Ted Mitchell: AI is a friend, not a foe. AI can build situations for people to apply their learning in almost any discipline. And I'm really looking forward to that part of the AI revolution. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Welcome to GenShift, where we explore how generational experiences shape the way we live, learn, lead, and work. I'm Dr. Katherine Jeffery.

Today's question is one almost every family, employer, educator, and student is asking: what should college prepare students for? And how do we think about the world that they're actually stepping into?

We're not preparing them for how the world used to operate, but we actually need to think about the world that they're stepping into.

My guest today is someone who has seen higher education from nearly every angle imaginable. He's led a college, helped shape national higher education policy as US Under Secretary of Education. Today he serves as president of the American Council on Education, representing more than 1,600 colleges and universities across the country.

Along the way, he's also led a venture fund focused on innovation and education, and currently serves on the boards of Coursera and Khan Academy. If there's anyone who has watched higher education evolve over the last three decades, it's Ted Mitchell. Ted spent his career thinking about one question: What should higher education prepare people for?

Today I want to explore what college signals, what employers expect, what students actually need, and whether those things are still aligned. So this conversation will matter to you if you're hiring recent graduates, if you're actually sending a child to college, if you're leading a college or university, or you're simply wondering whether the traditional path still makes sense.

Ted, welcome to GenShift.

Ted Mitchell: It's a delight to be with you, and it's gonna be really fun talking about these questions together.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Absolutely. And I got to speak alongside of Ted at a conference just this year, right? It was in January. That's right. 

Ted Mitchell: In Nebraska. Yeah, in Omaha. In Omaha. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. And really both of us got to kinda think about, what is the future of higher education? I You think about this all the time, but I got to kinda join that conversation, which was really fun for me as someone who has been in higher education in the past. 

Ted Mitchell: And you were doing a great job of pushing people to think more broadly and creatively.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Good. 

Ted Mitchell: sure

You're gonna push me today.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I hope so.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I'm gonna make it easy for you to start. We're gonna do a lightning round. Ready. So these are like short one or two word answers.

So finish this sentence: Higher education is ?

Ted Mitchell: A means of developing one's passions. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: One word to describe your own college experience. 

Ted Mitchell: Confusing.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I like that. The hardest part about being a college student today is? 

Ted Mitchell: Managing all of the separate demands on your life. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So true. AI in higher education, friend or foe? 

Ted Mitchell: Friend. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: 10 years from now, will a college degree be more important or less important? 

Ted Mitchell: Less. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: College is more about what you learn or who you meet?

Ted Mitchell: Who you meet. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: One skill you'd add to every college degree? 

Ted Mitchell: Verbal communication. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: I'm with you. Higher education's biggest blind spot?

Ted Mitchell: It's actually what you do on a daily basis. I know this is not a one-word answer. So let me try a one-word answer. Generational blindness 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: What an appropriate answer. 

Ted Mitchell: For you- For this podcast ... only for you. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: All right, so now you can use full sentences. You're released from the lightning round.

But I think that was an excellent setup for where this conversation could go. So you've been in higher education for decades, and you've seen it from nearly every perspective imaginable. If you give us the short version, what has actually changed over your career? 

Ted Mitchell: A couple things have changed. First and most importantly, I think that the diversity of institution types has expanded.

And so when we talk about college, and we'll go through this today there's no such thing as college or a college experience anymore. So I think that's the first thing, is the landscape has changed, but our mindset hasn't. 

So we have a picture of college that is actually not right anymore. If you ask people, "What's college like?" the picture that they have is of a four-year residential university where you're dropped off by your loved ones in whatever the modern equivalent of a minivan is-

and you move into your dorm room, and you do all the stuff for four years, and you finish, and the president shakes your hand, and get a diploma, and you're done. That experience represents 14% of the people who go to college. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Really? 14%. That blows me away, actually. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. But it takes 98% of our head space.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Wow. 

Ted Mitchell: So that's the first way it's changed, is that the average age of a college student is 26, not 19. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: The majority of students who are enrolled in post-secondary education are enrolled in community colleges. 

