How AI Could Reshape Higher Ed

Jeff, it is good to see you actually in a chair in your house in the place where you we normally record this podcast because I know you have been on the road nearly non stop this fall since your book came out.

Yeah, Michael, this last month has been kind of like a year, but. But I've learned so much in the questions parents, students and counselors are asking me on the road. So it's going to be good to catch up with you on this episode of Future youe.

This episode of Future youe 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 youe 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.

I'm jeff salingo.

And I'm michael horn. Jeff, we've been on our own mini tour of sorts, if you will, this fall with Future U tour stop at Butler University and Adobe's Edumax Conference in the Bay Area. But you've also been out quite a bit. It's actually been hard to keep track of you crisscrossing the country in different states all over and getting out of your comfort zone in terms of the geographies perhaps, but spending time. I know where you love spending time with actual students, high school counselors, learning from them, parents. I'm curious, given all that's happening in higher ed right now. Like you said in the intro, it feels like a year to you in just a month, but I think it feels like a decade to some administrators over the last 12 months.

That's true.

What's on the minds of families and the counselors who advise them and how are they absorbing all this, these headlines around higher ed?

Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of a disconnect. So I've been in San Francisco, Denver, New York City, in the suburbs, and Washington, D.C. so all big metropolitan areas so far in this book tour. Also Toronto, so we have a little bit of the Canadian representation there as well. And what I'm hearing, first of all is that there's the usual questions that I would have gotten two, three, four, five, six years ago about the SAT and about transcripts and things like that. So there's a little bit of a disconnect given the moment that we're living in right now in higher ed. But at every single stop there will be questions around what is the impact of research spending on undergraduate education? What is the impact of the Trump administration and its crackdown on campus protests in colleges? What's the impact going to be on higher education? The other big one that I get, Michael, really surrounds AI. We're going to be talking more about that this season, of course, on Future youe, but really, what is the future of college? And I think some of this is framed on what's going on in D.C. right there is this big compact that just came out. The Trump administration sent it to nine institutions. It's a proposal to reform campus operations from reducing the number of international students to requiring standardized tests. And if they sign this compact, again, these nine colleges and universities that got it, they'll get preferential access to federal funds. So at the time of recording, we don't have anyone that actually signed it. But, but again, there's, you know, stuff about what's going on in D.C. is clearly on people's minds when they ask about the future of college. I think some of it is also around the declining confidence in higher ed overall. And is this worth spending money on? You know, clearly affordability keeps cropping up in these conversations. They want to know more about merit aid. They want to know more about financial aid in general. But of course, I think a lot of this is really driven by AI. And, you know, in the middle of this tour landed this fascinating piece in the New Yorker that we'll link to in the show Notes Michael, that I sent to you, which is Should College Get Harder? Was the headline. And it really argues some of the things that we've been talking about here, that AI threatens to reshape knowledge work, and that college has become drastically easier, even as what we're going to require people to do in the future with AI is actually going to be harder. Right. And so the author of this piece talks about, you know, professors prioritizing research over instruction. Grade inflation has soared. Students study has half as much as they did decades ago. Students are really there for internships and extracurricular activities to really distinguish themselves because grades no longer do that. And their argument was that AI compounds these problems because now students can use chatbots to fake learning and so forth. And so it really reminds me, Michael, of this dinner conversation I had with university leaders in Texas just a couple of months ago. And the conversation at dinner was, well, if I could develop and teach a course, and if AI can take a course, both of which, by the way, have happened, what's the purpose of the university at the end of the day,

yeah, well, it's a good question, by the way. It's interesting to me. I've been on a couple campuses over the fall in Wichita State. They were one of our listeners actually there. She was asking a lot of questions around grade inflation and some of the artificial intelligence and the competing supply and demand pressures, if you will. Right on. Universities for more rigor from companies, if you will, but less rigor perhaps from the students and given habits and things of that nature. And when you sent the New Yorker article, I was reflecting on, I'm curious, your take, but I was reflecting on, I felt like a. I felt like it described my college experience quite a bit actually, with my extracurriculars being the priority in some ways and less my classes. Maybe as a communications major at Ithaca, you had a different experience. But put that aside for a moment. When I think about the purpose though, of a college or university in the age of AI, the first thing I think about is we really have to be careful, even more so I think than in the past to talk about what segment of higher ed we're talking about. And I'm curious your take on that. But like, you know, the Dartmouth president, she had a piece in the Atlantic on this question and said like, you know, this knowledge view of just knowledge dispensation, if you will, of the university is a very overly simplistic view of what a university or college does, has done and so forth, that colleges and universities are much more complex. They do lots of different things. And as I was reading it, I was just thinking, yeah, we have to pull out. I think the college university that's very obsessed with training to get the job or get the promotion, you know, sort of the online players, community colleges maybe, and things of that nature versus perhaps the idyllic experience. I will give you my answer, but I'm just curious, like, what's your reaction to that? What segment should we talk about?

Well, I think exactly. I mean, universities obviously do many different things and there is definitely the training part of it, which I think I might clip first because it's easy to design an AI driven course where literally you're just being trained to do something. But I would also argue, and you know, most of the university officials around the table with me in Texas were mostly R1 research universities, regional publics, some privates mixed in there as well. But also at the research level is that I think that, you know, we've talked a lot about this on the show about teaching and learning still remains at some places, you know, woefully Inadequate. In fact, it's good. You know, I, I talked with Corbin Campbell, who's written a book on college teaching. She's a professor at American University. She's quoted in my, my new book. And she's done a lot of studies at, you know, most selective colleges, less selective colleges, liberal arts colleges, which by the way, are supposed to be focused on undergraduate teaching. And she says they do the best. But still, most professors were never trained in teaching. Many teach the same way they were taught, and many teach the same way they've taught for 20 years. And so if all they're doing is that knowledge, delivering knowledge essentially through the lecture, and even if they're using other types of flipped classrooms that were hot, it seems like maybe 10 years ago. I'm still wondering, though, whether they are ready for the age of AI, where students not only could do most of the work through AI, but want to be engaged in, in different ways. Michael and you've seen the same surveys that I have seen where students feel ill prepared for a workforce driven by AI. They want to learn more. They think their faculty are really behind on it. And so does this almost take a pause for colleges and universities to figure out what their strateg strategy should be? I feel like the first couple of years of AI colleges and universities were like, okay, we're going to crack down now. They're like, okay, we have to accept this. But it still seems like course level or school level. I feel like with maybe the exception of Ohio State, I still don't quite know what it means for AI throughout the curriculum there. Right. But it seems to me that college universities need to step back, have a real focus on this for maybe the next year or so to say, here's what we need to do about this. And one of my concerns, to be honest with you, about all that's happening in Washington right now is that it distracts college leaders from kind of doing their jobs for the most part, because they're always addressing the next issue and the next crisis. And so nobody's going to say, you know what, we're really going to take a deep dive on AI for the next year and try to figure out how our teaching and learning should change.

Well, I think that's what's interesting right now is some of the startup universities being built around an AI core, you know, matter in space. Our friend Paul LeBlanc, right. You got New State University, Sasha Thackenberry, some ex duolingo employers, excuse me, employees, I think tentatively called outsmart or something like that. These AI Native universities, I think may put that question at the fore. And I think as much with higher ed, I think part of the challenge, like we've seen in the Trump tug of war. I agree it's distracting leaders from this question. And leaders have a very difficult time penetrating into the academic core at a lot of these places to actually rethink the teaching and learning. And so that's part of it. And let's address maybe that segment and leave aside some of the more training focused colleges and universities, if you will, and just say, like, I think that faculty centered college and university experience. To me, AI doesn't replace the need for it. Like the number of autodidact learners very small in the world. Yes. It's incredible to do just in time learning by having a conversation with ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. I'm using it all the time for that purpose. When there's like an area of casual interest that comes up and I want to quickly dive deep and learn something about it and foundational knowledge learning, place to create connections, place to explore with deeper experiences, the extracurriculars that I think are actually extremely valuable in figuring out what you want to go do and the things that energize you. And that colleges and universities should probably be leaning more in on to make it an intentional part of the experience that every single student is graduating with real experience where they're actually using AI in the context of that and then reflecting on purpose to understand what does it mean about me as an individual, like, where do I want to lean in? This seems to me, Jeff, like an actually centering opportunity for the college and university to become more relevant and more tied to what I think students really need and they might want to do. But it forces a recognition that the job to be done is not actually the classes themselves.

Right. That leads us, I think, to a very good point. Michael. I was just actually wondering when you would get to the job to be done here because it was brought up in this New Yorker piece. You know, does college just essentially become a personal development retreat, as they put it? I'll put retreat in quotes. Quotes sounds kind of nice to me. Right. Maybe the lazy rivers will actually serve a purpose at that point. But. But this idea that we know, for example, we know that students are completely have been less disengaged or more disengaged after the pandemic. We know they're, you know, the work of anxious generation and Jonathan Haidt around concerns about our students ready for the workplace and college in general. Right. The whole Social emotional aspect of colleges. Right. Is. And we also know that work and work based learning is more critical than ever before. And I brought this up before, you know, Andy Randy Bass at Georgetown has talked about the two cultures problem in higher ed. Used to be between the humanities and sciences. He now believes it's between academic learning and experiential learning. Yeah. So if we kind of redesign the college experience around this personal development retreat. What however you feel about that word retreat. But let's, let's focus on the personal development piece of this where we are focused on helping students with those problem solving skills, with those ability to work with other people and work in teams. You know, the kind of creating, you know, finding similarities among differences and helping them navigate those differences, helping them navigate ambiguity, helping them get that hands on learning so that the academic piece of this does become a lot less. And by the way, the academic piece could essentially be replaced in some ways by AI. It actually sounds, as I say this, hey, that could potentially work. The question now is we have all this infrastructure that was built for classic academic learning, not only academic buildings, but we have all these tenured professors. So what do we do with all of them?

Yeah, well, I'm getting really excited about your vision. I will say that. And I think, right, the knowledge experts are still useful in terms of guiding those questions and helping create those connections. And can you imagine the professor who is with a company, say, actually helping them solve the pressing problem with the frontier of academic research on stuff like it's real time case studies, as opposed to the book I wrote, however many years ago that I still teach. Can you imagine what that would start to do both to professors research being more topical, in demand, and then a connection to students actually being able to practice at the forefront of that on real projects? I guess I say like, yeah, it's a massive shift, but it's not obvious to me it means less expertise or less faculty per se. It does mean a very different set of things that they would be doing. I got a question recently, just before we recorded this. I was with some Minerva University faculty and one of them said if the major came from Johns Hopkins, but it was really an excuse to help train people for academic disciplines. My overlay on that would be there's something therefore inherently vocational actually about majors for the academy's purpose, not for the outside the academy, but in terms of my history major was to prepare me to think like a history PhD at some level. If we walk outside of the major structure and outside of the departmental structure, which is A huge shift as well, but more problems of practice and societal and things like that, that's much more interdisciplinary by nature. Then you can almost squint and start to see the future that you're talking about. But those are huge change initiatives that we know from history are going to be more likely to come from new entrants, if you will, into this college and university space. And then hopefully some places like we'll be able to re engineer around them. I would think places like Northeastern would have a leg up given the co op system and stuff like that.

Yeah, Michael, and I'm also wondering if it might and I want to get into jobs in a second to round this conversation out, but I'm also wondering if it might require a different type of expertise on campuses. James Devaney, who we both know at the University of Michigan, who heads up their innovation efforts there, told me recently for a paper that I did as part of the continuation of the series that we started on culture change in the future, in that we started on culture change at universities, told me that faculty are going to have to get used to that. The experts might come on the staff and administrative side, especially around AI. And so often at our colleges and universities we've thought of the faculty as the experts in all, you know, as the font of knowledge and everything flowed from them. And now as especially as these innovation areas of campuses start to take off, whether that's, you know, the Red House at Georgetown or ED +@@ASU or James Devaney Shop at Michigan, they're bringing in all these other experts from, you know, usually outside of academia who can help faculty redesign these courses, for example. But that does require a couple of things. A requires faculty to think differently about who's going to advise them on how they teach their classes and things like that. But as I was talking to James, I just kept also adding up all the cost of this. This is not necessarily a cost savings measure. If we kind of turn the university in this direction that we're talking about, and I know both of us, you know, this vision that I just laid out a little bit earlier, you know, I think both of us are all continue to be worried about just the cost curve and higher ed and nothing's going to bend it. But maybe stop there for a second because I do want, before we close out this part of the conversation, I do want to ask you about two things that did come up in that New Yorker piece and about what employers are going to do. Right? So are they going to simply continue to Trust the degree or will they do some testing? And the other argument in this piece was that maybe STEM degrees, which have always been more rigorous compared to the humanities. Okay, get ready for all those humanities graduates to send us notes. Is this is. It's going to be now a two tiered system, but I'm more interested in what do you think employers will do. Do you think employers will just kind of continue to trust the degree or. If college is getting easier, AI requires us to have a higher level of thinking, different cognitive skills, different social skills. Do you think employers might say we're going to start testing for that?

Yeah. So this gets back to the Andreessen Horowitz like podcast. Was that a year and a half ago at this point, that where they sort of listed all the problems with higher ed and they made the case that if universities are going to walk increasingly away from a meritocracy and have great inflation and so forth, then employers are going to look for other signals, effectively, whether that's their own testing or stuff like that. Right. My own take is different. This is where like, you know, you mentioned the compact that the Trump folks have put out at the time of this recording and one of them is hammer down on great inflation. And my sort of note is I agree it's like a huge problem. And if we move to competency based learning, by the way, like everyone would be mastering. So I don't know that like the way they framed it actually solves any problems, if you will. But what I think it does, Jeff, is it forces us to center experiences far more seriously in the university curriculum to get real world connection with companies where you are both able to show evidence that I can do the job because I've had things where I've been asked to do the tasks right on the job and I've built social capital because this is the other thing that's moving really quickly with companies is these tests are, aren't super reliable outside of the most technical jobs because employers aren't really clear on what the skills are at the heart of successful employees. So they're sort of grasping at lots of straws and trying to create lots of hurdles. And what we're seeing in the economy, particularly as AI is now doing the applications for people applying to jobs, is that there's just a massive increase, thousand job applications for an opening compared to say 2 to 300 previously before up to 85% of people were hired by your network. Like that's how you sort of got the job. I think that becomes even more so

that's probably going to become like 99%.

Right, right, right. Become, you know what, what happens? I'm trying to find someone, I get a thousand applications. Instead I just call you up and I'm like, jeff, do you know someone who does this? Well, and you're like, talk to these three people.

Boom, right?

I think experience, it's intermingled with tasks and skills and social capital and we can argue like which one is more important, but fundamentally they're interdependent. And I think being able to show you've done it and create connections which is the lifeblood of an elite or great college university experience is social connection with alums, with your fellow students, with professors, etc, that becomes even more valuable. So in some ways, like I, I don't love the dichotomy between STEM humanities because I history major over here believing that, that the liberal arts are actually about to become more important. But, but I liked Michael, how you

corrected yourself by, you know, the, the alumni network being a piece of the elite. And then you said, elite, great college experience. Yeah, yeah, I saw you caught yourself on that. But you know, it is, I think this is why people continue. You know, I again, as I go out and I tell people, open up your lens, you know, widen the aperture on your lens and look at more than just the elite colleges. The question I inevitably get from somebody in the audience is, aren't we buying an alumni network essentially when we buy an elite college? I will argue, yes, the elite colleges have better, probably alumni networks than anybody. But how do you can everybody really tap into those? How easy is it to tap into those now? You know, I, I'm wondering if that is. I wish somebody would do a study on this. Has that increased or diminished?

Well, so over time. Yeah. So maybe let's leave it here on this segment. Jeff, what I think is the new so experience, social connection was left to chance before. I would argue in an era of AI, it is the necessary part of the college experience for every single student. And figuring out how you do not leave that to chance, that's going to be what differentiates colleges and universities in the years to come. So maybe we'll leave it there. We can't wait to hear from listeners. Let's come back. We've got a lightning round of issues we want to get through because there's a lot going on in higher ed right now. We'll be right back on Future you.

This episode of Future youe 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 post secondary 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.

Welcome back to Future youe. We've got a lightning round of headlines happening because Jeff, like I emailed you as we were planning for the show and I was like it's actually been a quiet couple weeks for higher ed and then boom, boom, boom, boom. Everything seemed to explode. One though that you sent me that wasn't obvious immediately how it connected to higher ed. When I read it was this Wall Street Journal article. Student loan debt is strangling Gen X.

So my, my good old Gen X. Are you Gen X?

I am.

I always think you're a millennial.

Yeah, no, no, you look so young. Yeah, yeah, I slide in. I slide in in Gen X. So the key stat there from that article is 6 million plus borrowers have the highest average balance of any age group at $47,857. A lot of variability I suspect being mass there. But according to federal student aid data, this is the generation, as you pointed out to me, Jeff, that is sending kids to college.

College right now and this is to me is where the story starts and ends for higher education. There's not much we could do about something that happened 30, 30 plus years ago. I get that right. But these are the parents of today's college students. These are the parents who raise their hands when I give talks at high schools and in high schools and they say how are we going to afford college? And I think there's this data that I found fascinating when I was gathering it for the book, Michael, that Sallie Mae Ipsos does this survey every year. They've done it for 20 plus years on how Americans pay for college. Increasingly, parents are saying college is not an investment in the future. Only 41% said in 2024 they were willing to stretch themselves financially to obtain the best opportunity for their Future, compared to 60% a decade earlier. Here's where I think it's very interesting. 81% now of families with a six figure income cross a college off their list at some point because of high cost. What I think is happening here is that parents who do have student loan debt themselves are now saying to their own kids either hey, interest in the principal on that Too much for me. I can't pay for college for you. Or this is what the investment was for me 30 years ago. I'm willing, I'm not willing to make that same investment now. That's, to me, is why the whole value conversation around higher ed is hitting where it is. Because that wasn't true of baby boomer parents who were largely the parents of a lot of Gen Xers.

Yeah, I think that's right. By the way, you asked about the cost curve and all this cost. Right. Of rebooting certain universities or restructuring them. I do think this is what favors new universities coming into the space. I had that piece a few weeks ago where I agreed with you that higher ed is going to thrive in the future. But I think it might be very different programs that come in and redefine the cost structure as they also redefine the experience.

Okay, so next topic. The chairman of the House and Senate Judiciary Committee sent letters to a bunch of consultants and organizations that help colleges with their pricing strategies in terms of how much merit aid they give out. They wrote, and they said colleges that agree to use a common pricing formula or algorithm or knowingly do so through a third party company, which I think is very important here, knowingly do so through a third party company, are likely violating the antitrust laws. What do you make of this?

I'm no lawyer, Jeff, but I did read Richard Hofstadter in business school, Pulitzer Prize winner, and he has a whole piece about how antitrust law actually tends to get the small guys, not the big ones. This, not to say colleges are always the small guys, but this felt a little bit like if they're right, that's sort of what's going on here. It's like it's a downstream fallout of a business model in my mind. This is why I would love to see accreditation reform that lets in new entrants because I think that will change the cost structure and put some more competition in there. And so I don't know. I don't know if this is the, you know, if they're right or not. To me, this is sort of, though, chasing the symptom as opposed to the real root cause of the problem, which is we need more innovation in higher ed with, you know, new entrants that sort of bringing lower cost structures in. That's my quick take.

And my quick take on this is I'm not quite sure how colleges, universities could do this themselves. Again. You know, companies like eab, Ruffalo, Noah Levitz, they've created these Incredibly complicated, you know, algorithms and data, heavy data rich data sets and all done by the quants. You know, colleges can't replicate that themselves. And so if there is a crackdown on the third party providers, I just don't understand how colleges are going to continue to be able to do that

themselves as much with this administration chasing different things. I think they chase symptom rather than root cause. But anyway, Charlie Javis Jeff was sentenced. For those that don't know, remember there was a, this is like a big fraud story with like a, a story

of Jamie diamond taking over.

Right. Jamie diamond, right. Like making a huge purchase and, and played for a fool, if you will. What, what, what, what, What'd you make of this one?

Well, I, you know, I was a big fan of all the coverage of Theranos. I'm wondering when does the book come out? When does the movie come out? All this stuff. The fast. The most fascinating piece of this is that she hired a CUNY professor to help her come up with like fake names. Essentially the whole thing is about how they had to come up. They sold this to JPMorgan Chase and they had to come up with more names of potential customers that they claimed they had and they really didn't have. And so they went out and they hired this CUNY professor to help them do this. The CUNY professor clearly cut a deal with the government to testify in this and because he seems to still have his job. But that's the part I would love to know. Like, you know, how did that all come about? How did they find that person? What, what did the professor do in part of all this? That's the part of the story that I want to know more about.

Yeah, I, I don't know that I have anything else to add here, but maybe you'll write the book at some point. No pressure.

I just want the movie rights.

You just want the movie rights. That's the better place to be because it turns out books don't make money. For those that want to ask us those questions. What else do you have? Lightning round.

The only other thing I wanted to bring up here was Anthology, which really owns Blackboard now a bunch couple of other things. They declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And this is probably going to get into the weeds for our listeners, but you know, we know Blackboard was the original course management software way back in the mid-1990s. But what's interesting here is that, you know, Phil Hill went deep into the bankruptcy filings, which I found really fascinating because Blackboard basically is the Biggest part of anthology and it accounted for about 240 million. But in structure, by the way, now much bigger. About three times the size of Blackboard. So it also just shows you, by the way, that new market entrants can kind of take over. You know, we see that everywhere, you know, Amazon, you know, and Walmart took over for, for Sears and you know, Kodak went out the door and now, you know, they, you know, Apple is the, this is the camera of choice now. So it even happens in higher ed, at least in the ed tech portion of this. But it has happened over the last 30 years. And so Michael, I know the theme of this episode for you was new market entrance. I feel that we always think it never happens in higher ed. I understand this is not at the core of higher ed, but it definitely has happened here, at least in the edtech space.

Yeah, I didn't mean for it to become my answer to everything, but I'm dusting off my feeling. I'm feeling pretty good about this one because this is classic disruptive innovation in the Instructure canvas example, right, with the SaaS model compared to a server based on premise disruption. And then what you tend to see in markets where disruption happens is the leaders sort of do weird consolidations and

efforts with often, which is exactly what Blackboard did, right? It was bought combined, right? Yeah.

And a lot of debt. And then it's a lot of debt story, right, with a lot of debt. And that creates challenges and you go into chapter 11 to try to wipe that out. And so Phil Hill, I think, has done an excellent job covering this, Jeff. But, but in some ways the pattern recognition I think is the same. I, I've got one other before I ask you something about culture, because you keep writing about it, but I have one other which is I, I, I texted you about Congress exempting some trade schools from the new accountability rules in the one big beautiful bill. I hadn't realized this. Beauty schools in particular, I think have an exemption, Jeff, because of this weird netherland, right. Of certificate degree programs and so forth. There's like a crazy irony here. I don't know if you agree, but for years we sort of saw Obama, Biden administrations cracking down through gainful employment, in particular on these career colleges, beauty schools being the big one that they often went after because the costs were so out of proportion with the wage gains. And yet states require these credentials from beauty schools to be able to practice in terms of barbering and so forth. And here you had the opposite happening where they're sort of getting pulled out of these new accountability rules.

I don't know.

My initial reaction was just this is nuts. Like we just need to see account like why are we exempting parts? We finally have a rule that can apply to all. Let's just go forward with this. It seemed nuts to me. That was my view.

And I think as always right there's always going to be carve outs in Congress. And I just kind of found it fascinating that this came out after the fact a little bit because that bill was so big, probably nobody read it until the last month. So I just want to finish off Michael. We've been talking a lot about culture in higher ed. You know, you and I wrote the first part of this series which is now ending that I worked on all this year with a number of different people. It was great to have you as a co author. I also just co authored another piece of that with Sean Hobson who's the chief design officer at Arizona State at Plus we talked a lot about making change stick and his and this was part of his doctoral thesis as well is really giving innovation a home. His big thinking on this was that you really do need these cross functional units. I just mentioned James Devaney earlier. Right. The center for Academic Innovation at Michigan, Georgetown's Red House Ed plus at ASU of course. And you know this is something that I know comes up in our discussion at Butler University in Indianapolis that we we just had much smaller place than a Michigan or an ASU or Georgetown. You know is in it can't. Does innovation need to happen within the university or do you always need an external unit? And so we really look at that and how culture is in place or not in place if you have it within the university or just sitting outside the university. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that and then and we'll kind of wrap up this episode for this week.

Well, quick thought because I want to counteract my market entrant push here through this topic. Right. So here's the thing is that if culture is understand as the processes and priorities right. That become ingrained in an organization. If you can build structures that intentionally prioritize the type of innovations you want right. Embedded in the structure and yes it sits outside the traditional governance when you're trying to do something totally different and it can sit within when you're trying to do continuous improvement or make big structural changes to the existing so depending on the type of innovation you want helps you understand the type of structure you need. But I actually think building these structures so that innovation becomes more transparent, becomes more repeatable, becomes part of the culture, is the key to institutions doing these sorts of innovations themselves, both within the core but also externally when they develop new offerings. And sometimes this gets semantics. I always say, well, what's the purpose of the innovation? Are you trying to do southern New Hampshire and launch a major disruption, then do what you're doing right? Are you trying to actually improve the core, make it more relevant? Maybe not reset the business model itself? That calls for something different. I think structurally embedding it with real process and real repeatable formulations is critical.

Yeah. And I'm to take us out here by saying you're absolutely right, because part of the other piece of that paper is building dashboards, incentives, even sunset policies so you could lock in those new habits and prevent backsliding. So it's not just about sometimes creating these external units, but really building that infrastructure needed to make sure you're tracking what you're doing. Absolutely critical. Well, Michael, it was great to see you again both in our respective homes for this episode, and thank you all out there for listening. Please give us some feedback, especially on that first segment. We'd love to know how you're thinking about the future of the university in an age of AI. You know, what is the purpose of college? If you have any feedback on that New Yorker piece that we'll link to in the show notes as well, please send it our way. We'd love to hear from listeners and thank you again for joining us on this episode of At Future youe will see you next time.