Future U Podcast

🏋♂️ The education system puts a lot on the shoulders of high school guidance counselors. 🗺 We ask them to not only guide students through the vast and ever-changing postsecondary landscape but also navigate studies and socioemotional challenges in high school. And they are trying to accomplish all these goals for 385 students at a time, on average–more than 50 percent higher than the recommended caseload 💡 So, supporting better decision-making at the high school level toward improved postsecondary outcomes will demand equipping the decision makers–counselors, students, and parents, to name a few–with better information and tools. I recently spoke with Jon Carson of College Guidance Network, who is striving to do just that with the help of AI. 🤖Their new AI-driven chatbot, AVA, offers support through on-demand guidance, personalized planning, and text reminders. 💼 In our conversation, we dive deep on how adding this capacity can empower students and parents to make better decisions and ease the critical transition into life, work, and learning beyond high school. The full conversation is linked below. And a disclosure that I do work with CGN and lend my advice. Give the conversation a listen and let us know what would be most helpful to you or your student(s) in more confidently navigating the postsecondary transition. 

🎙 Jeff Selingo and I wrapped up our 7th season of Future U Podcast with a conversation about the big storylines in higher ed we’ve been exploring. Here are some of my takeaways from the conversation. 👨🎓 Higher ed not out of the woods yet–upticks in enrollment has a lot to do with increases in dually enrolled high school students with uncertain financial benefit for colleges 👨💻 Online education growth continues to outperform traditional options, driven by desires for lower tuition costs 📢 Research shows protests are concentrated at elite universities, and we expect them to carry over into next year 🎓 Creating more explicit connections to career will be critical to reversing the drop in perceptions of the value of post-secondary degrees  🏃♂️ NCAA can now pay salaries to athletes, which will likely lead to regulatory challenges that need to be addressed   You can listen to the full conversation linked below 🎧 Obviously, this isn’t a full list, so help us fill it in in the comments below. ☑ I’ve also linked a short survey we’re using to capture audience reactions. We’d love to hear your thoughts 💭

📊 The results are in on COVID academic recovery spending to date. The Education Recovery Scorecard, developed by researchers from Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project (EOP) at Stanford University, found that federal spending helped start students toward recovery, but there is still a long road ahead. 👨🎓 💵 It found that increases in student performance corresponded to per-dollar bumps in performance prior to the pandemic. In other words, the dollars did not go farther than what we saw from increased funding pre-pandemic. This may be because districts responded with more of the same interventions, by and large. This can be explained by the theory of threat rigidity, which posits that framing a challenge as a threat is helpful in marshaling resources - as evidenced by the $190b deployed toward education - but inhibits your ability to deploy those resources in new ways required by changing circumstances. 💰 With fewer federal dollars coming in and much work to be done, districts will need to make dollars go farther, which will require them to deploy them in new ways. 💡 The report lays out evidence-based ways for doing so, but implementing those changes may also require a paradigm shift away from focusing on the threat of learning loss and toward the opportunity for new ways to boost recovery.

Learning is at the heart of higher ed’s purpose, but how many institutions have a strong sense of what their students know? Not many, I’d guess. But competency-based education (CBE) offers a powerful solution to that problem. In CBE, students advance through their courses by demonstrating mastery against authentic assessments of learning, rather than satisfying seat-time requirements. I recently spoke with a couple pioneers in post-secondary CBE, Kelle Parsons of the American Institutes for Research and Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN)'s Amber Garrison Duncan, PhD. I learned a lot from our conversation. Here are some of my takeaways: 💼 CBE is helping to award students academic credit for prior learning that takes place outside of the classroom 👨💼 Employers are being brought in to participate in the evaluation of career-connected assessments 🤝 Aligning CBE and skills-based hiring represents a huge opportunity to better connect students with good jobs and companies with qualified workers 🏫 CBE is already being implemented effectively at more postsecondary institutions around the country than I realized You can listen to our full conversation below. Let us know how you see CBE transforming your classroom, school, or workforce in the comments.

