ST. PAUL, Minn. — At the end of each school year at Central High School, seniors grab a paint pen and write their post-graduation plans on a glass wall outside the counseling office.
For many, that means announcing what college they’ve enrolled in. But the goal is to celebrate whatever path students are choosing, whether at a college or not.
“We have a few people that are going to trade school, we have a few people that are going to the military, a few people who wrote ‘still deciding,’” said Lisa Beckham, a staffer for the counseling center, as she helped hand out markers in May as the school year was winding down. Others, she said, are heading straight to a job.
Talking to the students as they signed, it was clear that one factor played an outsized role in the choice: the high cost of college.
“I’m thinking about going to college in California, and my grandparents all went there for a hundred dollars a semester and went into pretty low-paying jobs, but didn't spend years in debt because it was easy to go to college,” said Maya Shapiro, a junior who was there watching the seniors write up their plans. “So now I think it is only worth going to college if you're going to get a job that's going to pay for your college tuition eventually, so if you’re going to a job in English or history you might not find a job that’s going to pay that off.”
When I told her I was an English major back in my own college years, she quickly said, “I’m sorry.”
Even students going to some of the most well-known colleges are mindful of cost.
Harlow Tong, who was recruited by Harvard University to run track, said he had planned to go to the University of Minnesota and is still processing his decision to join the Ivy League.
“After the decision it really hit me that it's really an investment, and every year it feels like it's getting less and less worth the cost,” he said.
A new book lays out the changing forces shaping what students are choosing after high school, and argues for a change in the popular narrative around higher education.
The book is called “Rethinking College,” by longtime journalist and Los Angeles Times opinion writer Karin Klein. She calls for an end to “degree inflation,” where jobs require a college degree even if someone without a degree could do the job just as well. And she advocates for more high school graduates to take gap years to find out what they want to do before enrolling in college, or to seek out apprenticeships in fields that may not need college.
But she admits the issue is complicated. She said one of her own daughters, who is now 26, would have benefitted from a gap year. “The problem was the cost was a major factor,” Klein told me. “She was offered huge financial aid by a very good school, and I said, ‘We don’t know if you take a gap year if that offer is going to be on the table. And I can’t afford this school without that offer.’”
Hear more from Klein, including about programs she sees as models for new post-grad options, as well as from students at Central High School, on this week’s EdSurge Podcast. Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below. It’s the latest episode of our Doubting College podcast series.
One of the country’s richest nonprofits focused on online education has been giving out grants for more than a year. But so far, the group, known as Axim Collaborative, has done so slowly — and pretty quietly.
“There has been little buzz about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education. “They are not absent from the conversation, but their name is not raised very often.”
Late last month, an article in the online course review site Class Central put it more starkly, calling the promise of the nonprofit “hollow.” The op-ed, by longtime online education watcher Dhawal Shah, noted that according to the group’s most recent tax return, Axim is sitting on $735 million and had expenses of just $9 million in tax year 2023, with $15 million in revenue from investment income. “Instead of being an innovator, Axim Collaborative seems to be a non-entity in the edtech space, its promises of innovation and equity advancement largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.
The group was formed with the money made when Harvard University and MIT sold their edX online platform to for-profit company 2U in 2021 for about $800 million. At the time many online learning leaders criticized the move, since edX had long touted its nonprofit status as differentiating it from competitors like Coursera. The purchase did not end up working out as planned for 2U, which this summer filed for bankruptcy.
So what is Axim investing in? And what are its future plans?
EdSurge reached out to Axim’s CEO, Stephanie Khurana, to get an update.
Not surprisingly, she pushed back on the idea that the group is not doing much.
“We’ve launched 18 partnerships over the past year,” she says, noting that many grants Axim has awarded were issued since its most recent tax return was filed. “It’s a start, and it’s seeding a lot of innovations. And that to me is very powerful.”
One of the projects she says she is most proud of is Axim’s work with HBCUv, a collaboration by several historically Black colleges to create a shared technology platform and framework to share online courses across their campuses. While money was part of that, Khurana says she is also proud of the work her group did helping set up a course-sharing framework. Axim also plans to help with “incorporating student success metrics in the platform itself,” she says, “so people can see where they might be able to support students with different kinds of advising and different kinds of student supports.”
The example embodies the group’s philosophy of trying to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just cash, to help promising ideas scale to support underserved learners in higher education.
Listening Tour
When EdSurge talked with Khurana last year, she stressed that her first step would be to listen and learn across the online learning community to see where the group could best make a difference.
One thing that struck her as she did that, she says, is “hearing what barriers students are facing, and what's keeping them from persisting through their programs and finding jobs that match with their skills and being able to actually realize better outcomes.”
Grant amounts the group has given out so far range from around $500,000 for what she called “demonstration projects” to as much as $3 million.
Artificial intelligence has emerged as a key focus of Axim’s work, though Khurana says the group is treading gingerly.
“We are looking very carefully at how and where AI is beneficial, and where it might be problematic, especially for these underserved learners,” she says. “And so trying to be clear-eyed about what those possibilities are, and then bring to bear the most promising opportunities for the students and institutions that we're supporting.”
One specific AI project the group has supported is a collaboration between Axim, Campus Evolve, University of Central Florida and Indiana Tech to explore research-based approaches to using AI to improve student advising. “They're developing an AI tool to have a student-facing approach to understanding, ‘What are my academic resources? What are career-based resources?,’” she says. “A lot of times those are hard to discern.”
Another key work of Axim involves keeping up an old system rather than starting new ones. The Axim Collaborative manages the Open edX platform, the open-source system that hosts edX courses and can also be used by any institution with the tech know-how and the computer servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of colleges and organizations around the world, including a growing number of governments, who use it to offer online courses.
Anant Agarwal, who helped found edX and now works at 2U to coordinate its use, is also on a technical committee for Open edX.
He says the structure of supporting Open edX through Axim is modeled on the way the Linux open-source operating system is managed.
While edX continues to rely on the platform, the software is community-run. “There has to be somebody that maintains the repositories, maintains the release schedule and provides funding for certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.
When the war in Ukraine broke out, Agarwal says, the country “turned on a dime and the universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX.”
Poulin, of WCET, says that it’s too early to say whether Axim’s model is working.
“While their profile and impact may not be great to this point, I am willing to give startups some runway time to determine if they will take off,” he says, noting that “Axim is, essentially, still a startup.”
His advice: “A creative, philanthropic organization should take some risks if they are working in the ‘innovation’ sphere. We learn as much from failures as successes.”
For Khurana, Axim’s CEO, the goal is not to find a magic answer to deep-seated problems facing higher education.
“I know some people want something that will be a silver bullet,” she says. “And I think it's just hard to come by in a space where there's a lot of different ways to solve problems. Starting with people on the ground who are doing the work — [with] humility — is probably one of the best ways to seed innovations and to start.”
Two instructors at Vilnius University in Lithuania brought in some unusual teaching assistants earlier this year: AI chatbot versions of themselves.
The instructors — Paul Jurcys and Goda Strikaitė-Latušinskaja — created AI chatbots trained only on academic publications, PowerPoint slides and other teaching materials that they had created over the years. And they called these chatbots “AI Knowledge Twins,” dubbing one Paul AI and the other Goda AI.
They told their students to take any questions they had during class or while doing their homework to the bots first before approaching the human instructors. The idea wasn’t to discourage asking questions, but rather to nudge students to try out the chatbot doubles.
“We introduced them as our assistants — as our research assistants that help people interact with our knowledge in a new and unique way,” says Jurcys.
Experts in artificial intelligence have for years experimented with the idea of creating chatbots that can fill this support role in classrooms. With the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, there’s a new push to try robot TAs.
“From a faculty perspective, especially someone who is overwhelmed with teaching and needs a teaching assistant, that's very attractive to them — then they can focus on research and not focus on teaching,” says Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university’s AI Summer Institute for Teachers of Writing.
But just because Watkins thought some faculty would like it doesn’t mean he thinks it’s a good idea.
“That's exactly why it's so dangerous too, because it basically offloads this sort of human relationships that we're trying to develop with our students and between teachers and students to an algorithm,” he says.
On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we hear from these professors about how the experiment went — how it changed classroom discussion but sometimes caused distraction. A student in the class, Maria Ignacia, also shares her view on what it was like to have chatbot TAs.
And we listen in as Jurcys asks his chatbot questions — and admits the bot puts things a bit differently than he would.
Of the nearly 10,000 students enrolled at Brookdale Community College in central New Jersey, about 17 percent are still in high school.
Some of them travel to the campus during the school day to take courses in introductory English, history, psychology and sociology. Others stay right at their own secondary schools and learn from high school teachers who deliver college-course lessons.
They’re part of a practice, increasingly popular nationwide, that sees teenagers complete advanced classes — mostly offered through community colleges — while juggling typical high school activities like sports practices, part-time jobs and dances.
“One of the reasons why we put a lot of time and effort into the high school programs, to get students started on the college pathway in high school, is it’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner,” says Sarah McElroy, dean of pathways and partnerships at Brookdale Community College.
Called dual enrollment, the phenomenon grew for the third year in a row this year. And the growth is steep — up 10 percent compared to last year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s significant in an era when college leaders are concerned about attracting and retaining students who may be skeptical about the value of a degree and also worried about the impending “enrollment cliff” resulting from fewer Americans of traditional college age coming up in the next few years.
It’s going to save them a lot of money, save them a lot of time and hopefully get them to their career goals sooner.
— Sarah McElroy
Nationally, about a fifth of students who take community college courses these days are still in high school, according to John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center. In some parts of the country, the share is even higher — it’s almost 40 percent in Iowa and Indiana, for example.
Among people who started ninth grade in 2009, about a third took some type of dual enrollment course, Fink says, adding, “That’s a big penetration into the high school market.”
The trend is catching on with policymakers and educators as they look for ways to spur college-going while also ameliorating high tuition prices.
“People are concerned about the costs of higher education: state legislators and governors, families and students,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. “The idea of getting college credit while you’re in high school is appealing as a way of holding the cost of college down.”
Brookdale Community College is in a state that has named dual enrollment as a priority. By 2028, New Jersey aims to double the number of high school students enrolled in at least one dual enrollment course, ensure all high schools provide dual enrollment options, and close access gaps to these programs for different groups of students.
That push is evident at Brookdale. From 2018 to 2023, the college recorded a 39 percent increase in Monmouth County high school students enrolling in its college-level courses. The institution hopes to increase enrollment among high school students by 50 percent more by 2028.
“We are trying to reach every high schooler in some way,” McElroy says.
Yet Brookdale, other community colleges, and their K-12 school partners face a few challenges in order for dual enrollment to “live up to its potential as a lever of access and equity to college and careers,” Fink says.
Good for Everyone?
Dual enrollment takes many forms and goes by many names. Some programs are run through well-organized early-college high schools that help students earn a full associate degree by the time they graduate. Others are more free-form, allowing students to take one or two courses as they please — a style some observers have critiqued as “random acts of dual enrollment.” Brookdale offers several different models through its high school partnerships.
Across these varied formats, dual enrollment seems to have become popular because it’s beneficial for all parties involved, according to education experts.
It’s good for students, Fink says, citing two decades of research that shows it leads to better high school and college completion rates. It’s good for community colleges, which advance their missions to serve their surrounding area — and also possibly create “a larger pool of students coming back to you” for additional classes after high school, too, he adds.
In fact, dual enrollment is “the most consistent source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the past decade,” says Nick Mathern, director of K-12 partnerships for Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit that supports a network of community colleges. “Depending on how you break down the age cohort, there is a way in which you see it’s the only source of enrollment growth for community colleges over the last decade.”
Especially in states that provide extra public funds to support dual enrollment, it’s good for school districts and public schools, proponents argue, since they can use those programs as a selling point for attracting families and students who might otherwise look to private schools, or public schools elsewhere.
These dual-enrollment programs are not replacing Advanced Placement courses, which have been a mainstay at high schools for decades and remain popular, Wyner says. Among the three-quarters of high schools that offer advanced coursework, about 78 percent offer dual enrollment compared to 76 percent that offer AP classes. But one advantage dual enrollment may have over the AP program is that it offers a much wider catalog of options, including some career and technical courses, which may appeal to a broader set of students.