The majority of people who are in four-year institutions are in commuter colleges, and it's a very small minority that spend that four precious ivy-colored years on a college campus.

That's the biggest change. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Wow. So what's the percent in a community college? 

Ted Mitchell: 58. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: 58. And then commuters? 

Ted Mitchell: I would probably give you wrong numbers, but builds up, so you got 60% in community college. You've got another 25% in commuter four-year institutions, and then you've got the 14% on top of that who are in residential institutions.

And then, I think that this is one of the places where the media has done us no favors in the last couple of years, if you take the rarefied air of selective institutions or highly selective institutions you're talking about 100 colleges out of 4,000, and you're talking about 2% of the population.

And yet our mind is just all, focused on these four-year institutions. And anyway, that's a huge change. A couple of other changes, online learning has really grown, and this will take us into AI, but online learning has grown dramatically both in terms of degree programs and in terms of courses that add to degree programs.

The four largest institutions in the country are over 120,000 enrollment, and they're online. Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, Arizona State University, and Maryland Global. That's a half a million students. So that's huge.

The final one that I'll talk about, and this is a good thing, I'm not saying the others are bad but we have become a far more diverse set of institutions, not just in terms of institutional type, but in terms of who goes to college.

We've really made a breakthrough in the last 25 years in terms of low income, first generation, students of color, foreign students. A college campus, whether it's a commuter campus or a residential campus. You hear different languages, people from all kinds of walks of life, and I think that has been the most positive change 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, so I feel like all three of these even, they touch on flexibility, which is a huge- Yeah

value in today's world, and then also accessibility, right? There's- That's right ... more options. 

Ted Mitchell: Exactly right. If you're a first generation student in Los Angeles and, you've got a very tight family and you don't wanna leave your family, you have community college options, you have the Cal State options, you have any number of places nearby.

That's flexibility. You could join Northwestern Governors Association and, still be at home and be in your community. So all of this, I think, speaks to higher education being a much more innovative place than we usually give it credit for. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, I've spoken at some community colleges out in California, and those

 are no joke. I was like, "This is a community college? This place is amazing." 

Ted Mitchell: Aren't they? It's really something. They're vibrant, they're vital, they've got tons of stuff going on.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes.

Ted Mitchell: The students are there because they really want to be there.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And they're highly resourced too. They get a lot of support. So I was very impressed. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. And that's the last 20 years. If we look forward, I think community colleges are really coming into their own. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah

Ted Mitchell: Because of their flexibility, because of their connection to local communities and local businesses. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah ... 

Ted Mitchell: Which makes it a whole lot easier for people to gather skills that can be useful to them, immediately in their context.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, that's so good. My next question, I might even wanna evolve this question is, what's changed for the student sitting in the classroom?

But it may not be the student sitting in the classroom anymore.

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, which students are you talking about? 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Exactly. 

Ted Mitchell: A lot of things have changed. I think some things not for the better. I think that the quality of teaching overall in colleges and universities has, I don't wanna say it too negatively, but it's dissipated- I think that the number of people who go into college being a professor who really wanna change students' lives has decreased, and it's become an attractive occupation for other reasons as well. Primarily doing research being a part of a scholarly community. That would be their passion.

Yeah. But I think that we have increasingly paid short shrift to pedagogy in classrooms, and this is one of the places where we have not, in the academy, kept up with the generational shift that, you have taught me about. Where what you need to do to attract students' attention and keep it is very different today than it was when I was in college or you were in college.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: We need to catch up. And then the other thing is, look, whether it's the internet or AI, the sources of information available to students today dwarf anything that we had. I remember having to go sniff around the physical library and, find that book, and then the three next to it.

It's oh, okay, those connect with that. All of that's being done in a much more efficient way, and so I think the starting place for a lot of students is higher than it has been in the past. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, 'cause I remember it used to feel like, okay, my professor wrote this book, and- Yeah

they've been teaching on this book for the last 15, 20 years, right? Yeah. And so then I would wonder what it's been like for you as you're trying to create change in an institution that has existed in the same way for so long. There's often so much resistance. Because it's like, "No, this is what I'm comfortable with, this is what I'm doing," but it's like I can just go online and ask AI to tell me those things.

