It’s hard to believe Jeff Selingo and I are back for our 10th season of Future U., which had some 65,000 unique listeners last season.
But here we are.
And for the first time in a few years, neither of us has a new book coming out this fall. I’ll admit: that feels pretty good.
It also gave us a little more space this summer to step back and think about what’s happening across higher education. And there was plenty to think about—from the One Big Beautiful Bill and AI to affordability, declining trust, dual enrollment, student loneliness, and the future of standardized testing.
In our season opener, Jeff and I tried to make sense of all of it.
The meta-theme that cut across much of the discussion is that colleges need to get much clearer about what they are—and what they aren’t.
Take academic programs. Jeff laid out four tests colleges should use in deciding what to offer: Is there durable demand? Does the program produce a worthwhile economic premium? Does it create career mobility? And, perhaps most importantly, can this institution actually be great at it?
For too long, colleges have acted as though being a legitimate university means being a comprehensive one. If the college down the road offers a program—or the institution you aspire to resemble does—then you need it, too.
Those days are ending. Institutions need to get more comfortable saying: We can be a fantastic university without doing X. In fact, not doing X may allow us to be much better at Y.
AI raises a similar challenge. This summer, Jeff and I both flirted with the idea that the lack of coherence in colleges’ approaches to AI might actually be a feature, not a bug—the natural result of faculty experimentation. We’ve both snapped back somewhat. Different institutions, departments, and professors can absolutely arrive at different answers. But students deserve some minimum expectations and a clear rationale for how AI fits into their education. “Every professor does whatever they want” isn’t a strategy.
More broadly, colleges need a stronger answer for why the experience is worth it in an AI era. And I’m actually more optimistic on that question than I’ve been before—provided colleges remember that they are more than their classes.
The late-night conversations. Experiential learning. Research. Relationships with professors and peers. Connections with alumni. The chance to learn how to discern when knowledge applies and when it doesn’t. In an increasingly digital world, that total experience—perhaps one of the last truly analog experiences many people will have—could become more valuable, not less.
But institutions have to design for it intentionally. The growing loneliness crisis on campuses is one reminder that merely putting students in the same place doesn’t guarantee that experience will happen.
And all of this sits against the backdrop of harder questions about affordability, public trust, and whom colleges are actually serving. Nearly 40% of recent high school graduates aren’t enrolling in college. Tens of millions of Americans have some college but no degree. Rather than simply accept those trends—or endlessly hope adult learners will return—could colleges use dual enrollment and stronger community college-university partnerships to bring more high school students into the fold earlier and lower the cost of a degree?
There’s much more in the episode, including where Jeff and I think the One Big Beautiful Bill gets ROI accountability right and wrong, whether AI can actually bend higher education’s cost curve, and why the University of California’s decision on standardized testing could be one of the stories of the year.
But underneath most of those questions is a more basic one: What does your institution stand for, whom is it trying to serve, and what is it willing not to do?
Listen to the full Season 10 opener of Future U. here—or watch it online at YouTube below.
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