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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome to another episode of Future Ready Leadership.
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My guest today, Eric Gertler, the executive chairman and CEO of U.S. News and World Report.
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Eric, thank you so much for joining me.
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Jacob, thank you for including me in your podcast.
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So thank you.
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Yeah, I'm looking forward to having a conversation today.
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We're going to talk a lot about education.
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Higher education, what's going on in that space?
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So that'll be a fun conversation.
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I have two young kids, a five-year-old and a nine-year-old.
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So this is especially important for me as I think about their long-term future.
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But why don't we first start with just a little bit of background information about you and the company in case people are not familiar with what you guys are.
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I will tell you though, that for your five-year-old and your nine-year-old, you've got other levels of education before you have to worry about higher education.
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You may have to save now for higher education.
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But you got lots of years ahead of yourself.
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Yeah, we got to make it through the other layers before we get there.
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For sure.
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So I'm happy to give you some background.
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First of all, I have the privilege of serving as executive chairman and CEO of US News and World Report.
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And for your audience, US News has been in existence for over 90 years.
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And I like to think about us as a 90-year-old startup because
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Much like when we talk about higher education and all the transformations that higher education is now going through, we keep on changing our business model every few years.
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Of course, we are very well known for our rankings in colleges, our best college rankings.
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We are known for our rankings in the health vertical for best hospitals.
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We're also known as a publication that is one that
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consumers have a great deal of trust in and understand that we are a nonpartisan.
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We are very data focused as a company.
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And like the overall media industry, we've got to continue to think about how we are providing insightful information content to our readers.
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We do have a large audience.
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We have over 25 million unique users coming to our site every month, in addition to all the other ways in which users interact with our site.
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But I will leave you with this, because there's lots of other things that we want to talk about today, and that is that for us to continue to grow and be important and relevant today and over 90 years, it's because...
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we have been wedded to our North Star.
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And our North Star is our consumer and making sure that we're helping consumers make the most important decisions in their lives.
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And when you think about it, we're going to talk about higher education.
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There is perhaps no more important decision that an 18-year-old is making, perhaps in their life, but certainly at that part in their life than where they go to college.
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And we want to be there to help our students
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our consumers make the best decisions as we do in all other parts of the transformations and the transitions that our consumers make, whether it's graduate schools or jobs or picking the right hospital, that North star, um, where, um, we, uh, we survive based on the trust that we've developed with our consumers is helping them make the right decision.
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So, um,
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Happy to take this in any direction that you want.
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Yeah, I remember actually using US News and I was applying for colleges because I think you guys have a lot of rankings, like you said, colleges, health care, best jobs.
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So a lot of people pay attention to those rankings and news.
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I think you also do stuff for like travel and leisure, don't you?
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We do rankings in travel, best places, best hotels.
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Yeah, I remember.
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Yeah.
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And I will tell you, our editorial team does a – they really do a terrific job because with the rankings, you can summarize and aggregate content in a way that makes it really easy for consumers to understand what they want and how to get the right information quickly.
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And I think
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in a world where you're inundated with information and often information that you don't trust,
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I continue to believe that we still play a very important role in those decision-making.
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Okay, so let's jump to the topic of higher education.
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So just to give you kind of my stance on it and where I am.
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So I put up an article.
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This was November 19th, 2025.
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And it was titled, My Daughter May Never Go to College.
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Here's Why That Shouldn't Surprise You.
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And this is for my nine-year-old.
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And so this conversation actually happens a lot between my friends and I, who all have kids in that five to nine year old range.
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And so I'll kind of unpack my, my thought process around it in a little bit, but I'm curious to hear your perspective first.
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Right.
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Do you still see value in higher education today in 2026?
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And also do you still see that value continuing over the next, let's say decade, or do you see a decline?
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So, first of all, I do.
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I do see value.
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But let me give you some context because I think it's important, first of all, to understand the U.S. news perspective when we look at the, you know, and why we do those rankings.
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Because, you know, the rankings that we do are very outcome-oriented.
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And to simplify it, in the rankings that we provide, we want to ensure that.
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that colleges are doing what they say they're going to do, which is actually ensuring that their students graduate.
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And we also want to make sure that our students, you know, students in this country are graduating with manageable debt.
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Okay.
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And so both of those, now we look at other things in the rankings.
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We want to make sure that when you go to college, are you making more money had you not gone to college?
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Um,
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But all of that is important because in a sense, it goes to the question that you're asking.
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And that is, is there a value, is there an ROI on the college education?
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And what your article is discussing is the fact that more and more Americans and really high school students
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are challenging that belief that there is complete value in higher education and
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because today we're seeing more and more parents, more and more students questioning that value for many different reasons.
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I still do believe that there is value in higher education, value in that college degree, but you need to be a more discerning consumer today.
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You have to decide whether or not
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Does it make sense to go to that expensive private school?
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Does it make sense to go to that public school?
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Does it make sense to go to that community school?
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And let's also remember there's a declining percentage of high school students that are saying, you know what?
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I don't need that college degree anymore and I'm going to go and do other things and go into a trade, for example.
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OK.
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So that is a debate that is happening in this country today.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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And so, and so that's today.
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Do you see the value of higher education increasing or declining over the next decade?
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And so when you say value in higher education, why is there value in higher education?
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Why should people like me be wanting to send our kids to college in the next 10, 12, 15 years, if you see the value continuing to grow?
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Yeah.
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Well, you know, first of all, I think we are at a very important inflection point.
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And so for there to be value, you know, we need to make sure that when our students are going to college, they are learning, they are developing the skills that will help them improve themselves in their lives, in their careers, in their communities, so all of that.
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And I think that over the next 10 years, there's lots of challenges that universities need to meet to be able to continue to ensure that that compact, so to speak, is happening.
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So you raise a very important question.
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And I think the answer to that depends on how universities get through the next few years.
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I mean, let's think about some of the challenges that are going on right now.
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University leaders are dealing with the government and how they are, the science dollars that are going away which will have an impact on students.
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They're dealing with fewer and fewer foreign students that are coming right now.
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What does that do?
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That has an impact on the business model.
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It also has an impact on the experience when you're at school and you're meeting foreign students.
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Right now, university leaders are dealing with
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They're dealing with AI and the impact that that's having on education.
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They're dealing with the debt that students are taking on.
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They're dealing with free speech issues.
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So all of those need to be resolved and managed in a way that students continue to get value out of their education in 10 or 15 years.
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Now, I will say that our university system has been around for hundreds of years.
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It is among the most respected.
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I mean, it's certainly been the most respected system over that over that time.
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But but, you know, you study the future of work.
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Things change and things can change very, very quickly.
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And I think that that to answer your question, we've got to watch how all of that plays out over the next 10 years.
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Yeah, I upset a lot of my grandparents because at a recent dinner, I think it was during Hanukkah last year, we were sitting around the dinner table and everybody was talking about college and school and, you know, my kids that I have with my wife, you know, they're grandkids.
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And I made a statement and I said, you know what?
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I don't think our kids are going to end up going to college.
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And everyone just sat there aghast.
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Like, how could you, how could you say such a thing?
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And we got into a long, like, I don't know, two hour conversation around it.
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And I think a big part of it for me, I think colleges have taken people for granted and they don't know who their customer is anymore because the assumption of colleges has always been, well, you have to come here because otherwise you won't get a job.
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And
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Tomorrow, for example, if the Fortune 100 companies out there came out and they signed a pact and they signed a letter that said, you know what?
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We collectively are coming out and saying that we're no longer going to prioritize college degrees for people who want to work here.
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Colleges would get decimated.
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I mean, I think for a lot of people, really the only reason they go to a college to start is because they want to get that first job.
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And everybody, the assumption has always been, well, if you don't go to college, no one's going to hire you.
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And so, I don't know.
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I think, and so that's one.
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I think a lot of colleges also forget that their customer is not just the student, but it's also the parent.
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It's the parents you need to convince on the value and the ROI of college.
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I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example.
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I double majored in economics and psychology.
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I've had friends that double majored in history, in English, and all sorts of different things.
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From everybody that I knew at college, very few people, one person actually I can think of who got a degree in engineering, ended up doing something related to their major.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Most people, including myself, did not apply in any way, shape or form what they learned in college to what they're doing in life.
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Jacob, you didn't study podcasting in college?
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No, I studied economics and psychology.
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This is the frustration, right?
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You brought up some of these points.
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But you raised some good points.
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First of all, in the same way you said that, well, my kids may not go to –
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college in 10 years.
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But because of that, let me make the last point on why.
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So the last point on why is because when you think about AI and you look at what people like Elon Musk are doing, building optimists,
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Right now, at a recent conference, Jason Calcales from the All In podcast said that he saw Elon Musk's Optimus 3, and he said that by the time these things become mainstream, people will forget that Tesla was ever a car company.
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By the time my kids are going to college, there's going to be an Optimus 10.
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Optimus version 10, ChatGPT version 12.
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So if you can take the knowledge of these AI tools and put it into something like an Optimus, a humanoid robot,
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that can teach my kids anything around any subject and very structured curriculum.
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For me, it's just very hard to understand why then I would want to spend –
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I don't know, over four years, almost 200 grand to send my kid to college unless they want to do something very specialized.
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And then the argument is always, well, don't you want your kids to have the college experience?
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That is a pretty lame excuse to me to spend 200 grand because I want my kids to live in a dorm and get socialized.
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There are other ways to do that.
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For sure.
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I don't know.
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For me, it's just...
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I don't know if colleges are just not – they're oblivious.
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They don't care.
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Like it's just mind-boggling for me the disruption that's going to come in higher education.
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Yeah.
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Well, first of all, I agree with you.
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You know, it's funny.
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When you first said you're sitting around at Hanukkah –
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saying, oh, there may not be universities or I may not send my kids to universities in 10 years from now.
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I sort of laugh thinking the Maccabea sitting around saying, I don't think this oil is gonna last for eight days and then it lasts for eight days.
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So this gets to- Now we gotta give people the- People don't know the whole story.
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Yeah, yeah.
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If you're Jewish and you celebrate Hanukkah, you know the menorah story.
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Yeah, exactly.
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But a few points I have to say.
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First of all, I do think, you said sort of
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you know, three points.