I don't need- Yeah ... you to tell me those, right? 

Ted Mitchell: Yep. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So how would you say professors and teachers have had to adapt through all of this? Or are needing to adapt, perhaps, 'cause we're in that shift. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah it's all a lot. For a lot of people it is a challenge to take what they believe they know better than anybody else in the world, and that's why they're professors- 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah ... 

Ted Mitchell: and transmit that to students, but also give students the opportunity to challenge that, to bring in other's perspectives, to encourage other's perspectives in the classroom.

And I think that's where it gets a little hard for some faculty. And, we're hearing a lot about that on the political side. That we're hearing that faculty, especially in the social sciences, bring their political perspective, and aren't very good at bringing in other perspectives. I think we need to be better at that.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Ah, that's interesting. Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: If I've trained for 50 years on a certain thing and I think I'm right, it's pretty easy to come into class and say, "This is the way to think about the world." 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Ted Mitchell: And it's hard. It's, and it's humbling to say, "Yeah, but it's not the only way."

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, I think that word is so key in this conversation. It's very humbling, and I think this transition that we're in, it is humbling for people who have done life a certain way for so long, and now you're saying, "Oh my gosh, I have to do it totally different." That's very hard.

Ted Mitchell: Yeah, and think about the professor who's teaching something about physics, and have a student raise their hand and say, "Yes, Professor, I understand that you think that the universe is expanding.

But what about these five people that I've just been reading about who say no, the universe is contracting?" 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And for me, I think that's a whole lot of fun. And I think that's much more fun to do than to just be dogmatic about it, but it's also hard. It's challenging.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: It is. It really is. What would you say is the thing that people outside of higher education misunderstand most about this moment that we're in? 

Ted Mitchell: That's a great question. I'll go back to my observation about the demographics of higher education. I think the biggest misunderstanding is that there is any kind of unitary definition of an institution of higher education.

That they are so different, and that's, one of the strengths of higher ed. But one of our problems is that we don't help people differentiate very well.

One of the things we've been working on at ECE is creating a way for students to inquire about colleges in a way that gives them a much better sense than the sorta guidebooks of what's offered, what students do, what they do when they graduate, what it will feel like for them to the best of our ability.

Because it's an important choice that students make, and they make it with not very full information. And my economist friends remind me that free markets only work with really good information.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So true.

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Explore the GenShift Dialogue Deck and my services@katherinejeffery.com. Start bridging the gap today. So here's a paradox I can't stop thinking about. Okay. Public confidence in higher education has fallen from 57% to 38% over the past decade, but when Gallup asked recent graduates, three out of four of them say that their degree was critical or important to reaching their career goals.

So why as a country are we losing confidence in something that people who actually experience it are saying, "No, this still brings a lot of value into my life"? 

Ted Mitchell: I keep looking for the right metaphor for this. Maybe it's a one-year gym membership.

You really don't like it, it really hurts while you're doing it, but when you're done, you think, "Wow, that was really worth it." So that's a part of it, and I think that's part of what is happening with students. And college shouldn't be easy, right? It should be challenging. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Right. 

Ted Mitchell: And I've thought a lot about this. I think that the general public confidence has almost nothing to do with what goes on on the campuses or online or in the interaction between students and faculty.

I think it has to do with the plumbing.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: All right... Explain that to us. 

Ted Mitchell: Ready? Here we go. So my friends at the Strada Foundation have been doing a, a lot of surveying about trust, and looking at where people trust and don't trust higher education. Families and students don't trust the admissions process in selective institutions.

It's part of the plumbing. How do you get people onto campus? 

They think that it is rigged, whether you're talking about legacy admissions or something else. They think that it is completely opaque. Do SATs matter more than your grade point average? Yeah Where do recommendations fit in? And, if my essay is competing with AI essays, what does that do to my chances?