“For a lot of students who are not eager to take more purely academic courses — or about test-taking and writing papers — this is an enormous opportunity to get excited about higher education through fields of study not offered in high schools,” Wyner says.
Some of the high schools that feed into Brookdale offer dual enrollment, AP courses and the advanced International Baccalaureate curriculum all at once, McElroy says: “We are finding students are taking a menu of options.”
One bonus she sees regarding the dual enrollment courses: Students know they’ll earn college credit for taking them, whereas they’ll only get college credit for AP classes if they score high enough on standardized exams.
“It transfers so widely. Four-year colleges are taking those credits,” McElroy says. “That’s helped to elevate dual enrollment across the state.”
Addressing Inequality
Yet data on dual enrollment reveals that not all student groups participate at the same rate.
Racial minorities, men and students who would be the first in their families to go to college are underrepresented in these programs. In the county that feeds into Brookdale Community College, for example, “our Black and Hispanic students are not finishing at the same rate white students are,” McElroy says.
Comparing the percent of high school dual enrollment students by race and ethnicity statewide (orange) and at Brookdale (blue.) Data courtesy of Brookdale Community College.
There are a few factors that contribute to this inequality, Fink says. For instance, some schools use standardized test scores to determine which students are eligible to participate, creating barriers since some groups of students consistently score lower than others. Many dual enrollment courses are taught by high school teachers who have the credentials needed to instruct at the community college level — typically a master’s degree in a relevant discipline — and at some high schools, there is a shortage of qualified teachers. And while some states have arrangements that make dual enrollment courses free for students, in other regions, families have to pay.
“If you have to pay extra to take college courses in high school, you’re going to get wealthier, whiter families taking advantage,” Fink says.
Then there is an older mindset to contend with, one that views dual enrollment primarily as an option for academically advanced students who are looking for enrichment.
It is true that some students choose dual enrollment through Brookdale to improve their chances of being accepted into a selective four-year university, McElroy says.
“We know from the research that dual enrollment courses are more rigorous than the standard- issue high school course,” Wyner says. “And so for a lot of parents and students who are eager to be challenged, they see dual enrollment as an opportunity to get exposure to college-level work and get challenged in their coursework.”
But some educators and researchers hope dual enrollment can serve as an opportunity to broaden access to higher education for “students on the margins of going to college,” Fink says, by boosting their confidence, by introducing them to topics they won’t learn about in high school that might inspire them to consider going to college, and by creating momentum for possible postsecondary studies.
“I don’t begrudge middle-class students and college-bound students the opportunity to take classes in high school,” Mathern says. “But if we are not intentional about how we deploy these programs, we are not actually changing how many students in any given community earn a college credential.”
To that end, Brookdale offers college readiness courses to its high school students who participate in dual enrollment programs, designed to teach them skills they need to succeed in advanced classes.
It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising. ... Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.
— John Fink
“It shows students they can do it,” McElroy says. “College could be for them.”
For more high school students to succeed in dual enrollment, experts stress that schools and colleges have to specifically look out for them and guide them through the process.
“We think colleges should be establishing a shared vision with their local school districts about what they want to achieve for dual enrollment,” Mathern says. “As we open the door wider, we can’t just give more students access to college classes and call it good.”
After all, if a student tries a dual enrollment class and doesn’t succeed in it, the experience can leave them worse off than if they hadn’t attempted it all, either by wasting their tuition dollars, leaving them with a low grade that will follow them on a transcript or by discouraging them from pursuing more higher education.
“It’s unethical to really not provide the supports and advising,” Fink says. “Unless you’re doing all of those things, it can be harmful and have the opposite of the intended effect.”
To that end, Brookdale has a dedicated team of support staff for its dual enrollment programs, McElroy says, explaining, “We want to serve the students as much as possible.”
Despite the flaws that remain in many dual enrollment programs, Fink is optimistic that, with fine-tuning, they can serve as a promising pathway to better college and career-training options for more young people.
“There are a lot of reasons we would want to do things differently in the college-to-career transition. It’s largely producing poor and inequitable outcomes,” he says. “What do we do with senior year of high school? Students are checked out. By bringing more career and postsecondary training into high school, you’re blurring the line, and that’s a positive thing for students.”
