What’s Ahead for Higher Ed in 2020?

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo, joined by my co host, Michael Horn, and welcome to 2020. I feel like we've been predicting 2020 in so many sectors of the economy for so many years, and we're now finally here, Michael.

And you're not going to let us go back into our predictions in the last decade to see how they've gone true, right? Because I just don't want to make the audience feel embarrassed about how great we are at predicting.

Well, and I was also thinking, you asked me the. Whether we should, like, go back a decade and I told you I can't even remember what we did last year.

Yeah, yeah. No, I do not want to revisit papers that I wrote in 2011 or something.

Yeah. I can't even imagine, you know, 2010. I was editor of the Chronicle. It's two years after the economic collapse. I can't even imagine what we were predicting back then, but it's great to be here. The format of the show will be a little different today. For this first show of 2020, we're going to talk a little bit about looking back first on 2019, what were the biggest stories and trends that we saw? And then we're going to take audience predictions for 2020 and talk a little bit about what people out there listening to Future youe are predicting, and we'll react a little bit about that. So let's first start looking back on 2019 and about the big stories. And probably the biggest story in a higher ed was Varsity Blues, which kind of came out of the blue in early March of 2019. I'll never forget I even mentioned this in the. In the book. I was driving across Chain Bridge, which you're familiar with, between Maryland and Virginia or between D.C. and Virginia. I was on my way to visit a high school and my phone started exploding with both news alerts, but also a friend who was reading the court documents and was sending me excerpts from them. So I think Varsity Blues to me, really shows, I think everything that people think is wrong with higher education and just kind of put it out there and it kind of had everything right. It had not only scandal, it had Hollywood, it had money, it had payoffs, it had faked photos. I mean, the story was classic.

You couldn't have gotten any bigger. It was the story that put higher ed on the front page of newspapers. And I remember my reaction being like, yes, our industry is on the first page. No, not for this. But yes, I had Varsity Blues in my top three as well, because the allure. And then of course, being in Boston with the actual trials here and so forth, it's sort of been. We've seen local NPR stations camping out to get the pictures and commentary around, you know, who, which celebrity is coming in now and so forth. And it was just amazing how widespread, frankly, it hit not just Hollywood, but top investors, top lawyers, a lot of people embroiled in the scandal. And like you said, it sort of stuck seem to confirm for people the worst that they thought of higher ed.

Well, it's even worse than that, right? Because when I first heard about this, I'm like, oh, I just spent the year inside of college admissions. I knew the lengths that people would go to get their kids into a selective school. I think what really surprised me as we learned the details is that they just went above and beyond what anybody thought people would do to get their kids into some of these schools.

I was shocked by one phone call where you hear the transcript of the guy basically say, oh, I don't care about the ethical dimension of it, I just want to know. And sort of cuts to the logistical chase of it. But it just goes to show. And then of course, a few months later, there was the story in Illinois of parents disowning their children so that they could get financial aid to colleges. So it just sort of went on and on and allowed it to really burn on throughout 2019.

Okay, so we have the same exact top one. Let's see how else we compare what

else is on your list. Number two on my list was University of Alaska declaring exigency, which is a higher ed's version of bankruptcy without bankruptcy. Because if you do bankruptcy, that gets you into all sorts of problems with the Higher Ed act and federal financial aid and so forth. But University of Alaska having this really brutal moment with the governor and so forth around the funding that would be provided at a time when in much of the country, public funds at the state level are actually going up right now for higher education. That was not the case in Alaska. And it really put the system at threat. And I think it was symbolic of sort of this larger storyline that we had throughout the country of colleges closing. But most of those colleges in the past year were small rural liberal arts or religious institutions, or you're off conservatory or art institute and things of that nature. Of course, the for profit campuses that continue to close and so forth. But the University of Alaska, a state flagship system, to have this sort of financial Trouble. You know, Clay Christensen has always been famous for saying 50%, I guess, of colleges will close or go bankrupt. I think has been his word. And here was actually basically a bankruptcy. So I, you know, I think in his prediction it counts. But I just, I, I think it might actually signal something much larger, Jeff, in terms of consolidation, I think in terms of community college and state comprehensive university systems throughout the country.

