship. “The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal government have pushed many lifetime civil servants out of their roles. They have also disrupted people at the other end of the career spectrum: summer interns, those energetic new arrivals who count on internships to serve as the on-ramp to their professional lives.” (New York Times; gift link)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff