Signals of Change, AI, and Tensions Around the Value of Higher Ed

Sophie White: Hey everyone. We have a fascinating conversation in store for you today that centers around the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report Teaching and Learning Edition. In this one, we talk with Michael LaMagna, Kim Arnold and Nicole Muscanell about the Horizon Report. We talk about some reasons that this report is different this year, including the new Signals of Change section, which shows emerging signals that may point to larger trends in higher education and technology. And then we also spend a lot of time discussing what these findings might mean for institutions who are navigating the world of AI in teaching and learning and how this ties back to larger conversations about the value of higher education, this tension between workforce and career readiness versus sharing the value of higher education to society and how we can work together as a higher education sector to support all of our goals. So I hope you enjoy.

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Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White, content marketing and program manager at EDUCAUSE and one of your hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: My name is Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE and I will be your co-host today.

Sophie White: Great. So today we are discussing the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report Teaching and Learning Edition. I think we're going to have a great discussion today on this report. So I will start by introducing our guests and then we will jump into it. First of all, we have Michael LaMagna. Michael is a professor of library services in the Learning Commons at Delaware County Community College and serves as the Information Literacy Program and Library Services Coordinator. Michael applies strategic foresight to his understanding of the possible and plausible futures for academic libraries and higher education. Thanks for being here, Michael.

Michael LaMagna: Oh, thanks for having me.

Sophie White: Great. And if anyone was confused, Delaware County is right outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, so it threw me off this morning. Next up we have Kim Arnold. Kim is the Director of the Teaching and Learning Program at EDUCAUSE. She has 20 years of experience in higher education with deep roots in learning analytics, data governance, ethics and privacy, student learning assessment, theory and design, and student digital ecosystems. Thanks so much for joining us, Kim.

Kim Arnold: Yeah, so happy to be here.

Sophie White: Great. And then we have Nicole Muscanell. Nicole is a researcher for EDUCAUSE. She holds a PhD in social psychology and has more than a decade of experience in higher education, including roles in research, instruction, and academic advising. Her recent work explores faculty and student technology use, workforce challenges, analytics and emerging trends shaping technology, teaching, learning, cybersecurity, and privacy and higher education. Thanks so much for being here, Nicole. Great. So let's just jump into it. I'm curious, I really love this report every year as a way to look at the trends that are shaping higher education and then how those may apply into the future as we use the foresight methodology to take a look at where higher education, teaching and learning might be going. So you all are the experts in this. Do you want to just start with maybe an overview of why the report this year is a little bit different and what you're excited about related to the 2026 Horizon Report?

Jenay Robert: We're all looking at each other to see who wants to answer this question.

Kim Arnold: We didn't draw straws.

Jenay Robert: Draw straws.

Nicole Muscanell: And I'm pausing too because I think one of the most exciting things is something that Jenay really contributed to the report and I don't want to steal your thunder, Jenay, so I don't know if you want to just tell us.

Sophie White: Jenay, kick it off.

Jenay Robert: Okay. I'll kick it off. Yeah. The report this year, one of the longstanding challenges I think with creating the Horizon report and creating any Strategic foresight type of report is it's really hard for us as humans to push our brains far out into the future. We're really hardwired to think about the present. And so we work with a panel of incredible experts from across higher education every year, but it's always hard for all of us to really push our brains to think about those fringe cases of data that are happening today that could evolve into something bigger in the future, the ten-year time horizon that we look at with the Horizon Report. So what we tried to do this year, and I'm excited to see, I want to say I think it was successful, but I won't know until it's published until we get feedback from all of you who read it and are listening to this pod. So what we've tried to do is have a more forward thinking approach by focusing a little more on these pieces of fringe data.