Were you surprised that, that there was an outcry? You know, this is a public university system. You know, I think that people take some pride in their, in their public universities. It's, you know, their names of their states are part of it. But it didn't seem to create as much outcry. Maybe it's just because, you know, we're

in the lower 48, they say they're off the continent. And I don't know, but the, you know, it's a good question. I, I had the same reaction. You know, it's not really a top three story. I picked it because I thought it might be a sneaky one that you wouldn't have, but of its symbolic value, I think is huge. And I think you're right. It sort of went under the public radar and escaped. Now, to be fair, in August, I think it was, they restored some of the funding. They're out of the exigency now. They're not going to lay off tons of tenured faculty members tomorrow anyway, but who knows what's going to happen? And it's not like the price of oil is going to sustain that, that state in that system, I think indefinitely. And, you know, maybe it escapes some of this because University of Alaska is not a place with sports teams that you regularly hear about and evokes the same passions and law.

This seems like the Ohio State or University of North Carolina.

Right. You know, something like that, where you can imagine sort of the football or basketball loyalty, bringing people out in droves to support a campus on the ed. But I agree with you, but I think symbolically it was a pretty big story. Did you have that on your list?

I did not have that on my list.

What's number two on yours?

Mine was another admissions story, mainly because I've been buried in the admissions world, so I stopped paying attention to too many other things, probably in higher education. But it was kind of a set of rules that were changed by nacac, which essentially is the national association of High School Counselors and College Admissions Officers. They were embroiled in a probe by the U.S. justice Department over antitrust law because of the Ethics code that they had passed a couple of years ago, which basically the Justice Department claimed resulted in colleges not able to compete with each other, because under this code, colleges essentially had to stop recruiting students on May 1. Once students committed, you couldn't go after a student that committed to x institution after May 1st.

So it's sort of an antitrust.

Antitrust. Right. Collusion, competitive. You couldn't offer incentives for early decision. Again, this was prevented by these rules. And you also, interestingly enough, couldn't go after students who applied to you but went somewhere else for transfer a year later. And so all three rules were changed to comply with essentially a consent decree which they signed with the Justice Department. And so now all those rules are off. So what does that mean? That means now schools, colleges and universities could offer students incentives to apply early decision. They could give them a better parking spot on campus. They could give them first dibs on housing or even courses. So some sort of incentive to get them in to apply early decision. I'm not sure that will have the most impact. The one that I think is going to have a much bigger impact is May 1st decision day. We hear so much about this. It's on Twitter all the time, people taking pictures. I made my decision, I put in,

yeah, they put a shirt on and so forth.

And so what happens now is that schools could, even after a student has decided, I'm going to go to Boston University and put in their deposit. If another school that they apply to can start emailing them, calling them on May 15, on July 15, and say, hey, if you come here, we're going to offer you another $5,000 or another $10,000, they could continue to recruit them. The other thing I think is going to happen, because transfer is now a big deal in higher ed, is I could imagine institutions going back to their pool of accepted students from the previous year, sending them some sort of communication in the fall of their senior year. I mean, fall of freshman year in college, when students are kind of, eh, you know, did I make the right choice? And say, hey, are you unhappy at wherever. Syracuse University, I think would have actually been interesting this year, given all the protests.

Yeah, given all the protests, Syracuse and

say, we have a spot here at Binghamton University, why don't you come on down? So those. To me, we don't know where this is. In some ways, this might be the bigger story in 2020 than 2019 because we'll actually start seeing the impact of them. But to me, that's my second biggest.

Do you think it'll create a slippery slope where higher ed. I mean, certainly this stinks for the applicant who thinks that they've made the decision they no longer will have to get college mail from every single place under the sun, and now they're still getting it. But do you think colleges will really sort of go down this because they're trying to fill out their classes and like their class didn't come together as they thought it would, and therefore they will use this to. As another crack at shaping their class? Is that where it's going to be most used? Or do you think the other version of this I can imagine is counterintuitively? You know, I've been super skeptical that all the push to get credits to transfer between schools will ever work like people want them to because it impacts money that colleges can make. But maybe counterintuitively, this actually increases the odds of that happening because they'll see, you know, more fluidity is good for them.

Or do you see that schools then say, okay, if we're going to have. If we're going to lose all these students to transfer, maybe we really start to say, you know, we're not going to accept credits from anybody. Right. And so then schools start to start to say that's the way we control kind of the transfer market is to accept fewer credits rather than more credits where I see this happening. So I always thought this was going to be kind of the. The bottom tier colleges will really be impacted by this May 1 deadline. But I was talking to an admissions dean recently who said a couple of years ago, they had some room in their class, they had some financial aid dollars left over. They went out to their community members, organizations that they worked with across the country and said, hey, do you have talented students that you're still working with who didn't quite get in or didn't get money from places, you know, we can still take their application at this point and we'll accept them and get them in. So they were able to shape their class at the very end. And so this was, you know, the school was a very, you know, it was a top 50 liberal arts college that told me this. And so I think that this is not only going to be. I think that we're going to start not, maybe not at the top 10, but I think we're going to start to see this in a tier of schools that you, I don't think you would have expected a year ago.

All right, so we're going to have to do a full episode on this once we See how this starts to play out.

So what is my number three?

Yeah. So my last one is the rise and demise of 2U. We've had chip on twice on the show. I'm looking at Lauren Dibble, our producer will come on in the next segment to confirm that. You know, but they at ASU gsv, we were with Chip just off the heels of them purchasing trilogy. So now they didn't just have the, you know, sort of the dominant position in the online program manager market. They had get smarter that they had acquired with the short courses. And now they have the leading boot camp partnering with colleges that was growing astronomically, you know, throughout the country. I think it was like 44 universities or something like that when they got acquired. And so they were, I would say, peak to you. Right. And then just, I mean, very short time later, Kevin Carey wrote a piece sort of casting doubts on the entire OPM industry that was a bit of a Washington insider piece that, that basically alleged that because of the financial incentives of them just taking revenue that these were sort of. I don't know if he uses this language or not, but it was sort of for profit 2.0 was his allegation in effect. And then a few months after that on an earnings call, Chip and the team revised guidance basically said the growth is not going to be what we expected. We're not going to be able to maintain pricing as we as we have and people should reset their expectations and all of a sudden the valuation tank to I think about, or even maybe less than, if memory serves correctly, what they had paid for trilogy. Now it's come back, I think it's doubled from its low point, if I'm, if I'm not mistaken. But this was quite a sort of flip, if you will, in the market out of nowhere for people that watch the online higher ed space.

Yeah. And I think this is somewhat related to my third piece which is really around the private public partnerships between colleges universities. So you mentioned kind of Opium's were one news this year, one piece of it. We also saw these International Pathways programs, INTU and Shorelite and others. Kaplan is in that business as well. That's those that help colleges universities recruit international students. And there's a lot of churn in that market given what's happening in politics. The Chronicle had this great piece a couple of weeks ago which some International Pathways people told me is very true. It's less about politics in the US and more about guns and violence that international students are worried about coming here. So we see some changes in that market as well. So OPM's pathways, we saw a piece coming out of Oklahoma a couple of weeks ago about these public private partnerships around housing and development on campuses, kind of land leases that colleges and universities love to do because it gives them immediate capital, it gives them immediate ways to build things that they couldn't otherwise build. And I think this is becoming a storyline coming into 2020 is what is the role and mission of colleges, universities? What are the businesses they should be doing? What are the businesses they shouldn't be doing? What are they not good at? But we're starting now to see some people pulling stuff back that they had outsourced and now outsourcing things they hadn't outsourced before. So I think to me the storyline from 2019 is public private partnerships. That's my headline. But moving into 2020 is what is the future of those partnerships? I think we're going to see some rising, some falling, and I think some new ones emerging.

Well, I think that's a perfect way for us to take a brief break and when we come back, we're going to bring Lauren Dibble onto the set to tell us about all the reader and listener predictions that we got in around what 2020 will bring. And Jeff, we are going to react to them. So we'll do our best. We'll be right back on Future you.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future youe. Excited for this because Lauren has been helping us out in the background for the first two and a half years of Future youe. And Lauren, we're bringing you on the set to tell us about the predictions we got from our audience around what's going to happen in 2020. So first, welcome.

Yeah, excited.

We can just tell our listeners you do so much work for us. Why don't you tell us, tell our listeners a little bit about who you are.

Yeah, well thanks for having me on. And live this time Lauren Dobell. I work for Entangled Solutions as an engagement manager and have been doing that for the last three plus years now.

You're part of the early guard of integration.

Part of the early guard, Yeah, I think I was employee number eight or something like that. And now we're up to 150 across the entire company. So it's been a wild couple of years and I have kind of touched a lot of our different practice areas and different projects at Entangled and really just kind of worked across the entire education ecosystem is definitely what I'm most passionate about. Both my parents are educators. Entangled. I was at Northeastern University where I worked on a lot of our innovation programs there. And so excited to be with you guys in the Boston area.

So what predictions do you have for us? First that came in from the audience,

so we got some great predictions, a lot of them. And so thank you to all of the listeners that wrote in. The first one's gonna be pretty kind of on the money prediction, but I wonder if either of you can play devil's advocate. So Rutledge Long predicts that college debt will continue to rise.

That's probably a safe predict.

That's a safe prediction. Although I'm wondering if people start to look at alternatives. Right?

Yeah.

As Brian Craig says, the faster, cheaper ones.

Yeah, I think that's the thing. At the edges, I think we are going to see more and more softening of the market. Not sort of that classic four year college experience that's residential and so forth that we think. But I do think on the edges you'll see more and I think income share agreements, we've had that spotlighted on this show and so forth. We'll start, start to take some more of their share. So, and maybe the growth is going

to community colleges, maybe more students going to public, you know, looking for less expensive options that require maybe still require debt. But let me be less.

I mean, what will also be interesting is if a recession hits and I don't, you know, who knows the timing of when that'll hit, not if it will hit, but when. What will that do to this factor? I mean, in the last one it drove it up significantly, but it might not this time because people are a little worried about it. So I guess that's the, the devil's advocate piece. But what else we have in the hopper?

Yeah, absolutely. So the next prediction comes from Calvin Bentley. He says there will be more mergers and acquisitions in higher education and ed tech companies, including companies that offer adaptive courseware.

So he's not just talking about institutions, he's talking also about the companies themselves.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, so I think clearly there will be more mergers and acquisitions of colleges and universities. That's in line with the closure trends we've talked about and so forth. EdTech companies as well. That's probably a safe prediction as well, just in the sense that I think. Well, let's talk at the top of the market. The McGraw Hill Cengages merger I think is sort of a harbinger of a lot of these older line education companies needing to merge because it's a very natural evolution. Whenever you see disruption in an industry that's hollowing out the bottom at the top there's consolidation. It's sort of the department stores. You know, there used to be 300 plus and now there's like seven or something like that. And I think we're seeing the same thing of the old line textbook publishers, companies like that, and even some movement in instructure and so forth in the learning management system space. I wonder how that'll all play out as well. The adaptive courseware piece of this I'm not sure I have a strong take on right off the top of my head.

Do you?

I don't either. I'm also wondering at the, at the bottom of the market whether, you know, you'll start to see startups be acquired again, mergers and, you know, companies combining there as well. So I, you know, we're starting to, we've been, as you, you mentioned a recession earlier. I mean, we've been in kind of a growth market in, in higher ed and in the economy for, you know, a decade plus now. So it'll be interesting to see what 2020 brings in that area.

All right, what do we got next?

All right, so the next one is written as more of a hope than a prediction, but we'll see what you guys think. So Deb Luckleiter says I'm hoping universities will begin accepting CRED external entities in the form of badges and other stackable type of credentials as part of degrees.

Yes. And I'm starting to think that this might happen because it goes back to value. And I'm not quite sure they will accept it from others. But they might partner with others. Right. Somebody we had on the podcast probably in season one or two, Brandon Bastide, formerly of Gallup, wrote a piece in Forbes a couple of months ago about the cred degree, I think he called it, or degree cred maybe, I can't remember. But the idea was that you would combine kind of the credential with the degree. So I could imagine this, right? Everybody, as you know, everybody wants to have the job skills coming out of colleges or universities. The degree itself is not embedded with those all the time here. Could we have some sort of credential that's understood by the industry? Industry standard credentials that are combined with that. Whether it is the institution that provides that or outsiders, I think is the question to me. Yeah.

So, okay, so we both loved the first two predictions. Love from you on this one. I'm going to shove this one because I totally buy everything you just said when it's internal. So like I wrote a piece with Clark Gilbert recently for Education Next about their certificate first approach and how it's really raised graduation rates in remarkable ways and it's getting industry recognized credential on the front end makes it more likely people come back and graduate. That's awesome. External entities. I just don't buy it outside of the southern New Hampshires or western governors or sort of maybe the bleeding, bleeding edge and maybe that's going to come down the pipeline eventually, but I don't think it's going to be 2020. I think it's going to be a few more years out if it comes down.