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And the first point is that universities don't know who their, their consumer is and who they're.
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And I do worry about that.
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You know, when I think about what colleges are doing today and what universities are, universities are, you know, these are communities that are made for fundraising and about real estate growth.
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and research labs and all of these other things.
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And then somewhere in the middle, you've got students.
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And I agree with you.
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I think students should be the number one priority.
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And at many universities, these students are not even being taught by professors, but by TAs.
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So we need to rethink.
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and make sure that students are absolutely prioritized.
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So I hear you with that.
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The second thing on your point, you said if all of these companies get together and say, oh, we don't need a college degree, what would that do?
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I mean, by the way, that is happening today.
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Exactly.
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More and more state governments saying, we don't require a college degree anymore.
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More and more companies not requiring a college degree.
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What they do want and what they do want to see is the development of certain skills, internships where they have the skill necessary already.
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You obviously spend a lot of time thinking about the future of work.
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The whole idea of mentorship and training kids, that is all changing.
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And companies want to see these kids who already have some of the skills when they come in.
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And so universities need to do that.
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And then the last thing where you said that, you know, to have just this experience of, you know, the college experience for three or four years, that is a, I agree, that is a very expensive proposition to be able to party for three or four years.
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And so universities need to, to the beginning of our conversations, they need to transform and understand that, um,
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that point that they are providing both the critical thinking and not, I mean, one of the big criticisms of certainly some of the more elite universities was that they were telling kids what to think and not how to think, which is absolutely critical, and ensuring that these kids have the knowledge to live and thrive in this new world,
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And the skill set, both the hard and the soft skill set, because otherwise I think you're right.
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These universities become less and less relevant.
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And we are seeing certainly, you know, the lower end of private universities that are going out of business.
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And so there is that fundamental.
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I'll just say one more thing before you before you jump back in.
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And that is colleges today also have to think about themselves as lifelong learning.
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It's not as though you go to college for three years and you learn enough that gives you all the skills that you need for the rest of your life.
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That may have been true 30, 40 years ago.
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But as you know, the world is changing too quickly, too fundamentally that to think that what you learn in a few years at college is going to be sufficient for the rest of your work life.
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And so that's another part of our education system that we need to think about.
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Yeah, so, I mean, it seems like we both agree there's a ton of problems.
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And so for me, like I was looking at average tuition, for example.
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So for UC Santa Cruz, where I went to school, for in-state undergraduates, including tuition, housing, and food, it's around $40,000 to $45,000 a year.
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So, you know, for four years, you're $160,000, $180,000.
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And that's UC Santa Cruz, not to bash my school, but from all the UCs, it's, you know, not, you know, UCLA up there.
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But there are others where you could spend $300,000 to $350,000 a year.
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It's obscene.
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It's mind-boggling.
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That's right.
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And the thing is that none of these educational institutions are accountable for anything.
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You can take any major that you want.
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Go to an educational institution like Harvard.
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You can't find a job afterwards.
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And Harvard's like, well, you picked it.
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That's not our problem that you chose a major that has, like, no jobs in that space.
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So, you know, on the one hand, they're taking a lot of money.
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They get a lot of endowments.
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They're, you know, pushing this messaging.
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But they're not on the hook for anything.
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And so for me, I'm just trying to wonder, like in five, ten years, are these educational institutions going to transform?
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Are they going to create more partnerships with with businesses?
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Are they going to reduce costs?
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Are they going to have more on the job training?
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I mean, companies now are trying to take people out of high school and create their own academies and say, you know what, we'll pay you to not go to college.
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Come here instead.
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We'll teach you what we want you to learn.
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And then you also mentioned the idea of free speech, right, where organizations like Harvard, which I think is consistently ranked as one of the top universities in the world, scored lowest on free speech.
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And, you know, whether people agree with these things on the political side or not, the reality is that people like me are getting together with our friends and we're having conversations about it and saying, is it worth the cost?
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We want our kids to be indoctrinated with stuff that who knows what they're learning there.
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Do we want them taking these BS core classes that have nothing to do with what they're interested in?
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Is there going to be an ROI when they graduate college?
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And is there another way where they can learn these things without having to go to school?
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And these are very real conversations that parents like me are having.
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To be honest, universities are doing a pretty damn poor job convincing me or, you know, wanting me to send my kids there.
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And do you talk to any of the deans, the universities?
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Are they – like what are they thinking about with all this stuff?
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So I do – I will say, first of all, you are spot on.
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And I spend a lot of time talking to students and parents and people in the community –
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and everything that you say is backed up by what we see based on polling and surveying.
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And there's a reason why trust in higher education has gone from about almost 70% down to the 30s.
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It's because the universities are not delivering in the minds of many parents and students what they should be delivering.
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And so, and you've got a much more sophisticated
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audience.
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You've got parents and students are saying, no, I'm not going to spend this type of money because I don't see the ROI.
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I see that, yes, colleges do ensure for now that when you graduate, your income is on average higher.
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You can look at different surveys.
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It's $20,000 more.
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But what these surveys also don't pick up, but the average consumer understands is that
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That's a gross number.
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Often you've got debt and you're paying debt every year.
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And so that also is being – is something that yourself and other parents and consumers are very sensitive to.
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Yes, almost 2 trillion I think.
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1.8 trillion in the United States of college debt.
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Correct.
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And look, the statistic I like to cite which shows that there's been a complete break of the compact between –
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students and universities is that there are 40 million Americans, 40 million Americans that have some college, no degree, but have debt, which means that they never got their degree.
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They never succeeded what they were supposed to.
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And they're walking away with that, which makes it fundamentally worse.
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But, but I will tell you that, um, university presidents today understand, um,
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what is going on to these, um, these conversations are happening today at the highest levels in universities, whether they're fully succeeding in addressing them is another question.
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Many institutions are, um, and, and understand that the cost of a higher education at many, certainly at some of the elite universities is just absolutely prohibitive.
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And so you're seeing a lot more students, um,
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and parents looking at public universities, looking at community colleges, which are really the workhorse of our higher education system and are fantastic, in many cases, fantastic institutions.
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And so those choices are being made by the consumer, which then means that they are having to be addressed by the universities.
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Yeah, and then even other data out there, I think it was 62% of students at a four-year college has finished within six years, only 62%.
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Half of graduates are underemployed a year after they graduate from college.
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So there's a lot of challenges there.
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It's funny, my five-year-old son the other day comes up to me and he says, Daddy, I want to be an electrician.
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And he loves cords and cables and understanding how things work.
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And he goes to robotics class.
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And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, wow, if you're not like, you could make
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a fortune being an electrician now, like it's one of the most in demand jobs, especially if you build a business around it.
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And so it's also really interesting to see a little bit of a trend reversal where we, for many decades, pushed the story of, well, you have to go get a four year degree if you wanna make money.
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And now it seems like the AI jobs or the AI is coming for a lot of the entry level jobs.
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And so we're seeing now a big push back to the trades.
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electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, HVAC technicians making six-figure salaries because they're the ones building the infrastructure for AI.
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I think there's also another statistic that 40% of people are in jobs that – for which their undergraduate degree has no relevancy, meaning they didn't need that college degree for that.
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And look, there's a lot of talk about AI –
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on many different levels.
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What that is doing to the degrees, I mean, for 20 years, we've told people, you know, get that computer science degree, get that STEM degree, that engineering degree, that'll help you get a job.
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And AI is actually breaking that down.
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And, you know, for many people, you don't need that anymore.
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You know, a humanities major may be more beneficial if it allows you to really have the critical levels of thinking.
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that are being required.
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So I'm just, when it comes to AI, I know fundamentally, and you've certainly referenced some of it in this conversation already, it will have huge impact.
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We're not completely sure yet how it's gonna have the impact and where it's gonna have the impact.
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We know it'll have significant impact.
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So I think we're still in very early days.
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So at least for me, when I think of the future of higher education, I mean, I know you said you're talking to some of these educational institutions.
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At least right now, my general perception is that the value of a degree from a four year educational institution is losing value, not increasing.
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It's going to be more about kind of micro skills and things like that, unless things change.
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I'm talking about kind of current state.
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So for me, I see the value like going down.
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not up.
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I don't know, for me, the future of higher education is, I don't know, I don't wanna call it like an education apocalypse here, but in the next five to 10 years, once people have Optimus robots in their house, once people have ubiquitous access to accurate AI tools that don't hallucinate and give you all the information that you need, I don't know, how are you gonna compete
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How is a four-year educational institution going to compete when I can go to my Optimist robot and say, create me a curriculum.
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I want to learn how to be, I don't know, anything.
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I want a degree in marketing.
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I want to get the equivalent of an MBA in marketing.
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Create a syllabus.
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Create a curriculum.
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Teach me what I need to know for four hours a day.
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And it has access to all the information, all the books, all the courses.
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It's just, I don't know, it's crazy to me.
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But, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, the workers that are – that want to be, and particularly a lot of this next generation, that want to be wholly remote.
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Yeah.
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And can do their job mostly from being remote.
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But they're able to do the job where they're at.
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And what I mean is you're not getting the same level of mentorship, you're not getting the same development in terms of soft skills, you're not getting the same development in problem solving, you're doing the work.
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You can, and certainly in AI, you're getting a lot of that knowledge, you're understanding the skill of what you need to do, but you're not getting, without being in a social environment and a practical application,
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you know, how it really works, what are the pitfalls, you know, how do you change course, how do you deal with sort of consumer sentiment and all of that?
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And certainly not yet.
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So I do think in college, there are a lot of other skills that you are developing.
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You're developing the knowledge.
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You're also developing a lot of the soft skills.
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You're learning the ability to critically think,
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You have the opportunity to do internships.
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The question that you're asking, which I think is a very hard question is, what is the value of all that?
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Is it worth $400,000?
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Is it worth $200,000?
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That becomes a very difficult question to ask if you're, you know, you're certainly leaving with a greater knowledge, skill set.
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You're leaving with a, which also is very important,
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a community of people that you know, a network and all of that.
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But that is something that we can't take for granted because certainly most of the country can't afford that today.
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And we can't bankrupt the country for that if they're not getting the real value.
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What do you think educational institutions need to do?
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So if we could create, I don't know, the kind of waving a magic wand where the perception of educational institutions, specifically higher education over the next five to 10 years was kind of like, Oh my God, everybody's got to go there.
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It makes complete sense.
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What are, I don't know, the top five things that you think need to happen for that value to be unquestionable and for the ROI to just be obvious.
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So to summarize what I was saying, when we think about going forward, it's pressure from two ends.
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It's both the consumer or the students being much more selective and much more thoughtful about where they're going to college and making the right decisions from a financial standpoint and what they want to get out of college.
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And then, you know, as I talked about,
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The colleges themselves need to ensure that, first and foremost, the students are leaving with good critical thinking skills, the right skills to be able to thrive in the workplace.
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But also, universities need to be much more sensitive to having a sense of where is industry going?
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Where are...
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Where are companies going?
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Having that communication with business to understand where are the jobs of the future?
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What is happening?
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And then, you know, aligning skills during college, like internships, to ensure that their students are prepared for those opportunities.
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And I think no longer can schools just say, and as you pointed out earlier in our podcast, that
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that schools have, in a sense, no responsibility for what happens to the student when they leave.
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They need to be a much more involved player in terms of that post-college, you know, college job.
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And, you know, it's very interesting how
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The workplace changes so quickly, certainly today, and universities have to be much more sensitive to that.
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So I'll just give you one story.
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I remember I had the privilege of serving in Mike Bloomberg's government when he was mayor of New York City, and I was responsible for job growth.
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And we were doing a study on the future of health care in New York City.
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And I went on a few of the meetings with our outside consultants, and I remember talking to one hospital president, and I said, what is the job that you're most concerned about in your hospital?
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And he said to me, and it surprised me, was a data analyst.
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And I never would have thought, I mean, you know, don't forget, this was 10, 12 years ago because it was in the last –
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term of Mike Bloomberg's mayorship.
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And I thought about that being really, it was a really interesting response.
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And I said, what do you mean a data analyst?
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And he said to me, he said, we're at the forefront of being able to analyze
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all of the outcomes based on data and the likelihood of certain things happening and outcomes on surgeries.
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And we need more people that are expert in data analysis.
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And I thought that was fascinating.
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And then I thought about, do universities have any sense that there's a whole new area in health for data analysts?
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And are they preparing those types of jobs?
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And I think...
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and you and I touched a little bit on AI, there's going to be a whole new set of jobs coming up.
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Are we thinking about what those jobs are?
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Are we training people for those jobs?
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And even if we don't have a perfect crystal ball on what those jobs are gonna be, are we at least directionally preparing students for the types of jobs that we're gonna need in the future?
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And I think that becomes an important part of a university setting.
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If you had to give colleges a grade on their preparedness over the next five to ten years in terms of value, if you were being honest, what grade would you give them now?
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You know, it's very hard.
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You know what?
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I'm going to sidestep that question and tell you I went to Brown University and many classes at Brown were pass-fail.
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So I will say that –
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The university, they're still passing.
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They're not failing.
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But they've got to roll up their sleeves and they've got more work to do to make sure they continue to pass those courses.
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There's work to be done for sure.
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Yeah, I'm definitely with you on the – I don't think there's enough partnership between educational institutions and business.
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To me, they're viewed as just completely separate worlds.
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And I mean, to me, if I was a business, like I would wanna have a very close relationship with all the educational institutions in my area because that's my talent pool.
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So if I can go in there and maybe, you know, guest lecture sometimes, if I could create projects, real world projects for teams there to work on, you know, I would wanna do that kind of stuff.
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But I don't know.
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I certainly agree.
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You know, there's also you want the integrity of the education, but you want that connection of this is what's happening in the business world.
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You know, I had lunch yesterday with a university president.
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We were talking about a bunch of ideas.
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And what's also very clear is putting aside what the job is,
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It is unbelievable the number of students that don't even know what a particular job is.
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Like they have no sense of, oh, I want to do this job, but they don't even know what's involved with that job.
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Forget about even having the skills.
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And so there's a level of...
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call it naivete that we need to also just have kids have an understanding of what the workforce is like.
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And those – Yeah, and nobody teaches that.
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Yeah, I remember like even when I was at UC Santa Cruz, I was taking various marketing classes and everybody said, what do you want to do?
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And I said, oh, one day I want to be kind of the CMO of like Coca-Cola or IBM.
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I didn't know what the hell went into that role.
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Correct.
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But it just sounds cool.
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So you're right.
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And that's something interesting as well.
410
00:37:59.138 --> 00:38:04.940
Why don't we have more of those professions coming into those educational institutions and explaining that?
411
00:38:05.540 --> 00:38:05.620
Yes.
412
00:38:05.640 --> 00:38:14.363
I remember as part of our marketing class, we had to do like a SWOT analysis and then present our SWOT analysis in front of the class and in groups of teams, but it was all hypothetical.
413
00:38:15.593 --> 00:38:28.578
And I remember thinking, how cool would it be if actually a local Coca-Cola came in and said that this is a real scenario that they were in in the past and to do an actual analysis on something like that.
414
00:38:28.978 --> 00:38:30.719
And then you get the experience.
415
00:38:31.199 --> 00:38:33.320
You understand more about the function and the role.
416
00:38:34.380 --> 00:38:43.548
And the relationship there between, I think, a lot of educational institutions, unless it's engineering, where, you know, I think there's a little bit more of a connection there.
417
00:38:43.568 --> 00:38:45.569
You just it's totally separate.
418
00:38:45.969 --> 00:38:47.871
And it's just so interesting and fascinating.
419
00:38:47.911 --> 00:38:48.151
Why?
420
00:38:48.171 --> 00:38:54.196
Because especially you hear conversations today where businesses say, well, we can't we can't find talent.
421
00:38:54.256 --> 00:38:55.857
We have so many open jobs.
422
00:38:55.877 --> 00:38:56.678
Yeah.
423
00:38:56.778 --> 00:39:03.181
And in the back of my mind, I'm like, are you really doing a good job trying to find that talent?
424
00:39:03.201 --> 00:39:06.102
Like how closely are you working with your local institutions?
425
00:39:06.142 --> 00:39:09.144
How involved are you with higher education to find that talent?
426
00:39:10.044 --> 00:39:10.444
And I don't know.
427
00:39:10.464 --> 00:39:12.345
It seems like there's just a lot of opportunity.
428
00:39:13.646 --> 00:39:14.747
Look, I agree.
429
00:39:15.047 --> 00:39:16.667
And it won't just happen by itself.
430
00:39:17.048 --> 00:39:24.671
It requires affirmative steps to reach out and communicate and really work together on that.
431
00:39:24.751 --> 00:39:26.052
I mean, when I think about it,
432
00:39:26.908 --> 00:39:32.430
For many, many years, many of our universities lived in their so-called ivory towers.
433
00:39:32.690 --> 00:39:42.014
And there was lots of benefit to that when you could go to this very protective area and learn and have great thoughts.
434
00:39:42.294 --> 00:39:47.616
And the world and the workplace hadn't really changed that much.
435
00:39:47.636 --> 00:39:50.677
So it didn't really make that big of a difference.
436
00:39:51.568 --> 00:39:55.169
I think today, back to your points, things are changing so much.
437
00:39:55.709 --> 00:40:01.851
We're seeing so much transformation, so much disruption that we're in a completely different state right now.
438
00:40:02.671 --> 00:40:16.655
And all of that I think is absolutely needed to ensure that, you know, we're not wasting these kids education and more so we're preparing them for the workplace.
439
00:40:16.715 --> 00:40:18.996
We're making sure that there is a place for them.
440
00:40:19.473 --> 00:40:23.396
where they can thrive, and companies are really getting the talent that they want.
441
00:40:23.476 --> 00:40:30.581
Because I think on the company side also, they don't just want to hire people for the sake of hiring people.
442
00:40:30.601 --> 00:40:33.543
They want to know that these are kids that are ready.
443
00:40:34.003 --> 00:40:35.304
They're passionate to work there.
444
00:40:35.704 --> 00:40:40.908
They've done some skill building while they've been in college to do that.
445
00:40:41.088 --> 00:40:46.712
Otherwise, there can be a greater reliance on AI for some of these early jobs, and we're not putting together –
446
00:40:48.465 --> 00:40:51.368
or having the right talent that's going up the career ladder.
447
00:40:53.049 --> 00:40:55.171
And so I think you raised some very important points.
448
00:40:56.592 --> 00:40:59.575
Let's – it's the last few minutes here before we wrap up.
449
00:41:00.155 --> 00:41:07.602
I'm curious to get your kind of crystal ball projections of where you think things are going to go over the next 5, 10 years.
450
00:41:07.642 --> 00:41:12.106
Because for me, especially when I think about 10 years, because you start college, what, like 17, 18, thereabouts –
451
00:41:14.548 --> 00:41:21.592
Like if I look at the next decade, right now, based on what I'm seeing, I'm very much in the doom and gloom scenario for higher education.
452
00:41:22.432 --> 00:41:37.801
To me, it just looks like when a lot of these humanoid robots come out, when more and more companies come out there and say that they're no longer looking at college as a prerequisite to get a job,
453
00:41:39.140 --> 00:41:43.343
At least for me, I think a lot of these educational institutions and higher ed are going to get decimated.
454
00:41:43.603 --> 00:41:45.104
I think enrollment will go down.
455
00:41:45.324 --> 00:41:48.086
I think more and more of them will go bankrupt and disappear.
456
00:41:48.606 --> 00:41:52.648
Obviously, ones like Harvard that have $50-plus billion in endowment will be fine.
457
00:41:53.649 --> 00:41:56.831
But I think a lot of them are going to really, really struggle.
458
00:41:57.351 --> 00:41:59.953
I sense that you are a little bit more on the optimistic side.
459
00:42:00.953 --> 00:42:03.995
So what do you think is going to happen over the next decade?
460
00:42:05.376 --> 00:42:07.818
So I think it's a little bit of –
461
00:42:08.684 --> 00:42:13.507
all the things that you mentioned, I think you will see some universities go bankrupt.
462
00:42:14.948 --> 00:42:16.869
You will see business models changing.
463
00:42:17.029 --> 00:42:23.293
I don't necessarily believe that just because you've been a great institution, you'll continue to be a great institution.
464
00:42:23.313 --> 00:42:26.915
I think things are moving too quickly and you need to react.
465
00:42:26.995 --> 00:42:31.658
But I will tell you, because I do get to speak to a lot of
466
00:42:35.965 --> 00:42:51.432
a lot of formidable leaders who are really thinking about the state of education and really looking at the ways in which they are changing the education landscape.
467
00:42:51.692 --> 00:42:58.535
And you'll see some of these who are doing a great job and improving education.
468
00:42:59.199 --> 00:43:04.442
Um, I mean, look, for example, you know, for many years, you would only look at the Ivy League schools.
469
00:43:04.482 --> 00:43:07.404
There are so many other great schools.
470
00:43:07.584 --> 00:43:12.727
I mean, schools like Vanderbilt and Duke that are doing terrific job, University of Florida.
471
00:43:13.347 --> 00:43:16.529
Um, and these are a product of people thinking about the edge.
472
00:43:16.629 --> 00:43:24.894
I mean, University of Arizona, uh, you know, President Michael Crow doing a fantastic job thinking through growing, um, um.
473
00:43:25.186 --> 00:43:26.607
getting people prepared.
474
00:43:27.508 --> 00:43:39.296
So I think it's a lot to do with, with leadership at, at these universities, many will fail, even ones where you would think that, Oh, they've been around for so many years.
475
00:43:39.336 --> 00:43:40.577
They've got such a great brand.
476
00:43:43.258 --> 00:43:54.166
It is, it is no doubt that we're going through a very disruptive period and we'll see some failures, but we'll also see some really interesting experimental,
477
00:43:55.072 --> 00:43:56.073
programs going through.
478
00:43:56.914 --> 00:44:02.179
And that's why I'm realistic, but I'm also optimistic.
479
00:44:03.660 --> 00:44:16.792
So you think the long run, you have faith that the colleges will figure things out, they'll go through some challenges and tough times, but ultimately they will come out on the other end, kind of weathering the storm, so to speak.
480
00:44:17.472 --> 00:44:20.535
Not all colleges, but I think most will.
481
00:44:21.714 --> 00:44:24.896
The ones that can figure out what to do next.
482
00:44:26.036 --> 00:44:29.678
Well, this has been, Eric, a fantastic conversation.
483
00:44:29.778 --> 00:44:35.942
Any last parting words of wisdom or something that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you want to make sure that we highlight or did we get through everything you wanted?
484
00:44:36.002 --> 00:44:37.022
You know, I'm a big believer.
485
00:44:37.042 --> 00:44:39.103
It all comes back to, you know, to leadership.
486
00:44:39.364 --> 00:44:41.285
And I've written about this.
487
00:44:41.365 --> 00:44:50.950
I think being a leader of a university, a university president is one of the more difficult jobs out there today that, you know,
488
00:44:52.122 --> 00:44:57.247
50 years ago, you just needed to think about the education and the curriculum of that school.
489
00:44:57.287 --> 00:45:04.694
Today, you need to think about fundraising and alumni and real estate and research and community development and economic development.
490
00:45:04.774 --> 00:45:08.177
And so it requires a whole new skill set.
491
00:45:08.397 --> 00:45:11.060
And to be able to ensure that.
492
00:45:12.146 --> 00:45:16.668
What you are, you know, we're talking about, are schools going to survive?
493
00:45:16.728 --> 00:45:17.689
Are they not going to survive?
494
00:45:18.129 --> 00:45:24.352
Really depends on making sure that we have the next set of great university leaders because there's lots to be done.
495
00:45:24.412 --> 00:45:35.598
And there's many that I've met that I am so impressed with, you know, others where, you know, the universities need to look for more talented people.
496
00:45:37.128 --> 00:45:42.577
Yeah, I think the next few years for sure will be very, very interesting to pay attention to.
497
00:45:42.597 --> 00:45:47.124
I remember one dean that I had on fairly recently where they were doing a good job.
498
00:45:47.184 --> 00:45:48.326
It was Kettering University.
499
00:45:49.351 --> 00:45:50.772
I don't know if you're familiar with them.
500
00:45:50.792 --> 00:45:53.193
I forgot the dean's name there.
501
00:45:53.573 --> 00:45:56.975
But they're doing a lot in terms of coding and development.
502
00:45:56.995 --> 00:46:01.098
It was Dr. Robert McMahon, president of Kettering University.
503
00:46:01.118 --> 00:46:08.242
But they're a very specific technical university, and they're doing a lot in terms of AI and coding and development, which I thought was pretty cool.
504
00:46:08.802 --> 00:46:16.706
So hopefully we'll see more and more deans and university presidents kind of waking up and making some changes.
505
00:46:18.127 --> 00:46:24.931
Well, Jacob, I also have to say you are talking and thinking about some of the most important issues that we need to think about.
506
00:46:24.951 --> 00:46:30.775
So thank you for the writing that you're doing, the thinking that you're doing, all the podcasting.
507
00:46:31.435 --> 00:46:32.856
Thank you for having me on your show.
508
00:46:32.896 --> 00:46:35.398
I enjoyed this conversation immensely.
509
00:46:35.958 --> 00:46:40.481
We could probably talk for another two hours, but I very much appreciate the time.
510
00:46:42.262 --> 00:46:46.644
Yeah, next time we're going to have to get deeper into the Maccabees and that whole story there.
511
00:46:48.065 --> 00:46:54.327
Eric, where can people go to learn more about you, U.S. News, World Report, anything you want to mention for people to check out?
512
00:46:55.548 --> 00:46:56.588
Sure.
513
00:46:56.809 --> 00:46:58.289
Go to usnews.com.
514
00:46:58.409 --> 00:47:01.371
I'm very proud of the work that we do.
515
00:47:01.451 --> 00:47:05.773
I'm very proud of the information that we provide to consumers.
516
00:47:06.893 --> 00:47:09.014
We are always releasing podcasts.
517
00:47:09.758 --> 00:47:11.159
New rankings, new content.
518
00:47:11.239 --> 00:47:19.406
We spend a lot of time thinking about leadership, the transitions that our consumers go through.
519
00:47:21.187 --> 00:47:21.788
So thank you.
520
00:47:22.048 --> 00:47:22.768
I appreciate that.
521
00:47:23.689 --> 00:47:24.970
Yeah, a lot of fun stuff happening.
522
00:47:25.651 --> 00:47:25.891
All right.
523
00:47:25.931 --> 00:47:28.933
Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your day, Eric.
524
00:47:28.953 --> 00:47:29.834
I really appreciate it.
525
00:47:29.894 --> 00:47:31.175
And thanks, everyone, for tuning in.
526
00:47:31.355 --> 00:47:34.638
Make sure to check out U.S. News and World Report, and I'll see all of you next week.
527
00:47:36.350 --> 00:47:39.992
Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Future Ready Leadership.
528
00:47:40.432 --> 00:47:47.315
If you want to get access to more content on how you can become future ready, make sure to subscribe to the newsletter.
529
00:47:47.716 --> 00:47:53.058
It's thefutureorganization.com forward slash newsletter.
530
00:47:53.438 --> 00:47:57.761
And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to somebody who you would like to see become a better leader.
531
00:47:58.201 --> 00:48:00.562
Thanks for listening or watching, and I will see you next time.
1
00:00:00.149 --> 00:00:00.630
Hello, everyone.
2
00:00:00.650 --> 00:00:03.012
Welcome to another episode of Future Ready Leadership.
3
00:00:03.032 --> 00:00:08.038
My guest today, Eric Gertler, the executive chairman and CEO of U.S. News and World Report.
4
00:00:08.798 --> 00:00:10.120
Eric, thank you so much for joining me.
5
00:00:10.500 --> 00:00:14.324
Jacob, thank you for including me in your podcast.
6
00:00:14.365 --> 00:00:14.985
So thank you.
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Yeah, I'm looking forward to having a conversation today.
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We're going to talk a lot about education.
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Higher education, what's going on in that space?
10
00:00:24.141 --> 00:00:25.942
So that'll be a fun conversation.
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I have two young kids, a five-year-old and a nine-year-old.
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So this is especially important for me as I think about their long-term future.
13
00:00:34.026 --> 00:00:40.030
But why don't we first start with just a little bit of background information about you and the company in case people are not familiar with what you guys are.
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I will tell you though, that for your five-year-old and your nine-year-old, you've got other levels of education before you have to worry about higher education.
15
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You may have to save now for higher education.
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00:00:51.081 --> 00:00:53.261
But you got lots of years ahead of yourself.
17
00:00:53.582 --> 00:00:56.022
Yeah, we got to make it through the other layers before we get there.
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For sure.
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00:00:57.522 --> 00:01:00.943
So I'm happy to give you some background.
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First of all, I have the privilege of serving as executive chairman and CEO of US News and World Report.
21
00:01:08.425 --> 00:01:15.626
And for your audience, US News has been in existence for over 90 years.
22
00:01:16.486 --> 00:01:20.007
And I like to think about us as a 90-year-old startup because
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Much like when we talk about higher education and all the transformations that higher education is now going through, we keep on changing our business model every few years.
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00:01:31.827 --> 00:01:38.291
Of course, we are very well known for our rankings in colleges, our best college rankings.
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We are known for our rankings in the health vertical for best hospitals.
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We're also known as a publication that is one that
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consumers have a great deal of trust in and understand that we are a nonpartisan.
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We are very data focused as a company.
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00:02:01.900 --> 00:02:17.068
And like the overall media industry, we've got to continue to think about how we are providing insightful information content to our readers.
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We do have a large audience.
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We have over 25 million unique users coming to our site every month, in addition to all the other ways in which users interact with our site.
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But I will leave you with this, because there's lots of other things that we want to talk about today, and that is that for us to continue to grow and be important and relevant today and over 90 years, it's because...
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we have been wedded to our North Star.
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And our North Star is our consumer and making sure that we're helping consumers make the most important decisions in their lives.
35
00:02:59.825 --> 00:03:02.227
And when you think about it, we're going to talk about higher education.
36
00:03:02.847 --> 00:03:12.711
There is perhaps no more important decision that an 18-year-old is making, perhaps in their life, but certainly at that part in their life than where they go to college.
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And we want to be there to help our students
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00:03:17.217 --> 00:03:42.411
our consumers make the best decisions as we do in all other parts of the transformations and the transitions that our consumers make, whether it's graduate schools or jobs or picking the right hospital, that North star, um, where, um, we, uh, we survive based on the trust that we've developed with our consumers is helping them make the right decision.
39
00:03:42.511 --> 00:03:43.792
So, um,
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00:03:44.882 --> 00:03:47.563
Happy to take this in any direction that you want.
41
00:03:48.263 --> 00:03:57.827
Yeah, I remember actually using US News and I was applying for colleges because I think you guys have a lot of rankings, like you said, colleges, health care, best jobs.
42
00:03:57.967 --> 00:04:02.309
So a lot of people pay attention to those rankings and news.
43
00:04:02.429 --> 00:04:04.650
I think you also do stuff for like travel and leisure, don't you?
44
00:04:05.700 --> 00:04:10.463
We do rankings in travel, best places, best hotels.
45
00:04:10.704 --> 00:04:11.664
Yeah, I remember.
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Yeah.
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And I will tell you, our editorial team does a – they really do a terrific job because with the rankings, you can summarize and aggregate content in a way that makes it really easy for consumers to understand what they want and how to get the right information quickly.
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And I think
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in a world where you're inundated with information and often information that you don't trust,
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I continue to believe that we still play a very important role in those decision-making.
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Okay, so let's jump to the topic of higher education.
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So just to give you kind of my stance on it and where I am.
53
00:04:53.733 --> 00:04:54.854
So I put up an article.
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This was November 19th, 2025.
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And it was titled, My Daughter May Never Go to College.
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Here's Why That Shouldn't Surprise You.
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And this is for my nine-year-old.
58
00:05:06.042 --> 00:05:13.984
And so this conversation actually happens a lot between my friends and I, who all have kids in that five to nine year old range.
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And so I'll kind of unpack my, my thought process around it in a little bit, but I'm curious to hear your perspective first.
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Right.
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Do you still see value in higher education today in 2026?
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And also do you still see that value continuing over the next, let's say decade, or do you see a decline?
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So, first of all, I do.
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I do see value.
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But let me give you some context because I think it's important, first of all, to understand the U.S. news perspective when we look at the, you know, and why we do those rankings.
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Because, you know, the rankings that we do are very outcome-oriented.
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And to simplify it, in the rankings that we provide, we want to ensure that.
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that colleges are doing what they say they're going to do, which is actually ensuring that their students graduate.
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And we also want to make sure that our students, you know, students in this country are graduating with manageable debt.
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Okay.
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00:06:22.834 --> 00:06:26.956
And so both of those, now we look at other things in the rankings.
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We want to make sure that when you go to college, are you making more money had you not gone to college?
73
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Um,
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00:06:33.947 --> 00:06:39.208
But all of that is important because in a sense, it goes to the question that you're asking.
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And that is, is there a value, is there an ROI on the college education?
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And what your article is discussing is the fact that more and more Americans and really high school students
77
00:07:01.652 --> 00:07:07.473
are challenging that belief that there is complete value in higher education and
78
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because today we're seeing more and more parents, more and more students questioning that value for many different reasons.
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I still do believe that there is value in higher education, value in that college degree, but you need to be a more discerning consumer today.
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You have to decide whether or not
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Does it make sense to go to that expensive private school?
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Does it make sense to go to that public school?
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Does it make sense to go to that community school?
84
00:07:40.961 --> 00:07:47.444
And let's also remember there's a declining percentage of high school students that are saying, you know what?
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00:07:48.085 --> 00:07:55.609
I don't need that college degree anymore and I'm going to go and do other things and go into a trade, for example.
86
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OK.
87
00:07:57.090 --> 00:08:00.132
So that is a debate that is happening in this country today.
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Yes.
89
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Yeah.
90
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Okay.
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And so, and so that's today.
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Do you see the value of higher education increasing or declining over the next decade?
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And so when you say value in higher education, why is there value in higher education?
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Why should people like me be wanting to send our kids to college in the next 10, 12, 15 years, if you see the value continuing to grow?
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Yeah.
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Well, you know, first of all, I think we are at a very important inflection point.
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And so for there to be value, you know, we need to make sure that when our students are going to college, they are learning, they are developing the skills that will help them improve themselves in their lives, in their careers, in their communities, so all of that.
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And I think that over the next 10 years, there's lots of challenges that universities need to meet to be able to continue to ensure that that compact, so to speak, is happening.
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So you raise a very important question.
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And I think the answer to that depends on how universities get through the next few years.
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I mean, let's think about some of the challenges that are going on right now.
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University leaders are dealing with the government and how they are, the science dollars that are going away which will have an impact on students.
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They're dealing with fewer and fewer foreign students that are coming right now.
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What does that do?
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That has an impact on the business model.
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It also has an impact on the experience when you're at school and you're meeting foreign students.
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Right now, university leaders are dealing with
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They're dealing with AI and the impact that that's having on education.
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They're dealing with the debt that students are taking on.
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They're dealing with free speech issues.
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So all of those need to be resolved and managed in a way that students continue to get value out of their education in 10 or 15 years.
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Now, I will say that our university system has been around for hundreds of years.
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It is among the most respected.
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I mean, it's certainly been the most respected system over that over that time.
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But but, you know, you study the future of work.
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Things change and things can change very, very quickly.
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And I think that that to answer your question, we've got to watch how all of that plays out over the next 10 years.
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Yeah, I upset a lot of my grandparents because at a recent dinner, I think it was during Hanukkah last year, we were sitting around the dinner table and everybody was talking about college and school and, you know, my kids that I have with my wife, you know, they're grandkids.
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And I made a statement and I said, you know what?
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I don't think our kids are going to end up going to college.
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And everyone just sat there aghast.
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Like, how could you, how could you say such a thing?
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And we got into a long, like, I don't know, two hour conversation around it.
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And I think a big part of it for me, I think colleges have taken people for granted and they don't know who their customer is anymore because the assumption of colleges has always been, well, you have to come here because otherwise you won't get a job.
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And
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Tomorrow, for example, if the Fortune 100 companies out there came out and they signed a pact and they signed a letter that said, you know what?
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We collectively are coming out and saying that we're no longer going to prioritize college degrees for people who want to work here.
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Colleges would get decimated.
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I mean, I think for a lot of people, really the only reason they go to a college to start is because they want to get that first job.
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And everybody, the assumption has always been, well, if you don't go to college, no one's going to hire you.
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And so, I don't know.
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I think, and so that's one.
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I think a lot of colleges also forget that their customer is not just the student, but it's also the parent.
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It's the parents you need to convince on the value and the ROI of college.
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I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example.
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I double majored in economics and psychology.
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I've had friends that double majored in history, in English, and all sorts of different things.
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From everybody that I knew at college, very few people, one person actually I can think of who got a degree in engineering, ended up doing something related to their major.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Most people, including myself, did not apply in any way, shape or form what they learned in college to what they're doing in life.
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Jacob, you didn't study podcasting in college?
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No, I studied economics and psychology.
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This is the frustration, right?
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You brought up some of these points.
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But you raised some good points.
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First of all, in the same way you said that, well, my kids may not go to –
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college in 10 years.
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But because of that, let me make the last point on why.
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So the last point on why is because when you think about AI and you look at what people like Elon Musk are doing, building optimists,
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Right now, at a recent conference, Jason Calcales from the All In podcast said that he saw Elon Musk's Optimus 3, and he said that by the time these things become mainstream, people will forget that Tesla was ever a car company.
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By the time my kids are going to college, there's going to be an Optimus 10.
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Optimus version 10, ChatGPT version 12.
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So if you can take the knowledge of these AI tools and put it into something like an Optimus, a humanoid robot,
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that can teach my kids anything around any subject and very structured curriculum.
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For me, it's just very hard to understand why then I would want to spend –
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I don't know, over four years, almost 200 grand to send my kid to college unless they want to do something very specialized.
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And then the argument is always, well, don't you want your kids to have the college experience?
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That is a pretty lame excuse to me to spend 200 grand because I want my kids to live in a dorm and get socialized.
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There are other ways to do that.
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For sure.
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I don't know.
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For me, it's just...
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I don't know if colleges are just not – they're oblivious.
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They don't care.
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Like it's just mind-boggling for me the disruption that's going to come in higher education.
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Yeah.
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Well, first of all, I agree with you.
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You know, it's funny.
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When you first said you're sitting around at Hanukkah –
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saying, oh, there may not be universities or I may not send my kids to universities in 10 years from now.
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I sort of laugh thinking the Maccabea sitting around saying, I don't think this oil is gonna last for eight days and then it lasts for eight days.
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So this gets to- Now we gotta give people the- People don't know the whole story.
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Yeah, yeah.
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If you're Jewish and you celebrate Hanukkah, you know the menorah story.
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Yeah, exactly.
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But a few points I have to say.
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First of all, I do think, you said sort of
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you know, three points.
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And the first point is that universities don't know who their, their consumer is and who they're.
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And I do worry about that.
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You know, when I think about what colleges are doing today and what universities are, universities are, you know, these are communities that are made for fundraising and about real estate growth.
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and research labs and all of these other things.
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And then somewhere in the middle, you've got students.
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And I agree with you.
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I think students should be the number one priority.
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And at many universities, these students are not even being taught by professors, but by TAs.
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So we need to rethink.
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and make sure that students are absolutely prioritized.
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So I hear you with that.
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The second thing on your point, you said if all of these companies get together and say, oh, we don't need a college degree, what would that do?
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I mean, by the way, that is happening today.
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Exactly.
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More and more state governments saying, we don't require a college degree anymore.
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More and more companies not requiring a college degree.
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What they do want and what they do want to see is the development of certain skills, internships where they have the skill necessary already.
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You obviously spend a lot of time thinking about the future of work.
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The whole idea of mentorship and training kids, that is all changing.
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And companies want to see these kids who already have some of the skills when they come in.
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And so universities need to do that.
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And then the last thing where you said that, you know, to have just this experience of, you know, the college experience for three or four years, that is a, I agree, that is a very expensive proposition to be able to party for three or four years.
