Kathleen is asked about the title in every media interview, before and since the Feb. 25 book release. “It has generated a lot of questions,” she said in our recent book chat. “I tell people to focus on the word, ‘who.’ Who needs college anymore? That’s in keeping with the design thinking frame, where you look at the needs of individuals and what needs are not being met.”
In the same conversation, Kathleen reminded us that only 38% of American adults have a four-year degree. “We never talk about the path to the American dream for the rest of folks,” she said. “We currently are not supporting the other really interesting pathways to financial sustainability — apprenticeships, short-term credentials. And that’s really why I wrote the book, to push the conversation around the 62% of who we call New Majority Learners at the Lab, the people for whom college was not designed.” Watch the full clip
She distills the point into one sentence in this SmartBrief essay: “The new paradigm is a ‘yes and’ paradigm that embraces college and/or other pathways instead of college or bust.”
What can colleges do moving forward? In this excellent Q&A with Inside Higher Ed, Kathleen shares her No. 1 suggestion: “College needs to be designed as a stepladder approach, where people can come in and out of it as they need, and at the very least, they can build earnings power along the way to help afford a degree program.”
In her Hechinger Report essay, Kathleen lists four more steps colleges can take to meet the demand for more choices, including “affordability must rule.”
From white-collar apprenticeships and micro-credential programs at local community colleges to online bootcamps, self-instruction using YouTube, and more—students are forging alternative paths to GREAT high-paying jobs. (source)
Today, we’re launching NextGenAI, a first-of-its-kind consortium with 15 leading research institutions dedicated to using AI to accelerate research breakthroughs and transform education.
AI has the power to drive progress in research and education—but only when people have the right tools to harness it. That’s why OpenAI is committing $50M in research grants, compute funding, and API access to support students, educators, and researchers advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
Uniting institutions across the U.S. and abroad, NextGenAI aims to catalyze progress at a rate faster than any one institution would alone. This initiative is built not only to fuel the next generation of discoveries, but also to prepare the next generation to shape AI’s future.
“My goal isn’t to make him a generative AI wizard,” White said. “It’s to give him a foundation for using AI to be creative, build, explore perspectives and enrich his learning.”
White is part of a growing number of parents teaching their young children how to use AI chatbots so they are prepared to deploy the tools responsibly as personal assistants for school, work and daily life when they’re older.
The problem is that these new roles demand a level of expertise that wasn’t expected from entry-level candidates in the past. Where someone might have previously learned on the job, they are now required to have relevant certifications, AI proficiency, or experience with digital platforms before they even apply.
Some current and emerging job titles that serve as entry points into industries include:
Digital marketing associate – This role often involves content creation, social media management, and working with AI-driven analytics tools.
Junior AI analyst – Employees in this role assist data science teams by labeling and refining machine learning datasets.
Customer success associate – Replacing traditional customer service roles, these professionals help manage AI-enhanced customer support systems.
Technical support specialist – While this role still involves troubleshooting software, it now often includes AI-driven diagnostics and automation oversight.
All of the articles listed below are from edutopia.org
4 Ways to Boost Students’ Self-Efficacy — by Tyler Rablin These strategies help students see what they have learned so they believe they can be successful in school in the future.
Self-efficacy, on the other hand, focuses on outcomes to drive beliefs. In essence, self-efficacy involves intentionally providing students with evidence of early success to help them build the belief that they can be successful in the future.
Self-efficacy has been a powerful focus for me because it helps me to be more intentional as a teacher. It requires me to be mindful of how I structure assessments, feedback, etc., to provide students with evidence of their successes early on to help them see potential future successes.
Maintaining Students’ Focus in the Spring — by Miriam Plotinsky Teachers can use these small ‘upgrades’ or tweaks to their regular practices to help keep students focused and involved.
As a recent MindShift article notes, “The second semester brings a lot of potential challenges to teachers’ regularly scheduled programming because of standardized testing, graduation events, and student burnout.” These challenges may be complex, but they are not insurmountable. With subtle shifts in practice, classrooms can remain safe and productive spaces—even in the spring.
She recommends a “coping jar” to help students identify moments of angst and manage their feelings. Fagell explains that when students find an effective coping mechanism, they write their idea on one side of a Popsicle stick and explain how it works on the other side. As students add ideas to the jar, they have an increased awareness of coping strategies and the importance of helping one another.
10 Picture Books That Showcase Collaboration — by Kristin Rydholm These entertaining stories feature collaboration and social-emotional skills to highlight the benefit of working together to accomplish a goal.
Are you an early childhood teacher in search of relationship-building resources to help unify your classroom? Have I got a book list for you! In the verbiage of 1970s infomercials: “This collection has everything!” The main characters are early childhood students, the setting is the school, and each plot requires the class to work collaboratively. The characters are united in curiosity, determination, and mission to work on accomplishing projects together that they couldn’t possibly do alone.
My goal is to try to preserve the messy, creative core of what it means to be an educator: curiosity, critical thinking, and the grit and energy to solve problems without always resorting to shortcuts—technological or otherwise. My hope is that my students will do the same.
Unplug and reconnect: Challenge yourself and your students to embark on an AI detox. Step away from AI tools where possible, and rediscover the power of human creativity and independent thought. Start a journal to document the journey, exploring questions like “How does it feel to rely solely on my own intellect?” or“What challenges arise when AI isn’t there to assist?” This activity can foster resilience, raise self-awareness, and cultivate a deeper appreciation for the human capacity to think, create, problem-solve, and innovate.
Blind Spot on AI — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain Office tasks are being automated now, but nobody has answers on how education and worker upskilling should change.
Students and workers will need help adjusting to a labor market that appears to be on the verge of a historic disruption as many business processes are automated. Yet job projections and policy ideas are sorely lacking.
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The benefits of agentic AI are already clear for a wide range of organizations, including small nonprofits like CareerVillage. But the ability to automate a broad range of business processes means that education programs and skills training for knowledge workers will need to change. And as Chung writes in a must-read essay, we have a blind spot with predicting the impacts of agentic AI on the labor market.
“Without robust projections,” he writes, “policymakers, businesses, and educators won’t be able to come to terms with how rapidly we need to start this upskilling.”
Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. At its heart, ableism is rooted in the assumption that disabled people require ‘fixing’ and defines people by their disability. Like racism and sexism, ableism classifies entire groups of people as ‘less than,’ and includes harmful stereotypes, misconceptions, and generalizations of people with disabilities. .
The Learning Accelerator is building an evidence base of what high-quality virtual and hybrid learning looks like and how it can be a catalyst for expanding access to powerful learning opportunities.
An analysis of 64 high-quality models revealed that virtual and hybrid learning occurs in various contexts, from state-based, fully-virtual programs to individual, hybrid schools and meets the needs of different student populations, including those underserved or disengaged by traditional education systems as well as looking for increased flexibility and course access.
What if students had the power to design their own learning journeys?
Across the U.S., states are moving beyond one-size-fits-all education and embracing unbundled learning, creating personalized pathways that equip students with the skills they need for the future. Getting Smart’s Unbundled Learning Podcast Series explores how Colorado, Arizona, and New Hampshire are leading the way—expanding real-world learning, shifting to competency-based models, empowering learner agency, and aligning education with workforce needs.
For policymakers, the newly released Policymaker’s Guide offers a roadmap for fostering unbundled systems. It highlights key priorities such as competency-driven accountability, flexible credentialing, and funding models that prioritize equity, helping state leaders create policies that expand opportunities for all learners.
Explore how unbundled learning is shaping the future of education and how states can build more personalized, future-ready systems.
New Pathways > Unbundled Learning — from gettingsmart.com We used to think that learning had to happen in a school building. Spoiler alert…that was never true.
How might we create an ecosystem where learning doesn’t just happen at school? With Unbundled Learning, learners don’t need permission to have equitable experiences. Unbundled Learning removes all the barriers and allows learning to happen at school, after school, with industry partners and anywhere a learner can imagine. Unbundled Learning is the foundation for which new learning models are built, learners are supported and systems are scaled.
If we used to think that school was the only answer, now we know we have options. .
I am always happy when my work generates a public discussion. That happened after a January column I wrote about a prominent scholar’s critique of the evidence for including children with disabilities in general education classrooms. Advocates, parents and teachers argued for inclusion, against inclusion and for some hybrid of the two. The director of education at the Learning Disabilities Association of America weighed in, as did the commissioner of special education research at the U.S. Department of Education. More than 160 people commented on one Reddit discussion about the story. Here’s a sampling of views I received or saw on social media.
When seeking guidance on classroom practice, teachers—understandably—tend to trust other teachers the most. An innovative fellowship program connects teachers with one another to provide concrete examples of what effective literacy instruction looks like.
A small philanthropy called the Goyen Foundation sponsors the program, now in its third year. For each cohort, the foundation selects 12 to 14 educators who are skilled in systematically teaching foundational reading skills while simultaneously building the knowledge that enables reading comprehension.
The Goyen Literacy Fellows document their own classroom practice, mostly through videos that are posted on social media platforms like X/Twitter and Facebook. They also interact with other educators who may have heard about “structured literacy” but aren’t sure what it means or how it’s done.
Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results — from nytimes.com by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop are the authors of “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.”
In a polarized nation, one point of agreement deserves more attention: Young adults say they feel woefully unprepared for life in the work force, and employers say they’re right.
In a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. Employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.
There’s a reason the system isn’t serving people well, and it goes beyond the usual culprits of social media and Covid. Many recent graduates aren’t able to set targets, take initiative, figure things out and deal with setbacks — because in school and at home they were too rarely afforded any agency.
Maybe it’s time to define a higher ideal for education, less about ranking and sorting students on narrow measures of achievement and more about helping young people figure out how to unlock their potential and how to operate in the world. Amid the drumbeat of evolving artificial intelligence, wars, rising authoritarianism, political polarization and digital disconnection, they need to learn a lot more than how to follow instructions.
Youth Voice & Choice
At XQ, we don’t see high schools as the tail end of K-12 education. Instead, we believe they are pivotal spaces for unleashing a young person’s sense of possibility and agency—so much so that it’s one of our Design Principles for school-wide success: Youth Voice and Choice.
Anderson and Winthrop, too, emphasize that when students feel they can shape the direction of their learning, they gain essential life skills: setting targets, identifying strategies, monitoring progress, and course-correcting when inevitable challenges arise. These aptitudes translate directly to college readiness, workforce performance, and a strong sense of agency in adulthood. As the authors note, even small doses of agency—like letting students choose which angle of a topic to explore—can radically transform how teens engage with the material and each other.
We’ve long championed youth voice and choice as a key element for transforming the traditional high school experience. By adopting this design principle, educators and school leaders empower students to be agents of their own learning journeys. They celebrate students’ personal growth and consistently provide opportunities for them to set goals and reflect on how they learn best.
By shifting away from checklists and mindless compliance, we can transform high schools into spaces of curiosity, discovery, and lasting engagement—where a spark lit in 9th grade can guide and energize students for a lifetime.
Faculty members often design and revise courses with limited direct feedback from students. In this episode, Laurel Willingham-McLain and Jacques Safari Mwayaona join us to discuss a program in which faculty work with trained student consultants to improve the student learning experience. Laurel is a consulting faculty developer at the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Syracuse University. Jacques is a Faculty Development Fellow, also at Syracuse University. Laurel and Jacques both work with the Students Consulting on Teaching program at Syracuse University.
That’s because the current class of high school seniors is the last before a long decline begins in the number of 18-year-olds — the traditional age of students when they enter college.
This so-called demographic cliff has been predicted ever since Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007 — a falling birth rate that has not recovered since, except for a slight blip after the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Demographers say it will finally arrive in the fall of this year. That’s when recruiting offices will begin to confront the long-anticipated drop-off in the number of applicants from among the next class of high school seniors.
“A few hundred thousand per year might not sound like a lot,” Strohl said. “But multiply that by a decade and it has a big impact.”
From DSC: I remember seeing graphics about this demographic cliff over a decade ago…so institutions of traditional higher education have seen this coming for many years now (and the article references this as well). But it’s still important and the ramifications of this could be significant for many colleges and universities out there (for students, faculty, staff, and administrations).
Will there be new business models?
More lifelong learning models?
Additions to the curricula?
I sure hope so.
Higher Ed’s Governance Problem— from chronicle.com by Brian Rosenberg; via Ryan Craig Boards are bloated and ineffectual.
According to the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, the average size of a private nonprofit college or university board is 28 (larger than a major-league baseball roster), though boards of elite colleges tend to skew even larger: closer to 40, according to a study done by McKinsey.
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By way of comparison, the average size of the board of directors of a publicly traded company in the United States is nine. If that seems too “corporate,” consider that the average size of the board of a nonprofit health-care institution is 13…
Still, anyone who studies organizational effectiveness would tell you that college and university boards are much too large, as would almost any college or university president when speaking off the record. Getting 12 people to spend significant time studying serious challenges and then reaching consensus about how to tackle those challenges is a heavy lift. Doing this with 25 or 35 or 45 people is close to impossible.
In fact, the sum is small compared to what other colleges and universities are investing in advertising, marketing and promotion, which has been steadily rising and is on track this year to be nearly double what it was last year.
Among the reasons are a steep ongoing decline in enrollment, made worse by the pandemic, and increasing competition from online providers and others.
“Private schools in particular are acutely conscious of the demographics in this country. They’re competing for students, and marketing is how you have to do that.”
John Garvey, president, Catholic University
From DSC:
And for you students out there, check this sound advice out!
Introducing the 2025 Wonder Media Calendar for tweens, teens, and their families/households.Designed by Sue Ellen Christian and her students in her Global Media Literacy class (in the fall 2024 semester at Western Michigan University), the calendar’s purpose is to help people create a new year filled with skills and smart decisions about their media use. This calendar is part of the ongoing Wonder Media Library.comproject that includes videos, lesson plans, games, songs and more. The website is funded by a generous grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, in partnership with Western Michigan University and the Library of Michigan.