And so when you start with this mistrust of the entry. Then you get in and you get a financial aid offer, and people have no trust about that. So I don't know about you, but, you there's this little pattern that happens where we're in the quiet phase, but it'll start up again around Thanksgiving, where colleges will list their tuition prices, and everybody's waiting for the first college that's gonna break $100,000.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, interesting. Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: And it's inevitable that it will happen. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: But the number of colleges who are playing up there is infinitesimal. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah 

Ted Mitchell: It just don't matter unless you're applying to them. So you've got big sticker prices, but then somebody comes along and comforts you and says, "Oh, but don't worry, almost no one pays that" And so you're in a, you're in another game.

And you think I don't know how to play that game either, so I don't trust the financial aid process." And it just goes on and on like that. The other big one is transfer. So you go to community college, you amass a number of credits. You then wanna transfer to a four-year institution, and the four-year institution says, "Welcome. We're so glad that you're here. But by the way, only 40% of your credits count. And so instead of starting as a junior, you're starting as a sophomore-ish." And so they think, "Oh my God, they're not really working for me, that maybe they want more money because they want me to take more classes." 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah.

Ted Mitchell: So this, this map of mistrust comes much more from the plumbing and the way we administer the industry than from the nuts and bolts or the stuff that we actually do. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So I feel like you having said that, what would you say to parents as they listen to you unpack that and they're going, "Yes, I just lived through that with my child."

And, "Yes, I feel like they just want more money from me." There's all this distrust. What would you say? 

Ted Mitchell: I would say first of all, with great humility, I'm really sorry. We should be better than that. 

That's one of the things that we're working on at ACE is we're really working on, a set of principles about what what every institution needs to do to rebuild trust.

And so it's transparency in admission. It's making financial aid offers comparable. It's being better about transfer students. And for me each of these then, if I were a parent going through the college process again, I have two kids, both of whom are through college now.

But I would use each of these points as a point to test the college.

My son or daughter is applying to five colleges. For each of the five, help me understand what is your admissions process? How do you determine financial aid? What is your transfer policy?

So that you're calling them on it as you go through the process. We talk about being an active consumer of healthcare. You really need to press your doctors for answers to questions. So you also need to really press these institutions for answers to these important questions because by and large they have them.

It's just easier for them to live in this world of everything is flexible, everything is bargainable. And that doesn't serve our students well.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. 

Ted Mitchell: I do think that there are new tools available to families to be able to assess the fundamentals of institutions.

What are you gonna get for this?

The Department of Education in Washington has a tool called the College Scorecard.

And that was a challenge that President Obama set out to us when I was working in the administration, to create a tool for parents and students to be able to compare institutions, and to compare them on things like size, demographics, graduation rates, that's an important one.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: Salary after graduation. And so that's a really good tool to just kinda get a sense of how institutions compare. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Where would people find that? 

Ted Mitchell: Collegescorecard@ed.gov. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay. We'll put that in the show notes. 

Ted Mitchell: Great. And then another one that we've been working on is carnegieclassifications.org, which goes another level beneath the scorecard and answers questions like if you really wanna be an engineer should you go to Stanford or Harvard?

There's an answer to that question. Stanford is much more an engineering school than Harvard. If you wanna be a lawyer, should you go to Stanford or Harvard? There's an answer to that question. It's Harvard. And I used those, I'm sorry to have used them, because I just bought into this myth of- so let's do it differently.

East Carolina- 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: There we go ... 

Ted Mitchell: versus Northern Iowa. You can answer those kinds of questions in the Carnegie Classifications. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Excellent. 

Ted Mitchell: And all, in both of them, every institution is there. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay. 

Ted Mitchell: All 4,000. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So you can compare and contrast. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. Just if I'm buying something on Costco's website, I can look at more items.

Ted Mitchell: We don't like to think of it... We don't like to think of it exactly that way but the answer is yes. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: To put it in the most basic of terms. 

Ted Mitchell: Yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay, so let's shift for a moment from colleges to- to employers. 

Ted Mitchell: Yep. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So when someone is actually making a hiring decision at their company, what does a college degree actually tell them in today's world?

Ted Mitchell: So this is very interesting. You hear CEOs say all the time, " Look, we're looking for skills, not degrees. We're looking for people who can do things, not looking for the brand name of the institution. And so you should all focus on skills."