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And so universities need to, to the beginning of our conversations, they need to transform and understand that, um,
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that point that they are providing both the critical thinking and not, I mean, one of the big criticisms of certainly some of the more elite universities was that they were telling kids what to think and not how to think, which is absolutely critical, and ensuring that these kids have the knowledge to live and thrive in this new world,
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And the skill set, both the hard and the soft skill set, because otherwise I think you're right.
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These universities become less and less relevant.
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And we are seeing certainly, you know, the lower end of private universities that are going out of business.
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And so there is that fundamental.
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I'll just say one more thing before you before you jump back in.
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And that is colleges today also have to think about themselves as lifelong learning.
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It's not as though you go to college for three years and you learn enough that gives you all the skills that you need for the rest of your life.
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That may have been true 30, 40 years ago.
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But as you know, the world is changing too quickly, too fundamentally that to think that what you learn in a few years at college is going to be sufficient for the rest of your work life.
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And so that's another part of our education system that we need to think about.
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Yeah, so, I mean, it seems like we both agree there's a ton of problems.
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And so for me, like I was looking at average tuition, for example.
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So for UC Santa Cruz, where I went to school, for in-state undergraduates, including tuition, housing, and food, it's around $40,000 to $45,000 a year.
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So, you know, for four years, you're $160,000, $180,000.
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And that's UC Santa Cruz, not to bash my school, but from all the UCs, it's, you know, not, you know, UCLA up there.
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But there are others where you could spend $300,000 to $350,000 a year.
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It's obscene.
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It's mind-boggling.
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That's right.
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And the thing is that none of these educational institutions are accountable for anything.
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You can take any major that you want.
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Go to an educational institution like Harvard.
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You can't find a job afterwards.
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And Harvard's like, well, you picked it.
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That's not our problem that you chose a major that has, like, no jobs in that space.
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So, you know, on the one hand, they're taking a lot of money.
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They get a lot of endowments.
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They're, you know, pushing this messaging.
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But they're not on the hook for anything.
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And so for me, I'm just trying to wonder, like in five, ten years, are these educational institutions going to transform?
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Are they going to create more partnerships with with businesses?
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Are they going to reduce costs?
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Are they going to have more on the job training?
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I mean, companies now are trying to take people out of high school and create their own academies and say, you know what, we'll pay you to not go to college.
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Come here instead.
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We'll teach you what we want you to learn.
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And then you also mentioned the idea of free speech, right, where organizations like Harvard, which I think is consistently ranked as one of the top universities in the world, scored lowest on free speech.
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And, you know, whether people agree with these things on the political side or not, the reality is that people like me are getting together with our friends and we're having conversations about it and saying, is it worth the cost?
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We want our kids to be indoctrinated with stuff that who knows what they're learning there.
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Do we want them taking these BS core classes that have nothing to do with what they're interested in?
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Is there going to be an ROI when they graduate college?
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And is there another way where they can learn these things without having to go to school?
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And these are very real conversations that parents like me are having.
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To be honest, universities are doing a pretty damn poor job convincing me or, you know, wanting me to send my kids there.
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And do you talk to any of the deans, the universities?
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Are they – like what are they thinking about with all this stuff?
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So I do – I will say, first of all, you are spot on.
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And I spend a lot of time talking to students and parents and people in the community –
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and everything that you say is backed up by what we see based on polling and surveying.
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And there's a reason why trust in higher education has gone from about almost 70% down to the 30s.
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It's because the universities are not delivering in the minds of many parents and students what they should be delivering.
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And so, and you've got a much more sophisticated
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audience.
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You've got parents and students are saying, no, I'm not going to spend this type of money because I don't see the ROI.
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I see that, yes, colleges do ensure for now that when you graduate, your income is on average higher.
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You can look at different surveys.
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It's $20,000 more.
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But what these surveys also don't pick up, but the average consumer understands is that
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That's a gross number.
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Often you've got debt and you're paying debt every year.
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And so that also is being – is something that yourself and other parents and consumers are very sensitive to.
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Yes, almost 2 trillion I think.
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1.8 trillion in the United States of college debt.
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Correct.
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And look, the statistic I like to cite which shows that there's been a complete break of the compact between –
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students and universities is that there are 40 million Americans, 40 million Americans that have some college, no degree, but have debt, which means that they never got their degree.
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They never succeeded what they were supposed to.
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And they're walking away with that, which makes it fundamentally worse.
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But, but I will tell you that, um, university presidents today understand, um,
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what is going on to these, um, these conversations are happening today at the highest levels in universities, whether they're fully succeeding in addressing them is another question.
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Many institutions are, um, and, and understand that the cost of a higher education at many, certainly at some of the elite universities is just absolutely prohibitive.
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And so you're seeing a lot more students, um,
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and parents looking at public universities, looking at community colleges, which are really the workhorse of our higher education system and are fantastic, in many cases, fantastic institutions.
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And so those choices are being made by the consumer, which then means that they are having to be addressed by the universities.
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Yeah, and then even other data out there, I think it was 62% of students at a four-year college has finished within six years, only 62%.
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Half of graduates are underemployed a year after they graduate from college.
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So there's a lot of challenges there.
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It's funny, my five-year-old son the other day comes up to me and he says, Daddy, I want to be an electrician.
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And he loves cords and cables and understanding how things work.
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And he goes to robotics class.
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And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, wow, if you're not like, you could make
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a fortune being an electrician now, like it's one of the most in demand jobs, especially if you build a business around it.
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And so it's also really interesting to see a little bit of a trend reversal where we, for many decades, pushed the story of, well, you have to go get a four year degree if you wanna make money.
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And now it seems like the AI jobs or the AI is coming for a lot of the entry level jobs.
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And so we're seeing now a big push back to the trades.
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electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, HVAC technicians making six-figure salaries because they're the ones building the infrastructure for AI.
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I think there's also another statistic that 40% of people are in jobs that – for which their undergraduate degree has no relevancy, meaning they didn't need that college degree for that.
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And look, there's a lot of talk about AI –
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on many different levels.
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What that is doing to the degrees, I mean, for 20 years, we've told people, you know, get that computer science degree, get that STEM degree, that engineering degree, that'll help you get a job.
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And AI is actually breaking that down.
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And, you know, for many people, you don't need that anymore.
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You know, a humanities major may be more beneficial if it allows you to really have the critical levels of thinking.
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that are being required.
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00:26:51.147 --> 00:27:05.390
So I'm just, when it comes to AI, I know fundamentally, and you've certainly referenced some of it in this conversation already, it will have huge impact.
298
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We're not completely sure yet how it's gonna have the impact and where it's gonna have the impact.
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We know it'll have significant impact.
300
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So I think we're still in very early days.
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So at least for me, when I think of the future of higher education, I mean, I know you said you're talking to some of these educational institutions.
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At least right now, my general perception is that the value of a degree from a four year educational institution is losing value, not increasing.
303
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It's going to be more about kind of micro skills and things like that, unless things change.
304
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I'm talking about kind of current state.
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So for me, I see the value like going down.
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not up.
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00:27:49.384 --> 00:28:11.649
I don't know, for me, the future of higher education is, I don't know, I don't wanna call it like an education apocalypse here, but in the next five to 10 years, once people have Optimus robots in their house, once people have ubiquitous access to accurate AI tools that don't hallucinate and give you all the information that you need, I don't know, how are you gonna compete
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How is a four-year educational institution going to compete when I can go to my Optimist robot and say, create me a curriculum.
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I want to learn how to be, I don't know, anything.
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I want a degree in marketing.
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I want to get the equivalent of an MBA in marketing.
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Create a syllabus.
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Create a curriculum.
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Teach me what I need to know for four hours a day.
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And it has access to all the information, all the books, all the courses.
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It's just, I don't know, it's crazy to me.
317
00:28:41.959 --> 00:28:54.184
But, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, the workers that are – that want to be, and particularly a lot of this next generation, that want to be wholly remote.
318
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Yeah.
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00:28:55.204 --> 00:29:01.267
And can do their job mostly from being remote.
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But they're able to do the job where they're at.
321
00:29:05.550 --> 00:29:17.393
And what I mean is you're not getting the same level of mentorship, you're not getting the same development in terms of soft skills, you're not getting the same development in problem solving, you're doing the work.
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00:29:17.453 --> 00:29:33.238
You can, and certainly in AI, you're getting a lot of that knowledge, you're understanding the skill of what you need to do, but you're not getting, without being in a social environment and a practical application,
323
00:29:33.785 --> 00:29:43.387
you know, how it really works, what are the pitfalls, you know, how do you change course, how do you deal with sort of consumer sentiment and all of that?
324
00:29:44.067 --> 00:29:46.168
And certainly not yet.
325
00:29:46.248 --> 00:29:56.090
So I do think in college, there are a lot of other skills that you are developing.
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00:29:56.110 --> 00:29:57.671
You're developing the knowledge.
327
00:29:58.311 --> 00:30:00.551
You're also developing a lot of the soft skills.
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You're learning the ability to critically think,
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You have the opportunity to do internships.
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The question that you're asking, which I think is a very hard question is, what is the value of all that?
331
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Is it worth $400,000?
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00:30:14.705 --> 00:30:16.707
Is it worth $200,000?
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00:30:17.267 --> 00:30:25.435
That becomes a very difficult question to ask if you're, you know, you're certainly leaving with a greater knowledge, skill set.
334
00:30:26.616 --> 00:30:29.078
You're leaving with a, which also is very important,
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00:30:29.688 --> 00:30:34.152
a community of people that you know, a network and all of that.
336
00:30:35.253 --> 00:30:45.143
But that is something that we can't take for granted because certainly most of the country can't afford that today.
337
00:30:45.943 --> 00:30:49.687
And we can't bankrupt the country for that if they're not getting the real value.
338
00:30:50.985 --> 00:30:54.067
What do you think educational institutions need to do?
339
00:30:54.847 --> 00:31:08.554
So if we could create, I don't know, the kind of waving a magic wand where the perception of educational institutions, specifically higher education over the next five to 10 years was kind of like, Oh my God, everybody's got to go there.
340
00:31:08.574 --> 00:31:09.455
It makes complete sense.
341
00:31:10.716 --> 00:31:18.920
What are, I don't know, the top five things that you think need to happen for that value to be unquestionable and for the ROI to just be obvious.