And so we've called them the one section that I can talk about a little bit we call signals of change and then maybe we'll have Kim touch on emerging practices a litle bit, but these are two new areas that we haven't previously explored in the Horizon Report. Signals of change is basically what it sounds like. So whereas trends, which are things that are happening at scale and that are quite likely to impact the future of higher education, signals are things that are not yet happening at scale. They don't rise to the level of trend. They're typically these stories that make you go, "Huh, that's interesting. What could that look like someday?" And that I think is a real piece of magic when it comes to thinking about the future because then that's where you really start to getting ahead of the curve. These things aren't even trends yet and yet if we can think about how they may become trends, do we want them to become trends?

If they do become trends, what could happen as a result of that? That really gets us thinking into a little bit more of that fringe area about the future. So I'll pause there and maybe Kim, if you want to talk a little bit about the emerging practices area.

Kim Arnold: Sure. Yeah. I think along with what Jenay is saying, this is the part of the Horizon Report that we were all really excited about this year. While we love the traditional kind of way that we've been doing it and it served the community really well, getting some insight into this more really emergent nascent work has been really exciting. So as we were gathering what we have historically called the exemplars, so these are the practices, the trends that have really gained traction and have we've always done an open call from the community for that. We added this year kind of a supplemental section. So we had not only exemplars, which are the things that are supporting the trends that we're finding, but also emerging examples of practice. So that goes along with the signals of change. So there was a lot of really exciting stuff there and you see things that are maybe only happening in a single classroom somewhere.

There may be only happening in a very small region. They're happening at a really early pilot stage, but there's something there that might start to gain that traction, reshape some of our core assumptions about teaching and learning and maybe end up as a trend ultimately. And so as institutions, we think this will be really helpful as you're planning your action steps, thinking about what others are doing, how they've done it successfully and how they've scaled it, but also keeping at the front of the mind some of these really cool emergent practices that may trend into the trend space. I use that word too much there, I guess, but also it might not go anywhere. But I think the ability to take a step back and really think about that really critical innovation that's happening in a lot of places that we haven't been able to highlight in the report in the past because we wanted it to be at that scaled level to reach the definition of an exemplar.

I think that's really exciting this year and hopefully will resonate with a lot of the community.

Michael LaMagna: Yeah. I'd like to say I think the trends are an excellent part of the report, but these signals of change and these exemplars really give institutions an idea of what's coming up on the near horizon that they should really be starting to explore in the next five years probably so that they're staying ahead of these trends moving forward. And we see that happening now. The trends are going to talk about AI, they're going to talk about the lack of trust in higher education and I think it's an excellent starting point for those conversations on campus, but we need to really start as an industry, as higher education, thinking about where are we going next and really working towards that future we want. So these signals of change and these exemplars really give us that path to start having those important conversations, not about what's happening today, but where we want to be tomorrow.

And so this is an excellent addition to the report.

Nicole Muscanell: I think everyone's captured a lot of the main points, but so I'll just quickly say I think one of the biggest things is that with Foresight and with the Horizon report specifically, the goal here is that you're able to see the broad set of connecting interconnected things that are changing together, not for you to just look at the port and go, "Oh, okay, well here's what I need to be concerned about and it's just on AI, but it's more like, here's financial pressures that are going on, here's some cybersecurity things." And we throw AI into the mix. And I think this year what's really cool is by including those signals of change is you're really getting a really good broad picture. So now we've got those ongoing trends that are continuing that we're well aware of, but now combine those with the mix of really new novel things that we're seeing.

And I think that gives institutions the best big picture, like what do I need to be thinking about as we move into the future?

Jenay Robert: I want to underscore something that Michael said too, kind of connected to actually something everybody said, but this idea that we need to think both about the ten-year horizon but also about nearer term horizons. And I think balancing that is really challenging, but something that I have never heard anybody disagree about is that change is happening faster now than it ever has in any other time in the past. And we've been very thoughtful about this actually when it comes to what the Horizon Report looks like and how it serves the community in the sense that the Horizon Report has historically taken that ten-year time horizon. And as the times shift, as the needs to be resilient become even more urgent and the need to think about those shorter time horizons becomes even more important than it ever has, we're really looking for that balance.

