Changing Higher Ed

At UC Santa Barbara, Kavitta Ghai recalls, students waited two days, on average, to get a question answered. For a student whose scholarship was just pulled or whose tuition is due tomorrow, that is too long, and at community colleges, she notes, most classrooms have no teaching assistant at all. She argues AI can now offer the round-the-clock support students have never had, if it is built and go...

Most AI risk at a university does not start with a hacker. It starts with a student, a faculty member, or a researcher copying something out of the learning management system and pasting it into a personal AI account, where every safeguard written into the institution's enterprise licenses no longer applies. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dean...

Texas A&M holds a green light rating for its speech policies and still fell from 47th to 192nd in this year's College Free Speech Rankings. Harvard climbed from 245th to 71st without changing a single policy, a sign that how leadership responds to speech controversies matters more than what is written in the handbook. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks...

Student loan default and repayment rates have continued to be calculated through years of dormant collections, and some institutions could soon face single-year default rates high enough to threaten their Title IV eligibility. That risk is arriving alongside final OB3 rules, sweeping accreditation proposals from the AIM negotiated rulemaking, and midterm elections that will reshape every committee...

Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. W. Brooke...

Workforce readiness is usually framed as a funding and program-design problem. In some states and at some institutions, the funding and the employer willingness already exist, and what is missing is a structure on the institution's side that can take the offer and act on it. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Brad Griffith , president of Buckeye I...

Private colleges under enrollment pressure get told to diversify revenue. The venture that follows usually either fails to earn or drags the institution away from the academic identity families were paying for. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Brooke Barnett, President of Rollins College . The conversation covers how a tuition-dependent priv...

Institutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers doing the damage are recent design decisions, not fixed features of higher education, and several of them cost almost nothing to remove. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podca...

Most institutions in a crisis don't believe they're in one. The word calls up a scandal with a camera crew outside, and nothing on this week's agenda looks like that, so the answer is often no. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Evan Nierman , founder and CEO of Red Banyan, a strategic communications firm built around high-stakes rapid response. T...

Applications keep climbing while the class comes up short. The gap sits in the phase most institutions treat as the finish line: what happens after the acceptance letter goes out. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Mike McGetrick , Vice President of Spark451, which he co-founded. Spark451 is a Jenzabar company. The conversation covers why enrollme...

The same students who say college costs too much are overwhelmingly saying it was worth it, and that contradiction is the key to the entire public confidence debate. In Gallup-Lumina polling cited in this episode, 93 percent of bachelor's students called their degree a worthwhile investment. The doubt is about price, not the education, and generative AI has raised the stakes for confusing the two....

Program discontinuation is usually the fight presidents avoid. Fairleigh Dickinson University put a significant slate of program discontinuations and consolidations to a faculty referendum, and roughly 88 percent of the faculty endorsed it. The vote reflects a larger redefinition underway at FDU: a shift from the four-year degree to a university built around lifelong learning. In this episode of t...

At Manhattan University, the case for the liberal arts is being made with outcomes, not nostalgia. Its graduates rank in the top 2% nationally for mid-career salaries, and The Wall Street Journal ranked the university 73rd in the country for graduate salaries, social mobility, and cost-effectiveness. The more useful story for institutional leaders sits underneath those numbers: a set of deliberate...

Most retention systems flag struggling students through grades and attendance. By the time those indicators fire, many students are already halfway out the door. Elvee's survey of 1,050 U.S. college students shows why: 86% start college highly motivated, 42% come close to dropping out at some point, and only 17% of those who struggle ever request help. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® po...

Half of college presidents worried about public trust are answering with a public relations campaign. According to the AAC&U report at the center of this episode, that is a reasonable instinct but the wrong one. Public confidence in colleges and universities has slid for more than a decade, and messaging alone will not turn it around. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm...

When the federal government freezes research funding, leaders tend to treat it as a budget problem: a number that was cut and might later be restored. The harder truth in this conversation is that much of the damage cannot be undone. Halted studies, shuttered labs, and departed early-career researchers do not simply resume when the money comes back. Research funding cuts are a strategic risk, not...

Most AI conversations in higher education focus on the academic side. The administrative side gets less attention and is producing the bigger near-term financial wins for institutions willing to govern the rollout. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Justin Beck, CEO of Gravyty , about how AI is being applied across enrollment and advancement at in...

AI implementation in higher education is often framed as a technology question. California State University treated it as change management with technology as the catalyst, rolling out ChatGPT Edu to 22 universities in 18 months while running the largest AI survey ever conducted at a single university system. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr....

At sixteen, with straight A's in math and science, Dr. Karen Panetta's school career assessment told her to sell makeup or be a cook. A male friend with lower scores got engineer or politician. No AI was involved. Just a rules-based system applying gender and biographical filters to two teenagers. That same logic now sits inside AI tools landing in admissions offices and HR systems across higher e...

Most business schools are still forming committees to figure out what to do about AI. Kogod School of Business at American University formed a committee, but far from the typical higher ed standards. Leadership gave it six weeks and a five-page limit, and used the recommendation to integrate AI into every department, major, and minor. Three years later, undergraduate enrollment is up 40%, applicat...

AI adoption in higher education is moving faster than institutional change models were built to handle. Students are already using AI at high rates, while many institutions are still trying to decide where AI belongs, who should lead it, and how much change is required. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Nikki Barua , serial entrepreneur and found...

Scaling higher education is no longer a theoretical strategy. As the sector moves deeper into consolidation, institutional leaders need to confront whether their operating models, credential structures, partnerships, and delivery systems are built for the market ahead. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Stephen Spinelli, President of Babson Co...

Civic preparedness in higher education can no longer be treated as an assumed byproduct of a college education. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Raj Vinnakota , president of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars , about how colleges and universities can rebuild the civic skills students need to navigate disagreement, evaluate credible informatio...

International student enrollment in the United States reached record highs in 2024–2025, followed by a sharp and uneven decline heading into 2025–2026. While top-tier institutions continue to attract global talent, regional and private institutions are facing growing pressure as visa restrictions, geopolitical dynamics, and shifting perceptions of the U.S. reshape the enrollment landscape. In this...

Higher education's track record with technology change is uneven for a reason, and the reason is rarely the technology. It is whether leadership treats change management as a discipline that runs from planning through sustainment, or as a rollout activity bolted on at the end. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Mike Toguchi , Chief Strategy Officer...