“I mean, that’s what I’ll always want for my own children and, frankly, for anyone’s children,” Khan said. “And the hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time standing next to a student, figuring them out, having a person-to-person connection.”
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“After a week you start to realize, like, how you can use it,” Brockman said. “That’s been one of the really important things about working with Sal and his team, to really figure out what’s the right way to sort of bring this to parents and to teachers and to classrooms and to do that in a way…so that the students really learn and aren’t just, you know, asking for the answers and that the parents can have oversight and the teachers can be involved in that process.”
More than 100 colleges and high schools are turning to a new AI tool called Nectir, allowing teachers to create a personalized learning partner that’s trained on their syllabi, textbooks, and assignments to help students with anything from questions related to their coursework to essay writing assistance and even future career guidance.
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With Nectir, teachers can create an AI assistant tailored to their specific needs, whether for a single class, a department, or the entire campus. There are various personalization options available, enabling teachers to establish clear boundaries for the AI’s interactions, such as programming the assistant to assist only with certain subjects or responding in a way that aligns with their teaching style.
“It’ll really be that customized learning partner. Every single conversation that a student has with any of their assistants will then be fed into that student profile for them to be able to see based on what the AI thinks, what should I be doing next, not only in my educational journey, but in my career journey,” Ghai said.
How Will AI Influence Higher Ed in 2025? — from insidehighered.com by Kathryn Palmer No one knows for sure, but Inside Higher Ed asked seven experts for their predictions.
As the technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, no one knows for sure how AI will influence higher education in 2025. But several experts offered Inside Higher Ed their predictions—and some guidance—for how colleges and universities will have to navigate AI’s potential in the new year.
In the short term, A.I. will help teachers create lesson plans, find illustrative examples and generate quizzes tailored to each student. Customized problem sets will serve as tools to combat cheating while A.I. provides instant feedback.
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In the longer term, it’s possible to imagine a world where A.I. can ingest rich learner data and create personalized learning paths for students, all within a curriculum established by the teacher. Teachers can continue to be deeply involved in fostering student discussions, guiding group projects and engaging their students, while A.I. handles grading and uses the Socratic method to help students discover answers on their own. Teachers provide encouragement and one-on-one support when needed, using their newfound availability to give students some extra care.
Let’s be clear: A.I. will never replace the human touch that is so vital to education. No algorithm can replicate the empathy, creativity and passion a teacher brings to the classroom. But A.I. can certainly amplify those qualities. It can be our co-pilot, our chief of staff helping us extend our reach and improve our effectiveness.
Today, I want to reflect on two recent OpenAI developments that highlight this evolution: their belated publication of advice for students on integrating AI into writing workflows, and last week’s launch of the full GPTo1 Pro version. When OpenAI released their student writing guide, there were plenty of snarky comments about how this guidance arrives almost a year after they thoroughly disrupted the educational landscape. Fair enough – I took my own side swipes initially. But let’s look at what they’re actually advising, because the details matter more than the timing.
Tutoring programs exploded in the last five years as states and school districts searched for ways to counter plummeting achievement during COVID. But the cost of providing supplemental instruction to tens of millions of students can be eye-watering, even as the results seem to taper off as programs serve more students.
That’s where artificial intelligence could prove a decisive advantage. A report circulated in October by the National Student Support Accelerator found that an AI-powered tutoring assistant significantly improved the performance of hundreds of tutors by prompting them with new ways to explain concepts to students. With the help of the tool, dubbed Tutor CoPilot, students assigned to the weakest tutors began posting academic results nearly equal to those assigned to the strongest. And the cost to run the program was just $20 per pupil.
Faculty must have the time and support necessary to come to terms with this new technology and that requires us to change how we view professional development in higher education and K-12. We cannot treat generative AI as a one-off problem that can be solved by a workshop, an invited talk, or a course policy discussion. Generative AI in education has to be viewed as a continuum. Faculty need a myriad of support options each semester:
Course buyouts
Fellowships
Learning communities
Reading groups
AI Institutes and workshops
Funding to explore the scholarship of teaching and learning around generative AI
Education leaders should focus on integrating AI literacy, civic education, and work-based learning to equip students for future challenges and opportunities.
Building social capital and personalized learning environments will be crucial for student success in a world increasingly influenced by AI and decentralized power structures.
A Three-Phase, Rational System of Education — from petergray.substack.com by Peter Gray; with thanks to Dr. Kate Christian for this resource What will replace k-12 and college?
A Three-Phase, Rational System of Education I don’t know just how or how fast the change will happen, but I think the days of K-12 and four years of college are numbered and sanity will begin to prevail in the educational world. I envision a future with something like the following three-phase approach to education:
Phase I. Discovery: Learning about your world, your self, and how the two fit together.… Phase II. Exploring a career path.… Phase III. Becoming credentialed for specialized work.…