I guess what I really want to make sure people kind of take home from this is that it's not an either or. We don't want to become an organization or a community that just responds to timely things as they pop up. We don't want to only focus on those signals of change. We don't want to only focus on that next news story or that next we're recording this in early May and so we have big security breaches on our mind as we're recording this. We don't want to become a community that only responds to things as they're happening, but we also don't want to forget about the link between current events and that longer term plan. And I think that's what we're trying to do now with the Horizon Report is find that balance.

Michael LaMagna: And I really like how you said that because we want to be proactive and not reactive. We've been as an industry so reactive in higher education to those external forces that are imposing on us and we can see that play out in a lot of the trends in the Horizon Report this year, but I think it's important that we start being proactive and really driving education and really our institutions to the future that we want. And those signals of change allow us to see what is on the horizon and really work towards that future that we want, not only for our institution but our students, our faculty, and the larger communities that we serve.

Sophie White: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And this is taking me back a little bit, Jenay, to a conversation we had a few weeks ago related to looking at a 50-year horizon for education and technology. We did an episode that was kind of a thought experiment in some ways looking at where technology could go and how it relates to society. But one of the main things I took away from that was why it's so important for us to have agency in the ways that we structure how these technologies evolve. And that's something that's coming through for me in this Horizon Report too, that there's so much discussion about AI in particular. The signals of change for me span such a variety of different areas too, everything from autonomous businesses to emotional management systems, things that could be related to standing up businesses without people and then also looking at deeply into our emotions through AI and thinking about how signals of those affect teaching and learning.

But in general, the theme I feel like I'm hearing coming through is how much power we have in making sure that we keep these technologies equitable and thoughtful and intentional in how we roll them out to our students

Jenay Robert: Yeah, that's always been my favorite part of doing Horizon Research in general is that by being really intentional about thinking about data about today and how that applies to tomorrow, we can create that future that we want to see and we're not passive recipients of that future. I mean Sophie, you brought up one of the cringiest examples actually from the emotional management system if this is making you cringe, you're not alone, but it is a signal of things that could happen and of things that could scale in the future. And so this is an AI-powered, exactly what it sounds like, emotional management system. It's intended to monitor the emotions that this is actually being used in a school, and I think it was middle school someone could fact check me. I swear I wrote this section of the Horizon Report.

So the intention is to be able to monitor the sort of affective experiences of students in your class in real time and then help you intervene if there are issues or just understand the experience of your students. For me, this is incredibly terrible. I don't have no other way to say it. I think it's a horrible idea. Other people might think this is phenomenal and the biggest help they've ever received in a classroom. I'm not here to kind of come down on the judgment for the entire community in that way, but what I can say confidently is that it is very important that we know that these use cases are popping up. And again, this is not at the level of a trend, but it is a thing that has been used and so important for us to know that at least someone in this world thinks that this is a great idea and is this a great idea to us?

Do we want to see this happening or do we want to keep an eye out for this type of technology and make sure that we don't allow it into our institutions or what do we want to do about it? So it brings that agency into our hands.

Nicole Muscanell: It was in New York just FYI.

Kim Arnold: Well, and I was just going to jump in here because my background, I have a big background in learning analytics and privacy. And so this type of stuff has been on my mind and there's been research in the learning analytics fields for 20 years about skin sensors, eye movement, all of this to help kind of look at brain waves and brain cycles. And in a lot of instances, it can be exceptionally helpful for the learners, but this is one of the things that stood out this year, I think, especially since we were looking not just at trends, but also a lot of the emerging kind of signals of change and practices. One of the things for me that is really important for us as a community to consider is that tension between empowerment and surveillance. And it's a very, very difficult road to walk, which is why I think you see that we saw a lot this year.

We saw a lot about ethics, privacy, equitable use. I think Sophie, you kind of mentioned that. And I think this theme kind of runs under everything. We know that AI it's not future anymore. We're not looking at like a Jetson's future. It's here, it's going to stay and it is actively restructuring the way that higher education works, how the whole world works, but especially for us, how higher education works. And so it's really important that we think about what is that tension there, that push and pull between empowerment and surveillance and who that's benefiting and who that's potentially not benefiting and how we kind of address that, mitigate that whenever possible. But I think there's been a lot of recent examples. Cybersecurity again is another one of these things that's a huge risk now because of our dependence on educational technology and that empowers us and it enables us to bring better, more personalized learning experiences to our students AI helps those instructing course, really instructing courses, it really helps them gain some efficiencies by eliminating some of the more route tasks and allowing them to put more of their brain capacity into the really critical humanistic components of teaching.

But then there is that other side that we have to balance and figure out how we walk that road on that really tight, tight rope as we go forward. And that's something that's really come out in this year's report to me.

Michael LaMagna: Yeah, Kim, one of the things that really stood out to me in the report this year as we were looking at these trends was this undercurrent of trust that AI has kind of thrusted on us that trust between teachers and students as we think about AI plagiarism detection or how AI is going to be used in the classroom, this kind of idea of trust with the sensors to monitor your mental health in the classroom. And even in the larger society, the trust between the population, the communities we serve and the institutions themselves. And so we could see this connection between AI bringing this new technology and trying to remain a human focused kind of people first institution where there's trust. So yeah, it's such a great point and we can see how that signal of change really plays into the trends we're seeing.

Sophie White: Michael, question for you I had was I noticed one of the trends is AI is reshaping trust in information. That's one of the social trends this year. So talking about how if you're relying on AI outputs for specific information, you may not always be fact checking things in the way that you would have previously, et cetera. I'm curious based on your background in information literacy, where do you think we are right now in this kind of situation with figuring out trusted information and how AI is changing that dynamic?

Michael LaMagna: Yeah, it's such an interesting time to be in this space because a lot of institutions are now talking about AI literacy and a lot of what AI literacy is, is just information literacy that we've been teaching for decades in higher education and in the K–12 space, really thinking about how does AI fit within our existing information ecosystem. And when we get to that question of trust, it's no different than the conversations we were having ten, fifteen, twenty years ago about going out to the internet, coming across a site, how do we evaluate it? I think what we're finding though is a lot of our students are really being more discerning consumers of information. And so I think the message has been clear that AI does hallucinate, that AI will make things up, that AI will give you made up citations to add to your paper and that students are really being more discerning consumers of information as they go and they use these tools because that conversation about plagiarism, that conversation about academic integrity that's been there for years in that K–12 environment has followed them into higher ed.

And I'm not saying that they're not using AI, but I think that the conversation should be away from plagiarism detection, AI detection, and really building that trust in the classroom where you have the conversation with students who say like, "Look, this is a tool we're going to be using for the foreseeable future. So how do we use it in an ethical manner in the classroom? How do we use it ethically as we leave the classroom and then go into the workplace?" And so that idea of trust is there. And what's nice is we see in these trends that concept of trust really was thrusted because AI was brought in at such a quick pace and then you have that kind of arms race where every institution's thinking about how they're going to use it or not use it. And so really I think we're seeing the larger conversation shift to no longer being about how do we just detect it, but more about how do we work with our students in a meaningful way.

But ultimately I think this AI literacy that we're seeing really should just be embedded in that information literacy that we've been teaching for years because it is all just information at this point, especially with that generative AI.

Jenay Robert: I agree so much with everything you just said. And I want to highlight this idea that AI literacy is not just about how to use AI but how to not use AI. And I think that's something that really gets lost in the conversation, particularly when some members of our community who are vocal about not wanting AI tools being used in higher education in any way, which it's fine. I actually don't have a huge argument with a lot of people who choose not to use AI in their context. Fine, but I think that what is often missing from that tension is this distinction that when we talk about AI literacy, we're not just trying to teach you how to use a tool that you don't want to use. We're trying to help you understand that you're going to encounter this technology in a variety of ways at work and in life and we want you to know how to react to it, how to identify it, how to choose purposefully when to use it and when not to use it as opposed to just taking a blanket approach with it. So I really appreciated that you highlighted that.

Sophie White: I'll add too, I noticed some discussion about this in the environmental trends section. So Nicole, I'd love to hear what you think, but from my perspective, I'm seeing an increasing awareness of environmental effects of AI and data centers. I know I'm in Colorado and there's a vote happening this week related to potential safeguards on data centers built here. So I appreciated the discussion of also teaching students intentionally using AI for certain things while considering what is your carbon footprint around that AI use and how can you consider when you should or shouldn't use it to support your studies?

Nicole Muscanell: Yeah, I think I don't actually know what the student perspective on this is currently, but we do know that Gen Z, for example, is way more concerned about environmental issues than prior generations. So I would suspect that starting to teach them about what the carbon footprint is and then how do we start to actually come up with ways for using AI more intentionally and in ways that actually are not detrimental to the environment I think they would be very much be open to that and on board with it. I think right now everybody's kind of seeing the concern over these data centers and that we're starting to realize there isn't going to be enough water to operate these centers if we just keep evolving at the pace that we're evolving at. And so I think on the one hand, it's going to be about developing newer sources of energy to run these new advanced AI models and technologies.

But I do think right now in terms of students, faculty, staff and professionals at higher ed, it's going to start to be a question of how can we change our immediate behaviors when using AI to make sure that we're not causing a lot of damage to the environment. So maybe I can work on, for example, something as simple as my prompt engineering so that I'm not asking ChatGPT 20 questions if I don't need to, but getting that down to, okay, let me just ask this one really precise question and not try to give it fifty more prompts after that. And that's just a little example. Obviously that probably has a small impact, but collectively when those things add up together, I think it's really going to be important.

Jenay Robert: And if you think about that at scale and we're not just teaching people AI literacy for day-to-day life, we're teaching people AI literacy for professional use as well. And so think about engineers who are using digital twins to test the safety of a rollercoaster. Are they being as efficient as possible with their AI use? Are they using the right model? Are they using the most advanced model that they can, which creates more of an energy drain, or are they using the level of advancement in the model that they need, which would cost less energy? So these things definitely scale and they're nuanced. Again, it comes back to this idea that it's not just about being for or against something. It comes down to understanding all of the different pieces in that system and the evolution of those pieces. As Nicole mentioned, we're seeing evolution in the way people are powering data centers, but part of that comes from this awareness.

Kim Arnold: Yeah. I have two really quick points. One being is I very recently was hanging out with a gaggle of 15- and 16-year-olds and an elder, somebody in my generation said, "Well, I'm going to ChatGPT that. " And the outcry from these 15- and 16-year-olds, no, that's going to take all ... You don't ChatGPT that, you Google that. So they're distinguishing between the ... And they're informing us older folks. So I found that a really interesting thing that they were in this mind that no, that's not what you use AI for, but they're also of the generation that will do 12,000 iterations to get their photo to look just right using AI. But it's an interesting thing to think of, but the environmental trends section is always very interesting to me. And one of the things is the person that has the really awesome kind of responsibility to be able to look at everything that's kind of submitted in the exemplars and the emerging practices type of spaces is that those were the sections that we year and year and year like Horizon Report over Horizon Report over the past three or four years in the environmental section, like the impact of AI has come up in one form or another.

But when it comes to higher education, being able to provide very direct examples of what we are doing, there are very few, very few. And in fact, there was no emerging signal. There was no emerging practice around environmental impact type stuff, which shocked me. I thought we'll find something really cool on the edges that maybe this will develop in toward a trend. And so I don't really know why that is. It's something we've talked a lot about. Part of it is some of that requires a much bigger kind of strategic, but there have been ... I have seen examples of, again, folks saying what's an appropriate use of AI versus not. And so that could be construed again into resource usage, but we're not framing it that way in our heads. We're not seeing it that way. And so that for me is a really interesting and perplexing kind of point in this very specific horizon report on why we didn't see more examples from higher ed either in the trend section around environmental impact or in the signals of change.

Nicole Muscanell: So I'll kind of jump in and second that. And I think that's an ongoing issue we've had over Horizon Reports and I don't think it's specific to AI either. It's that in general, we don't get a lot of submissions about very specific environmental things that campuses are doing. And I almost wonder if that's kind of just a byproduct of institutions just being really overwhelmed with things they might perceive as way more urgent and immediate. And so it's like sustainability kind of takes a backseat for a lot of things because guess what? Our enrollments are dropping and we're literally still figuring out how to adapt to AI right now in real time so we don't have the time and space to enter the sustainability arena and do really specific meaningful things right now. I think that could be at least part of it.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. I'm glad you pointed that out and it's a good opportunity to point back to another shop talk episode that we did that focused on the sustainability element of AI tools. We had done a little quick poll about AI related procurement, for example, and talked about what role sustainability played spoiler alert, it ranked very low on the list and we had our friend Karen Costa come in and talk about some of those things with us. So that's a great episode to watch if this is an interesting topic to you. The other thing I wanted to point out was if you're listening or watching and you have a great example of something you're doing related to sustainability and big data, we would really like to hear about it. So whether that's another Shop Talk episode or an EDUCAUSE case study or an EDUCAUSE Review article, I don't know, but reach out to one of us on this call and let us know because I think that is a topic that deserves a lot of attention.

And yet as Kim and Nicole said, we often don't get a lot of data from the community about what's being done in that space.

Sophie White: So I feel like there's so much we could talk about related to AI, but I'm curious, I was seeing in this report and let me know if I'm misinterpreting it, but it seemed like there was really a tension between this push for measuring the ROI of higher education, proving the value of higher education trends towards things like credentialing and stackable credentials versus keeping the core principles of higher ed as a place for exploration and critical thinking and community to support societal goals. So I'm curious, what do you all think about that massive question and what the Horizon Report this year tells us about what we should be doing?

Kim Arnold: I have so many thoughts, but I want to pause and see if anybody else wants to jump in.

Jenay Robert: I have so many thoughts too, but I feel like I've been talking too much.

Kim Arnold: I know. I feel like I can't come back too.

Nicole Muscanell: I agree with Jenay and Kim, so maybe the best place to start is from someone who's on the ground in higher ed.

Jenay Robert: Michael.

Michael LaMagna: Yeah, absolutely. Of course, I have a lot of thoughts on this as well because we see this tension playing out and I'm at a community college, so we have that tension between transfer degree programs as well as career and technical programs. And what we're finding is that there really is a tension there where we're being asked by the local community, the local business community, employers to really produce graduates that are ready to hit the ground running as soon as they start a job and we have to figure out a way to make that fit within a career and technical program or even a transfer program. And so we see this playing out not only in the trends, but in higher education over the last couple of years as to is a bachelor's degree, say, required for that job that you're looking for? And if it is required, is the expense to earn that bachelor's degree, does it pay off for that job itself because does the salary equate to that time and lost opportunity to get that there as well as just the larger question of maybe these micro-credentials are a better place to start where you can kind of create a pathway where these credentials stack over time to really get somebody where they need to be because maybe they don't need that bachelor's degree, but they just need enough classes in how to use AI in the workplace or a specific tool and that gets their foot in the door.

And so that's really where that tension plays out now, that traditional view of higher education, that place where you're going for an education for education sake, to expand your mind in the liberal arts, I think we're seeing that tension play out in government funding and we had those kind of conversations in the Horizon Report. You're seeing it play out in terms of local communities where students are thinking about enrolling. And so really I think this is a trend that we're going to see continue for a while now until higher education kind of catches up to it because this trend is really outpacing institutions, at least from my perspective, but I'd love to hear what everybody else has to say.