342
00:31:19.956 --> 00:31:29.342
So to summarize what I was saying, when we think about going forward, it's pressure from two ends.
343
00:31:29.502 --> 00:31:44.191
It's both the consumer or the students being much more selective and much more thoughtful about where they're going to college and making the right decisions from a financial standpoint and what they want to get out of college.
344
00:31:44.291 --> 00:31:47.473
And then, you know, as I talked about,
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The colleges themselves need to ensure that, first and foremost, the students are leaving with good critical thinking skills, the right skills to be able to thrive in the workplace.
346
00:32:00.973 --> 00:32:09.518
But also, universities need to be much more sensitive to having a sense of where is industry going?
347
00:32:09.678 --> 00:32:10.439
Where are...
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00:32:11.783 --> 00:32:13.103
Where are companies going?
349
00:32:13.463 --> 00:32:18.264
Having that communication with business to understand where are the jobs of the future?
350
00:32:18.764 --> 00:32:20.285
What is happening?
351
00:32:20.845 --> 00:32:32.887
And then, you know, aligning skills during college, like internships, to ensure that their students are prepared for those opportunities.
352
00:32:33.067 --> 00:32:40.168
And I think no longer can schools just say, and as you pointed out earlier in our podcast, that
353
00:32:41.911 --> 00:32:49.836
that schools have, in a sense, no responsibility for what happens to the student when they leave.
354
00:32:49.896 --> 00:33:00.244
They need to be a much more involved player in terms of that post-college, you know, college job.
355
00:33:00.384 --> 00:33:04.807
And, you know, it's very interesting how
356
00:33:05.516 --> 00:33:13.761
The workplace changes so quickly, certainly today, and universities have to be much more sensitive to that.
357
00:33:13.781 --> 00:33:16.763
So I'll just give you one story.
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00:33:16.823 --> 00:33:27.570
I remember I had the privilege of serving in Mike Bloomberg's government when he was mayor of New York City, and I was responsible for job growth.
359
00:33:28.531 --> 00:33:33.534
And we were doing a study on the future of health care in New York City.
360
00:33:34.595 --> 00:33:47.404
And I went on a few of the meetings with our outside consultants, and I remember talking to one hospital president, and I said, what is the job that you're most concerned about in your hospital?
361
00:33:48.965 --> 00:33:55.169
And he said to me, and it surprised me, was a data analyst.
362
00:33:56.510 --> 00:34:03.375
And I never would have thought, I mean, you know, don't forget, this was 10, 12 years ago because it was in the last –
363
00:34:04.143 --> 00:34:08.746
term of Mike Bloomberg's mayorship.
364
00:34:09.607 --> 00:34:13.109
And I thought about that being really, it was a really interesting response.
365
00:34:13.129 --> 00:34:14.670
And I said, what do you mean a data analyst?
366
00:34:14.710 --> 00:34:19.233
And he said to me, he said, we're at the forefront of being able to analyze
367
00:34:20.611 --> 00:34:28.733
all of the outcomes based on data and the likelihood of certain things happening and outcomes on surgeries.
368
00:34:29.273 --> 00:34:33.714
And we need more people that are expert in data analysis.
369
00:34:34.515 --> 00:34:36.555
And I thought that was fascinating.
370
00:34:37.035 --> 00:34:45.037
And then I thought about, do universities have any sense that there's a whole new area in health for data analysts?
371
00:34:45.657 --> 00:34:47.678
And are they preparing those types of jobs?
372
00:34:47.778 --> 00:34:48.358
And I think...
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00:34:49.081 --> 00:34:54.583
and you and I touched a little bit on AI, there's going to be a whole new set of jobs coming up.
374
00:34:55.704 --> 00:34:57.845
Are we thinking about what those jobs are?
375
00:34:57.985 --> 00:34:59.886
Are we training people for those jobs?
376
00:35:00.446 --> 00:35:11.151
And even if we don't have a perfect crystal ball on what those jobs are gonna be, are we at least directionally preparing students for the types of jobs that we're gonna need in the future?
377
00:35:11.691 --> 00:35:16.093
And I think that becomes an important part of a university setting.
378
00:35:17.925 --> 00:35:28.450
If you had to give colleges a grade on their preparedness over the next five to ten years in terms of value, if you were being honest, what grade would you give them now?
379
00:35:29.991 --> 00:35:30.852
You know, it's very hard.
380
00:35:31.112 --> 00:35:31.432
You know what?
381
00:35:31.452 --> 00:35:38.756
I'm going to sidestep that question and tell you I went to Brown University and many classes at Brown were pass-fail.
382
00:35:39.436 --> 00:35:40.477
So I will say that –
383
00:35:42.299 --> 00:35:44.560
The university, they're still passing.
384
00:35:44.841 --> 00:35:45.601
They're not failing.
385
00:35:46.281 --> 00:35:51.564
But they've got to roll up their sleeves and they've got more work to do to make sure they continue to pass those courses.
386
00:35:51.965 --> 00:35:53.806
There's work to be done for sure.
387
00:35:54.806 --> 00:36:00.770
Yeah, I'm definitely with you on the – I don't think there's enough partnership between educational institutions and business.
388
00:36:02.670 --> 00:36:06.631
To me, they're viewed as just completely separate worlds.
389
00:36:07.952 --> 00:36:16.555
And I mean, to me, if I was a business, like I would wanna have a very close relationship with all the educational institutions in my area because that's my talent pool.
390
00:36:17.435 --> 00:36:30.439
So if I can go in there and maybe, you know, guest lecture sometimes, if I could create projects, real world projects for teams there to work on, you know, I would wanna do that kind of stuff.
391
00:36:31.624 --> 00:36:32.444
But I don't know.
392
00:36:32.464 --> 00:36:33.965
I certainly agree.
393
00:36:35.726 --> 00:36:47.790
You know, there's also you want the integrity of the education, but you want that connection of this is what's happening in the business world.
394
00:36:47.810 --> 00:36:51.151
You know, I had lunch yesterday with a university president.
395
00:36:51.191 --> 00:36:53.152
We were talking about a bunch of ideas.
396
00:36:53.972 --> 00:37:01.035
And what's also very clear is putting aside what the job is,
397
00:37:02.076 --> 00:37:08.783
It is unbelievable the number of students that don't even know what a particular job is.
398
00:37:09.524 --> 00:37:17.772
Like they have no sense of, oh, I want to do this job, but they don't even know what's involved with that job.
399
00:37:18.533 --> 00:37:20.075
Forget about even having the skills.
400
00:37:20.235 --> 00:37:22.077
And so there's a level of...
401
00:37:24.870 --> 00:37:32.194
call it naivete that we need to also just have kids have an understanding of what the workforce is like.
402
00:37:33.094 --> 00:37:34.855
And those – Yeah, and nobody teaches that.
403
00:37:36.116 --> 00:37:43.440
Yeah, I remember like even when I was at UC Santa Cruz, I was taking various marketing classes and everybody said, what do you want to do?
404
00:37:43.460 --> 00:37:49.083
And I said, oh, one day I want to be kind of the CMO of like Coca-Cola or IBM.
405
00:37:49.835 --> 00:37:51.556
I didn't know what the hell went into that role.
406
00:37:52.196 --> 00:37:52.656
Correct.
407
00:37:52.876 --> 00:37:55.017
But it just sounds cool.
408
00:37:55.097 --> 00:37:55.797
So you're right.
409
00:37:55.937 --> 00:37:58.038
And that's something interesting as well.
410
00:37:59.138 --> 00:38:04.940
Why don't we have more of those professions coming into those educational institutions and explaining that?
411
00:38:05.540 --> 00:38:05.620
Yes.
412
00:38:05.640 --> 00:38:14.363
I remember as part of our marketing class, we had to do like a SWOT analysis and then present our SWOT analysis in front of the class and in groups of teams, but it was all hypothetical.
413
00:38:15.593 --> 00:38:28.578
And I remember thinking, how cool would it be if actually a local Coca-Cola came in and said that this is a real scenario that they were in in the past and to do an actual analysis on something like that.
414
00:38:28.978 --> 00:38:30.719
And then you get the experience.
415
00:38:31.199 --> 00:38:33.320
You understand more about the function and the role.
416
00:38:34.380 --> 00:38:43.548
And the relationship there between, I think, a lot of educational institutions, unless it's engineering, where, you know, I think there's a little bit more of a connection there.
417
00:38:43.568 --> 00:38:45.569
You just it's totally separate.
418
00:38:45.969 --> 00:38:47.871
And it's just so interesting and fascinating.
419
00:38:47.911 --> 00:38:48.151
Why?
420
00:38:48.171 --> 00:38:54.196
Because especially you hear conversations today where businesses say, well, we can't we can't find talent.
421
00:38:54.256 --> 00:38:55.857
We have so many open jobs.
422
00:38:55.877 --> 00:38:56.678
Yeah.
423
00:38:56.778 --> 00:39:03.181
And in the back of my mind, I'm like, are you really doing a good job trying to find that talent?
424
00:39:03.201 --> 00:39:06.102
Like how closely are you working with your local institutions?
425
00:39:06.142 --> 00:39:09.144
How involved are you with higher education to find that talent?
426
00:39:10.044 --> 00:39:10.444
And I don't know.
427
00:39:10.464 --> 00:39:12.345
It seems like there's just a lot of opportunity.
428
00:39:13.646 --> 00:39:14.747
Look, I agree.
429
00:39:15.047 --> 00:39:16.667
And it won't just happen by itself.
430
00:39:17.048 --> 00:39:24.671
It requires affirmative steps to reach out and communicate and really work together on that.
431
00:39:24.751 --> 00:39:26.052
I mean, when I think about it,
432
00:39:26.908 --> 00:39:32.430
For many, many years, many of our universities lived in their so-called ivory towers.
433
00:39:32.690 --> 00:39:42.014
And there was lots of benefit to that when you could go to this very protective area and learn and have great thoughts.
434
00:39:42.294 --> 00:39:47.616
And the world and the workplace hadn't really changed that much.
435
00:39:47.636 --> 00:39:50.677
So it didn't really make that big of a difference.
436
00:39:51.568 --> 00:39:55.169
I think today, back to your points, things are changing so much.
437
00:39:55.709 --> 00:40:01.851
We're seeing so much transformation, so much disruption that we're in a completely different state right now.
