Since it seems much of the country is under some sort of weather advisory this weekend, it might be a good time to slow down and dig into one of the links in this week’s issue a bit more deeply, and maybe even talk it through with your colleagues next week. They don’t need to know the source of your newfound wisdom and insight. 😀 

And so, without further ado, this week we start by discussing shifts in graduate school enrollment and what those changes might mean for higher education and society. From there, we turn to an opinion piece that challenges higher education to do the hard work of demonstrating its value, before closing with a look at what faculty are really thinking about AI.  

After reading today’s issue, share your thoughts on how higher ed can better prove its value in the comments! 

Women Now Majority in Graduate School 

From Women far outnumber men in law school, med school, vet school and other professional programs | The Hechinger Report 

Jon Marcus reports on the growth of female students in graduate and professional programs and the impacts this has on society outside of higher education.  

Our Thoughts  

First, you might be wondering why I chose to feature an article about gender gaps in graduate and professional programs. It is because this is not just a graduate school story. It is a higher education legitimacy story. If more men decide that college is not for them, that is half the population drifting further from seeing higher education as relevant, which only accelerates already shaky public confidence. Gallup’s long-running tracking shows confidence in higher education has been depressed relative to prior decades, even with a recent uptick, and the perceived importance of a college degree has been sliding as well. 

The headline numbers are striking. Women now make up the majority of undergraduate enrollment, and they increasingly dominate many pipelines that feed graduate and professional education. As The Hechinger Report notes, women outnumber men four to one in veterinary medicine and are now the majority in law, medicine, pharmacy, optometry, dentistry, and more. This is, in many ways, long overdue progress for women. At the same time, when any profession becomes heavily dominated by a single demographic group, representation narrows, which has real downstream consequences for who feels seen, who seeks services, and who imagines themselves in that career. 

There is also a very pragmatic institutional angle here. Many campuses have leaned on graduate enrollment, especially master’s programs, as a stabilizing force while undergraduate demand has been volatile. That strategy becomes harder to sustain when the pipeline shrinks. This article explicitly flags declining international graduate enrollment as another compounding threat, and recent reporting on fall international enrollment snapshots has shown international graduate numbers declining as well. If stable or increasing graduate enrollment plays a role in your overall institutional budget, these trends are not abstract or distant.  

Finally, I keep coming back to the bigger societal link. Higher education is associated with outcomes that extend well beyond earnings, including better health and longer lives, and higher rates of civic participation like voting. When a growing share of men disengages from that pathway, it is not just a campus problem. It is a community problem that shows up in places far beyond the classroom. Ignoring that connection carries real and lasting costs.  

Higher Ed’s Value 

From Better Defining and Measuring Higher Ed’s Value | Inside Higher Ed 

Doug Lederman argues that higher education should do the hard work required to better prove our worth.  

Our Thoughts  

While I don’t usually feature an opinion column, this one is especially timely because the accountability conversation is no longer hypothetical. Federal negotiators are actively shaping a framework that uses graduates’ earnings to determine whether programs keep access to federal aid, sending a clear signal that earnings-based definitions of “value” are becoming the default whether we like it or not. At the same time, public confidence in higher education has been shaky for years, and we should assume institutions will be asked to prove their impact more directly and more often.  

I agree with Lederman’s core argument that earnings can be a sensible floor. Students deserve protection from programs that consistently leave them worse off financially. That baseline matters. But if we stop there, we risk quietly redesigning the sector around a single outcome that is heavily shaped by labor markets, geography, and who students were before they ever arrived on campus. Earnings-only accountability also creates real incentive problems for fields that matter but do not pay well, and for institutions that enroll more working adults, first-generation students, and students with fewer financial buffers.  

As someone nearing the end of my PhD in teaching and learning, I also sympathize with the pushback because measuring learning is genuinely hard. It is hard across disciplines, at scale, and to do in a way that does not turn into a compliance exercise. But “hard” is not the same as “impossible,” and we have more building blocks than we sometimes acknowledge. As one example, AAC&U’s VALUE rubrics are designed for evaluating cross-cutting outcomes using authentic student work rather than proxy measures alone. 

This is where I think the sector has missed the moment for far too long. For over twenty years, I have heard higher education leaders say some version of, “We change lives.” I truly believe that, but we can no longer ask prospective students, families, and policymakers to simply trust us about learning and value. If we do not define what we mean by quality and publicly report on it, someone else will do it for us, and it will almost certainly be narrower than what we would choose.  

The uncomfortable truth is that this work is slow, political, and methodologically messy. It requires shared definitions, better data, and the humility to publish results even when they are not flattering. Still, I do not currently see a viable alternative. The accountability pressure is here, and if we want the story of higher education to be bigger than a wage number, we have to do the difficult work of measuring what we claim to deliver and showing our progress in plain language.  

Faculty and AI 

From Survey: Faculty Say AI Is Impactful—but Not In a Good Way | Inside Higher Ed 

According to a new report from the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University, faculty believe that AI will have negative impact on learning. 

Our Thoughts  

On the critical thinking point, I think faculty are picking up on something real. Early research is starting to show a pattern that should make us cautious about outsourcing thought, especially when students use GenAI as a first draft of their reasoning instead of a tool they interrogate. A Microsoft Research study of knowledge workers found that when people relied on GenAI, they reported reduced cognitive effort and lower engagement in critical thinking, particularly when they had high confidence in the tool’s output.  Other early work also links heavy AI tool usage to cognitive offloading and lower critical thinking performance.  Even some of the more public-facing experimental work that discusses cognitive debt and LLM-assisted writing is directionally consistent, though this evidence base is still emerging and should be treated as suggestive rather than settled.  

However, I actually think the more important story here is not “faculty are worried about cheating” or even “faculty are skeptical of AI.” It is that a meaningful share of faculty appear to be opting out of engaging with the tool altogether. The report notes that about a quarter of faculty do not use any AI tools, and about a third do not use them in teaching.  That is a problem, not because everyone needs to become an AI evangelist, but because you cannot make sound decisions about a technology you have not tried to understand. You cannot set a meaningful policy for your course, redesign an assessment, or advise a student about ethical use if you have never spent time with the thing you are reacting to. 

While it is completely reasonable to be cautious (I am) and decide you do not want AI tools in your classroom, it is not reasonable to opt out of understanding them. AI is already influencing how students draft, study, search, and summarize, and it is reshaping the expectations they will face in the workforce. If faculty disengage, we do not preserve educational values. We simply hand the steering wheel to the tools and the students and then act surprised when learning starts to look thinner and critical thinking erodes.