Okay, what else do we have? Lauren?

So the next one is related but slightly opposing view perhaps. So this one comes from John Mott and says post secondary education will grow increasingly job competency aligned, so degrees and credits will matter less. Institutions will increasingly be compelled to make specific verifiable assertions about their students knowledge, skills and abilities.

Wow.

So I mean this continues to be the coin of the realm that I think a lot of folks hope for and I just don't see it. I mean it's funny, you know, four or five years ago, so 2014, 2015 I think was sort of the hype around competency based education, which is essentially what John's talking about in higher ed. And everyone was sort of excited about it and so forth. We had some experimental sites from the Department of Education. There's been very little movement since from what I understand. They're sort of sun setting I think in many cases. And it's just, you know, we've got those handful of institutions that are doing that, but we haven't seen the movement that I think we really need to see. And I think frankly the one of the things that's fueling all these sort of last mile providers that Ryan Craig writes about is because higher ed has not made this shift to really getting job Aligned, competency, aligned, and so forth.

And I also think it needs a lot of alignment. It needs a bigger push. I think the accreditors play a huge role here. Right. If the accreditors demand this more, you'll see institutions follow. But it requires alignment within institutions around learning outcomes and understanding. Right. Because he talks about these, you know, specific, verifiable pieces.

Yeah, that's hard.

I mean, that really comes down to the faculty saying, here's what I'm teaching, here's the course I'm teaching, and here are the very specific learning outcomes that have value in the marketplace. That really requires a level of cooperation. And nothing against faculty, but it requires a level of cooperation you don't see among the faculty at most colleges.

All right, so I'll try to be charitable because I think I would love to see this happen. But the President's Forum, you know, started by Excelsior College and sort of Western Governor's University, Southern New Hampshire, asu, et cetera, in that they are doing a project on trying to improve the articulation between their online programs, I think specifically through this sort of verifiable outcomes. And apparently they're making some progress. I don't know what that actually looks like. Maybe we can find out in 2020.

Great. So the next one's interesting because it relates to a conversation we'll be having on an upcoming episode. But Mark Salisbury predicts that actual prices will become publicly accessible.

I love Mark. I love what he's trying to do at Tuition Fit. But I just think that, again, he is running up against an industrial complex, financial aid. Industrial complex. And in higher education, that makes it very difficult. Now, one of the things that Mark is doing, and again, we're going to be talking about this in a future episode as well, is really crowdsourcing financial aid letters that users give him. And we see how this has changed other industries. Right. When we book things now, we look on travel websites for user reviews, Right. We see what the Internet has been able to do with crowdsourcing. And so if we get enough of those letters in higher ed, what he's been trying to do, maybe. But there is so much incentive for colleges not to do this or not to cooperate. They don't really even have to cooperate, but push back against it, find other ways around it, because they don't want transparency. Transparency is bad for their business.

Yeah, it's so sad when you say transparent. Right. It just like leaves me with a whole sort of emotion. But the, you know, tuition fit edmit others out there there's, there's an increasing push for this tuition for transparency and pricing. I hope they make some really good progress. I'm, I'm hopeful. I think we'll see some steps forward in 2020. How about I say that I don't think it's going to be a tidal wave in 2020 yet.

Great. What else, Lauren?

Great.

So the next one is going to be interesting to hear your take because it's admissions related and you've both been entrenched in that this year. So Brooks Doherty says further and precipitous decline of the use of standardized testing for college admissions.

Oh, this is yours?

Well, I think we're going to know this pretty soon. University of California will decide, I think in February. The Board of Regents there will decide in February whether to do away with the use of standardized tests, both the ACT and the sat, for admissions to the University of California system institutions. As California goes, so does the rest of the country, in my opinion. The University of California is a huge system. California produces a lot of students who go out of state, meaning high school students. And what they're going to start to say is, if I don't have to use the SAT or ACT for the University of California, why should I use it for Yale, Georgia Tech, whatever it might be? I always thought a couple of years ago when the University of Chicago went test optional, others would follow. Nobody really did. Among the top schools, the University of California is a different animal. I think it has so much power and influence, and I couldn't imagine the amount of lobbying that's going on in the background by David Coleman at the College Board and others to try to make sure this doesn't happen.