438
00:40:02.671 --> 00:40:16.655
And all of that I think is absolutely needed to ensure that, you know, we're not wasting these kids education and more so we're preparing them for the workplace.
439
00:40:16.715 --> 00:40:18.996
We're making sure that there is a place for them.
440
00:40:19.473 --> 00:40:23.396
where they can thrive, and companies are really getting the talent that they want.
441
00:40:23.476 --> 00:40:30.581
Because I think on the company side also, they don't just want to hire people for the sake of hiring people.
442
00:40:30.601 --> 00:40:33.543
They want to know that these are kids that are ready.
443
00:40:34.003 --> 00:40:35.304
They're passionate to work there.
444
00:40:35.704 --> 00:40:40.908
They've done some skill building while they've been in college to do that.
445
00:40:41.088 --> 00:40:46.712
Otherwise, there can be a greater reliance on AI for some of these early jobs, and we're not putting together –
446
00:40:48.465 --> 00:40:51.368
or having the right talent that's going up the career ladder.
447
00:40:53.049 --> 00:40:55.171
And so I think you raised some very important points.
448
00:40:56.592 --> 00:40:59.575
Let's – it's the last few minutes here before we wrap up.
449
00:41:00.155 --> 00:41:07.602
I'm curious to get your kind of crystal ball projections of where you think things are going to go over the next 5, 10 years.
450
00:41:07.642 --> 00:41:12.106
Because for me, especially when I think about 10 years, because you start college, what, like 17, 18, thereabouts –
451
00:41:14.548 --> 00:41:21.592
Like if I look at the next decade, right now, based on what I'm seeing, I'm very much in the doom and gloom scenario for higher education.
452
00:41:22.432 --> 00:41:37.801
To me, it just looks like when a lot of these humanoid robots come out, when more and more companies come out there and say that they're no longer looking at college as a prerequisite to get a job,
453
00:41:39.140 --> 00:41:43.343
At least for me, I think a lot of these educational institutions and higher ed are going to get decimated.
454
00:41:43.603 --> 00:41:45.104
I think enrollment will go down.
455
00:41:45.324 --> 00:41:48.086
I think more and more of them will go bankrupt and disappear.
456
00:41:48.606 --> 00:41:52.648
Obviously, ones like Harvard that have $50-plus billion in endowment will be fine.
457
00:41:53.649 --> 00:41:56.831
But I think a lot of them are going to really, really struggle.
458
00:41:57.351 --> 00:41:59.953
I sense that you are a little bit more on the optimistic side.
459
00:42:00.953 --> 00:42:03.995
So what do you think is going to happen over the next decade?
460
00:42:05.376 --> 00:42:07.818
So I think it's a little bit of –
461
00:42:08.684 --> 00:42:13.507
all the things that you mentioned, I think you will see some universities go bankrupt.
462
00:42:14.948 --> 00:42:16.869
You will see business models changing.
463
00:42:17.029 --> 00:42:23.293
I don't necessarily believe that just because you've been a great institution, you'll continue to be a great institution.
464
00:42:23.313 --> 00:42:26.915
I think things are moving too quickly and you need to react.
465
00:42:26.995 --> 00:42:31.658
But I will tell you, because I do get to speak to a lot of
466
00:42:35.965 --> 00:42:51.432
a lot of formidable leaders who are really thinking about the state of education and really looking at the ways in which they are changing the education landscape.
467
00:42:51.692 --> 00:42:58.535
And you'll see some of these who are doing a great job and improving education.
468
00:42:59.199 --> 00:43:04.442
Um, I mean, look, for example, you know, for many years, you would only look at the Ivy League schools.
469
00:43:04.482 --> 00:43:07.404
There are so many other great schools.
470
00:43:07.584 --> 00:43:12.727
I mean, schools like Vanderbilt and Duke that are doing terrific job, University of Florida.
471
00:43:13.347 --> 00:43:16.529
Um, and these are a product of people thinking about the edge.
472
00:43:16.629 --> 00:43:24.894
I mean, University of Arizona, uh, you know, President Michael Crow doing a fantastic job thinking through growing, um, um.
473
00:43:25.186 --> 00:43:26.607
getting people prepared.
474
00:43:27.508 --> 00:43:39.296
So I think it's a lot to do with, with leadership at, at these universities, many will fail, even ones where you would think that, Oh, they've been around for so many years.
475
00:43:39.336 --> 00:43:40.577
They've got such a great brand.
476
00:43:43.258 --> 00:43:54.166
It is, it is no doubt that we're going through a very disruptive period and we'll see some failures, but we'll also see some really interesting experimental,
477
00:43:55.072 --> 00:43:56.073
programs going through.
478
00:43:56.914 --> 00:44:02.179
And that's why I'm realistic, but I'm also optimistic.
479
00:44:03.660 --> 00:44:16.792
So you think the long run, you have faith that the colleges will figure things out, they'll go through some challenges and tough times, but ultimately they will come out on the other end, kind of weathering the storm, so to speak.
480
00:44:17.472 --> 00:44:20.535
Not all colleges, but I think most will.
481
00:44:21.714 --> 00:44:24.896
The ones that can figure out what to do next.
482
00:44:26.036 --> 00:44:29.678
Well, this has been, Eric, a fantastic conversation.
483
00:44:29.778 --> 00:44:35.942
Any last parting words of wisdom or something that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you want to make sure that we highlight or did we get through everything you wanted?
484
00:44:36.002 --> 00:44:37.022
You know, I'm a big believer.
485
00:44:37.042 --> 00:44:39.103
It all comes back to, you know, to leadership.
486
00:44:39.364 --> 00:44:41.285
And I've written about this.
487
00:44:41.365 --> 00:44:50.950
I think being a leader of a university, a university president is one of the more difficult jobs out there today that, you know,
488
00:44:52.122 --> 00:44:57.247
50 years ago, you just needed to think about the education and the curriculum of that school.
489
00:44:57.287 --> 00:45:04.694
Today, you need to think about fundraising and alumni and real estate and research and community development and economic development.
490
00:45:04.774 --> 00:45:08.177
And so it requires a whole new skill set.
491
00:45:08.397 --> 00:45:11.060
And to be able to ensure that.
492
00:45:12.146 --> 00:45:16.668
What you are, you know, we're talking about, are schools going to survive?
493
00:45:16.728 --> 00:45:17.689
Are they not going to survive?
494
00:45:18.129 --> 00:45:24.352
Really depends on making sure that we have the next set of great university leaders because there's lots to be done.
495
00:45:24.412 --> 00:45:35.598
And there's many that I've met that I am so impressed with, you know, others where, you know, the universities need to look for more talented people.
496
00:45:37.128 --> 00:45:42.577
Yeah, I think the next few years for sure will be very, very interesting to pay attention to.
497
00:45:42.597 --> 00:45:47.124
I remember one dean that I had on fairly recently where they were doing a good job.
498
00:45:47.184 --> 00:45:48.326
It was Kettering University.
499
00:45:49.351 --> 00:45:50.772
I don't know if you're familiar with them.
500
00:45:50.792 --> 00:45:53.193
I forgot the dean's name there.
501
00:45:53.573 --> 00:45:56.975
But they're doing a lot in terms of coding and development.
502
00:45:56.995 --> 00:46:01.098
It was Dr. Robert McMahon, president of Kettering University.
503
00:46:01.118 --> 00:46:08.242
But they're a very specific technical university, and they're doing a lot in terms of AI and coding and development, which I thought was pretty cool.
504
00:46:08.802 --> 00:46:16.706
So hopefully we'll see more and more deans and university presidents kind of waking up and making some changes.
505
00:46:18.127 --> 00:46:24.931
Well, Jacob, I also have to say you are talking and thinking about some of the most important issues that we need to think about.
506
00:46:24.951 --> 00:46:30.775
So thank you for the writing that you're doing, the thinking that you're doing, all the podcasting.
507
00:46:31.435 --> 00:46:32.856
Thank you for having me on your show.
508
00:46:32.896 --> 00:46:35.398
I enjoyed this conversation immensely.
509
00:46:35.958 --> 00:46:40.481
We could probably talk for another two hours, but I very much appreciate the time.
510
00:46:42.262 --> 00:46:46.644
Yeah, next time we're going to have to get deeper into the Maccabees and that whole story there.
511
00:46:48.065 --> 00:46:54.327
Eric, where can people go to learn more about you, U.S. News, World Report, anything you want to mention for people to check out?
512
00:46:55.548 --> 00:46:56.588
Sure.
513
00:46:56.809 --> 00:46:58.289
Go to usnews.com.
514
00:46:58.409 --> 00:47:01.371
I'm very proud of the work that we do.
515
00:47:01.451 --> 00:47:05.773
I'm very proud of the information that we provide to consumers.
516
00:47:06.893 --> 00:47:09.014
We are always releasing podcasts.
517
00:47:09.758 --> 00:47:11.159
New rankings, new content.
518
00:47:11.239 --> 00:47:19.406
We spend a lot of time thinking about leadership, the transitions that our consumers go through.
519
00:47:21.187 --> 00:47:21.788
So thank you.
520
00:47:22.048 --> 00:47:22.768
I appreciate that.
521
00:47:23.689 --> 00:47:24.970
Yeah, a lot of fun stuff happening.
522
00:47:25.651 --> 00:47:25.891
All right.
523
00:47:25.931 --> 00:47:28.933
Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your day, Eric.
524
00:47:28.953 --> 00:47:29.834
I really appreciate it.
525
00:47:29.894 --> 00:47:31.175
And thanks, everyone, for tuning in.
526
00:47:31.355 --> 00:47:34.638
Make sure to check out U.S. News and World Report, and I'll see all of you next week.
527
00:47:36.350 --> 00:47:39.992
Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Future Ready Leadership.
528
00:47:40.432 --> 00:47:47.315
If you want to get access to more content on how you can become future ready, make sure to subscribe to the newsletter.
529
00:47:47.716 --> 00:47:53.058
It's thefutureorganization.com forward slash newsletter.
530
00:47:53.438 --> 00:47:57.761
And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to somebody who you would like to see become a better leader.
531
00:47:58.201 --> 00:48:00.562
Thanks for listening or watching, and I will see you next time.