Kim Arnold: Yeah. I love that you just said that this is outpacing education. I think that's one of the clearest philosophical shifts that we saw in this year's Horizon Report is that higher ed, we are now preparing students not just for the future, but we're preparing them to navigate these kind of ongoing volatile kind of polycrises and that adaptability is really, really important. And that's why flexible pathways, experiential learning, micro-credentials, these stackable, that's why these things came out time and time again in this report. And for institutions, especially those who have stayed more in the traditional lane of, we are here for the benefit of learning, we're here for knowledge creation, four-year degrees have always been what we're doing This is where it becomes really a place where there's potentially some strategic gaps for them because, and sorry, Sophie, I'm going to bring it back to AI, but just briefly, I'm just going to touch on it briefly and then I'll get back away.

We know when we talk to the workforce, when we read the research coming out of the workforce, there's been some really large studies done in the past year that tell us that hiring managers will pick somebody with less subject matter expertise and more AI experience. They will pick those people seven times out of ten because you can teach people expertise on the job. The knowing how to manage and navigate in the reality of our new world is something that higher ed has a large responsibility to help teach those students. And for me to do a quick plug, if you haven't looked at this year's student and technology forum report, go look at that because really interesting in there to compare with the Horizon Report is that the students in that EDUCAUSE report, they did not think they would be using AI. They thought it was a very small of what they needed to prepare for in going into the workforce and that is completely opposite of what the workforce is telling us.

And so I think that idea of lifelong learning, the micro-credentials, the stackable, how can we do this in more micro doses to kind of keep up with the pace of the world is going to be a new reality for those of us in higher education.

Jenay Robert: The only thing I want to add to this conversation is that like so many of the other things we've talked about today, this is a very nuanced topic. This is not just should we or should we not prepare students for the workforce? This is not just should we or should we not teach students certain discrete skillsets this is not should we or should we not respond to the pressures of federal funding? There are just so many elements to consider and I really want to just make sure that there's space that we're not assuming that the sole purpose of higher education is to prepare people for the workforce. At the same time, we're not assuming that the sole purpose of higher education is to create more informed citizens that have this liberal arts education. I think that either one of those singular pathways could be appropriate for some institutions, but for the majority of institutions in our community, both of those things have to be true, that we're both preparing people to be informed citizens and whole people and also we are preparing people for a workforce and that it's incredibly complicated.

I've heard some experts in this area say they think that perhaps this will result in more differentiation of institution types in the future, that perhaps institutions will realize that it's simply too challenging now to meet all the needs of all the people and so that you may have institutions kind of coming out and saying, "Look, we're primarily focusing on workforce preparation unapologetically, this is the population we're serving and this is what we're doing and that other institutions will double down on this liberal arts approach." My personal opinion as someone who works in this field, I hope that we don't only see that differentiation. I think that is okay to see some institutions specialize in that way, but I do hope that we still see some element of the other in each, like some mix in each institution.

Nicole Muscanell: Yeah. And I'll just chime in and say, I think Jenay points out a really good point. I think part of it is just a communication problem. And I'm not saying there's not work to be done in this area. There's definitely work, but I think higher ed has not been particularly great at communicating exactly what the value is. And so that's part of the issue is it's not just one thing that you're getting out of college. And I think that's why a lot of people are concerned is, well, if we boil this down to just you get a job and what the economic payoff is, you're losing actually a lot of what higher education actually provides. But part of the reason that's continuing to happen is I think institutions have to get better at saying, "Okay, these are the different things that we provide to students." And it's not just about getting a job, but it can be a lot of other factors that by the way contribute you to succeeding in real life beyond just the workforce.

And I'm just thinking at the top of mind, like cognitive and socio-emotional development is something that you really do get out of the college experience. So I think part of the issue here is really coming down to we have to learn how to identify exactly what you're getting out of college and actually communicate that to people a lot better.

Sophie White: I think that's a great point, Nicole, and we are unfortunately running out of time for this discussion. This report is really incredible and I'd highly recommend everyone take some time to read the full report. I think this is a great place to just think about how we don't necessarily have to work as individual institutions, but as a sector we can work together to make sure we're communicating the value, the really nuanced value of what higher education does for its students and society as well. So thank you so much to Nicole, Kim, Michael, my co-host Jenay for being here and for all of your support for the 2026 Horizon Report.