I'm going to trust you on this, is what I'm going to say, because I agree the UC system seems like a different animal to me. There's lawsuit against this now as well. So it's not just the Chancellor's basically expressing doubt about the wisdom of having test requirement. It's also other pressures being brought to bear. That feels like a floodgate starting to open. There's sort of something in the air right now that feels different from a couple years earlier. I don't think Harvard or Yale is going to lead on this.

No. And again, maybe the University of California might decide not to do this. I think many people in the system think it's a risk. Right. So it's not a slam dunk. I think people think it is. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in a moment, and it'll Be

interesting to see if something replaces it, if that happens. All right, so that's just sort of my wild card thing that I think we ought to think about at some point. Lauren, we got time for two more, I think.

Yep. Great.

So the. The next one is interesting because in segment one, we are talking about what might or might not happen with transfer credits and how colleges might react to some of the new standards around that. But. So Liz Dietz predicts that there will be a common course articulation language, such as competencies to facilitate transfer credit. So she's saying that there will be more transfers happening?

Yeah.

I mean, this sounds a little bit like Deb's hope for the new year. I remain skeptical. I mean, I know Florida has made advances of this over the years and so forth. I just think when you look at the business models, it's kind of like electronic health records in hospitals. They use them to keep you in their system, not to share you with other systems, because that's how they make money. And I think it's. Especially in a time where colleges are looking for every penny that they can get, given the current conditions we've talked about. I'm just not seeing the rush to it or if there is legislatively, I think colleges will find all sorts of ways to obscure it.

And I think higher education is an inefficient system. And again, as you note, the institutions benefit from that inefficiency. And until there is an external person that pulls the levers, and I think really it's accreditors and the federal government, those are really the only two people that could possibly. That could possibly force things, or state governments, I guess, because they have the power of the purse strings for the publics. I think those are the only people that can really force this to happen.

And I agree. I guess the wild card would be more dedicated partnerships where there's skin in the game. Back to the transferring institution and somehow doesn't. Not to the transferring institution, the institution that receives the students. If there was some sort of deeper partnership model there, maybe, but I don't know. I'll go one step further. I'm super worried right now about all the dual enrollment programs popping up across the country right now in community colleges. Because I wonder where will those credits actually articulate to, even particularly out of state?

Good question. And the last one.

So this last one's also related and kind of an interesting additional take. This comes from Ellen Frischberg, and she says she hopes someday for a clearinghouse for credits established, authorized to provide Degrees combining credits from a variety of institutions so related to transfer. But what do you think about pulling different credits?

I mean, what's interesting here is that we've had a number of things around, around credit and transfer. I think what it really shows is that there is this inability for the higher education system to truly understand the modern student, the modern Undergraduate traditional student, 18 to 24 year old who is increasingly transferring even themselves between institutions. They're not the full time, first time freshmen that we tend to think about. And also obviously lifelong learners who continue to move between institutions and the systems are just not designed find for those types of students. So it's interesting that we have had so many predictions around this area. Perhaps that's showing that there's more pressure. So maybe these are better predictions for 2022 or 2023.

That's sort of my thought, I think, is that I think the pressure is building. I think our hope is, I mean, you know, I've been super pessimistic on these, but I, you know, my hope is there. Right. But I just, I don't think it's for 2020, but it'd be amazing. Particularly as you think about the lifelong learners you were alluding to there. Right. Which is the adult who's coming into and out of higher ed as they're working and sort of that fluidity and permeable boundary between institutions plural and workplaces that makes for a more synergistic lifestyle for someone who's continuing to upskill and reskill in this era of the rapid change in jobs and technology and globalization and so forth. We all hope for it. I'm just not sure it's here yet.

Yeah, and I think the other thing about higher education in general is like, even though change is more rapid than it was a couple of years ago, a change within a year. I mean if we came back in December and reviewed these, we might see some movement on them. But to see any sea change like any of these things is not, I don't think is going to happen within a year just because of the way higher ed works.

All right, well now we have a record, we have an audio record. So mark it down December 15th or whatever it is. We will come back to it and read, revisit the predictions. But until then, Lauren, thank you for joining us. Not just behind the scenes because you do so much for us there, but on air itself. Thanks to. Yeah, and thanks to Steve Shakaris for all his support as always and Jeff, heck of a lot of fun and we will be back soon on Future youe. Hey folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future youe. And just a reminder to Please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.