In the Future U Season 7 Wrap Up episode, hosts Jeff & Michael tackle key #HigherEd topics like: enrollment trends, online education, FAFSA issues, campus protests, value in #HigherEducation, and college athlete compensation. Listen now! https://lnkd.in/eRB8uSvD

It’s still a stat that shocks me when I look at enrollment data: About 40% of American colleges enroll 1,000 or fewer students. Another 40% enroll fewer than 5,000 students.   We have lots of small colleges in the U.S. The conventional wisdom given other industries is that they all won’t survive with a demographic cliff coming of high-school graduates in the middle of this decade—especially since most of the colleges serve traditional-age students within 50 to 100 miles of campus. As we head into our summer hiatus on Future U Podcast, Michael Horn and I chose some of our favorite episodes from this past season to feature on the channel over the summer. In this episode, our guest was Lynn Perry Wooten, president of Simmons University in Boston. I’ve known Wooten since she was a dean at Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and was a fellow in the ASU Georgetown Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership that I help run.   Simmons is one of those small colleges. At the undergrad level it has about 1,800 students (and 3,900 grad students). Wooten brings an interesting perspective to the job, not only as a business dean, but as someone who has spent her career as a scholar and expert on organizational development and transformation. In other words, she doesn’t just read the business literature as a college president; she has actually written it. Three key takeaways from our conversation with Wooten: • The distinction for small colleges just can’t be that they are small. At Simmons, it’s that they are a women’s college for undergrads; co-ed as grad. They know the earlier you get your graduate degree, especially for women, the better your economic trajectory. So starting this year, any student at Simmons can get an undergrad and grad degree in five years. “We are focusing a lot on what can we do best in this higher ed landscape than no one else can do,” Wooten said. • Lean into the Data. Too many colleges are still run on anecdote, gut, and emotion. When Simmons recently went through academic changes it looked at where its majors were, where its students were (online vs. in-person) and the mix between grad and undergrad. That drove decision-making and allowed them to integrate failing humanities programs into the professions and as a blended degree. • Online ed alone is not unique. Simmons was a first mover there with an innovative nursing program. But the first-mover advantage for small colleges online was lost during the pandemic, Wooten told me. “We have to think about what we can make unique for our program,” she said. 🎧 Listent to the full episode and subscribe now for a new seasons starting in August. 🚨 Also read this great narrative on the value of small colleges and what we lose when they go by Scott Carlson in this week's The Chronicle of Higher Education (https://lnkd.in/eWYubXEf)

👨💻 One adverse side effect of edtech: it can tether teachers to their computers or make them feel sidelined. 🏃♂️ That’s a problem because student-centered learning works best when teachers are free to move around the classroom, actively guiding students’ on their personal learning journeys. 🤹♀️ But that’s hard to do when they need to be at their computer, toggling between various apps across their numerous tasks. 📣 That’s why Merlyn Mind, an education AI company, built an AI tool that allows teachers to control their various digital tools with their voices.  🤖 I spoke recently with its Co-founder and CEO, Satya Nitta. I was fascinated to learn about the new possibilities opened up in classrooms by automating and voice-activating the once time- and energy-consuming juggling act of teaching in the digital age. Listen to the full conversation below and share the ways you want to see AI transform teaching in the comments below. 

Stressed about the debate? Skip it and listen to the season wrap up of Season 7. 😃 We take you through the year's most pressing issues and what to look ahead to in the fall. #HigherEd

We've reached the final episode season 7. We have covered a ton of important topics and we predict many of those topics will still be relevant when we return in the fall and beyond. In this episode, Jeff and Michael go to a rapid-fire format and break down six topics in higher education: recent enrollment trends, the state of online education and OPMs, the ongoing #FAFSA issues, campus protests related to the Israel-Hamas conflict, the increasing focus on value in higher education, and recent developments in compensating college athletes. This episode is made possible with support from Ascendium's Education Philanthropy and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. #highered #highereducation

Rethinking Job Descriptions Michael Horn shared fascinating insights from his upcoming book "Job Moves" and recent podcast episode with Kelle Parsons and Amber Garrison Duncan, PhD about the disconnect between job descriptions and actual job requirements. Key takeaways: 1️⃣ Modern job descriptions often prioritize legal protection over accurately describing roles. 2️⃣ Hiring practices must be legally defensible, complicating efforts to change. 3️⃣ Using performance assessment rubrics could provide more accurate job information. 4️⃣ Employers should focus on describing what employees actually do, not just skills. 5️⃣ Educators can then invest in helping people develop these practical abilities. 6️⃣ Hiring managers need to work around vague job descriptions to make good matches. 7️⃣ Describing day-to-day experiences, similar to gig work contracts, could be more effective. This approach could revolutionize how we connect people with jobs and prepare students for the workforce. This episode is made with support from Ascendium's Education Philanthropy. #highered #highereducation #jobs #jobready #training #hiring