And institutions should focus on skills. Rather than have a transcript that's about grades in a course, we should have transcripts about skills that we've obtained in a course.

Brandeis has actually gone so far as to have two transcripts for their students. One is the regular one, and the other is a transcript about skills. It's really interesting. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: ETS has built the mechanics around the skills transcripts, but I highly recommend people look at that.

And I recommend it to all of our presidents as well 'cause I think it's the thing of the future. That's all good and well, but hiring managers are risk-averse.

They want people to succeed, and they don't want to have earned the reputation of hiring people who can't do this stuff.

And so despite everything that we say about ignoring the name, we don't. So a friend of mine, Byron Auguste, is running an organization whose tagline you've heard, Tear the Paper Ceiling to try to make sure that employers are looking at qualified employees who don't have a college degree. Problem is, when managers have to choose between someone who doesn't have a college degree and someone who does, even if you can make the argument that they have the same set of skills they will pick the one with a college degree because the risk is perceived to be lower. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. That tips the scale. 

Ted Mitchell: It tips the scale, and unfortunately, at the next level, it also tips the scale to have gone to a more prestigious-sounding college. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. 

Ted Mitchell: And so again, are you gonna choose the person who went to an Ivy League institution or the person who went to a regional state college?

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Ted Mitchell: The one who went to the state college may be better and smarter and more active and are gonna really lead the way, but the Ivy League graduate is less risky, just given the culture that we're in. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Ted Mitchell: So that's the state affairs now. I think what's happening, is that we're starting to make progress on that.

Brandeis is an example. Once you can start to actually name the skills and show that people have them, then the prestige of the degree itself and the prestige of individual institutions starts to mean less, and I think that's an incredibly beneficial change. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So probably 10 years ago, it was all a buzz about the concept of you earn badges. Yeah. Is that kind of what Brandeis is doing?

Ted Mitchell: That's how you would do it is you would- Okay ... name the skill, like a verbal communications I mentioned earlier Yeah how good are you at making an argument and backing it up with evidence?

There would be a ETS, in the Brandeis case, has set up a number of projects that students need to work on to be able to do that, and then those will be graded and coded, and you might get a bronze badge for that.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay.

Ted Mitchell: In one year, and a silver badge the next year, and maybe work your way up to a gold badge. But yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: So if you start with a bronze, you can improve.

Ted Mitchell: You can. Yeah, so it's not a have it, don't have it. And hmm, let me back up. A lot of people just do the do you have it, don't you have it?

That's easy. It's simple. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Right. 

Ted Mitchell: Doesn't have a lot of value in the marketplace yet. The ones that are more developmental, I think, will probably be better for students in the long run. But that takes a lot of work. When you go back to this professor that you identified who wrote the book, who's been teaching the book, blah, blah, blah.

You're now gonna ask her to assess a whole different kind of thing. That's gonna be very hard. That's why ETS has their work cut out for them in this. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, 'cause that's not what I signed up for.

Ted Mitchell: I signed up to tell the truth to 18-year-olds who were sitting on my every word. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes, it's such a different world.

We've covered a lot of ground today, from the changing face of higher education and declining public trust to what a college degree actually signals to employers today. But there's one piece of this conversation that we simply cannot ignore, and that is AI.

Because colleges are trying to prepare students for a workplace that is changing incredibly fast, and that raises some really big questions. If students can use AI to write a paper, solve a problem, or do work that once took hours, what are they gaining, and what might they actually be losing? And if employers already say that many new graduates need significant development when they enter the workforce, what happens as AI changes the skills that those graduates will need before colleges can even catch up?

So, we're not done with Ted Mitchell yet. In the next episode, Ted and I are going to dig into AI, how colleges are responding, where the guardrails should be, what students still need to learn for themselves, and perhaps the biggest question of all: in a world where AI can do more and more for us, what do we still need college to teach us to do for ourselves?

Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying these conversations, follow GenShift, share this episode with someone who would enjoy it, and take a minute to leave a review or a rating. It really does help more people discover the show. I'm Dr. Katherine Jeffrey, and I'll see you next time on GenShift.