The premise of “free college” programs popping up around the country in recent years is that bringing the price of higher education down to nearly nothing will spur more students to enroll and earn degrees.
But is that what actually happens?
David Monaghan, an associate professor of sociology at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, has been digging into that question in a series of recent research studies. And the results indicate that not all of these free college programs have the intended effect — and that how a program is set up can make a big difference.
In a working paper the professor co-authored that was released last month, for instance, Monaghan compared two free college programs in Pennsylvania to dig into their outcomes.
One of the programs is the Morgan Success Scholarship at Lehigh Carbon Community College, which is available to students at Tamaqua Area High School who enroll right after completing their high school degree. Qualifying students are guaranteed fully paid tuition, with the program paying any gap left after the student applies for other financial aid and scholarships (a model known as a “last dollar, tuition-only guarantee.”)
The other is the Community College of Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Scholars Program, which is available to students who graduate from a high school in Philadelphia and meet other merit criteria. It is also a “last dollar” program that covers any tuition and fees not paid from other sources. The students must enroll immediately after high school graduation, have a low enough income to qualify for a federal Pell scholarship, file their application for federal financial aid by a set date and enroll in at least six credits at the college.
The Morgan Success Scholarship seemed to work largely as its designers hoped. The year after the program started, the rate of college-going at Tamaqua Area High School jumped from 86 percent to 94 percent, and college-going increased another percentage point the following year. And the number of students graduating from Lehigh Carbon Community College with a two-year degree increased after the program was created.
But something else happened that wasn’t by design. The free-college program appears to have led some students who would have enrolled in a four-year college to instead start at the two-year college — where they may or may not end up going on to a four-year institution. There is a chance, then, that the program may end up keeping some students from finishing a four-year degree. “On balance, the program expands access to postsecondary education more than it diverts students away from four-year degrees, though it does appear to do this as well,” the paper asserts.
The free-college program at Community College of Philadelphia, meanwhile, didn’t seem to move the needle much at all.
“I expected to see an enrollment boost, and I didn’t even see that,” says Monaghan.
In other words, it isn’t even clear from the data that the free college effort sparked any increase in enrollment at the college.
The reason, he says, may be that the leaders of the program did not do enough to spread awareness about the option, and about what it takes to apply. Since the program was open to all high schools in the city, doing that communication was more difficult than in the case of the other program they studied.
“Our analyses suggest that a tuition guarantee, by itself, will not necessarily have any impact,” he and his co-author wrote in their paper. “If a program falls in the forest and no one hears it, it will not shift enrollment patterns.”
Monaghan says that the findings show that more attention should be paid to the details of how free college programs work — especially since many of them are full of restrictions and require students to jump through a series of hoops to take advantage of them. That can be a lot to ask a 17- or 18-year-old finishing high school to navigate.
“We really overestimate what people are like at the end of high school,” and how savvy they’ll be about weighing the costs and benefits of higher education, he argues. “There hasn’t been enough research on free college programs in terms of how they are implemented and communicated,” he adds.
It’s worth noting, of course, that some free college programs do significantly increase enrollment. And that can create another unintended side effect: straining resources at two-year colleges.
That was the case in Massachusetts, where the MassReconnect program that launched in 2023 led more than 5,000 new students to enroll the first semester it was available, according to a report from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.
As a result, the state’s 15 community colleges have struggled to hire enough staff — including adjunct instructors — to keep up with the new demand.
What did that program do to spark so much interest? Unlike the programs studied in Pennsylvania, MassReconnect is available to not just people freshly graduating high school, but to anyone over 25 years old — a much larger pool of possible takers.
Another working paper by Monaghan, which looked at as much available research as he could find on free college programs, found a large variety of impact.
And that may be the biggest lesson: For free college programs, the devil really is in the details of how they are set up and communicated.
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Colleges are adjusting to a lingering impact of COVID-19 shutdowns that kept kids out of physical schools at key points in their social development: It’s harder than it used to be to teach students to adjust to college life when so many are coming to campuses nervous about making social connections.
As a result, many colleges and universities are rethinking their freshman orientation programs, adding new options and doing more to help students forge relationships.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder this summer, for instance, administrators are offering incoming students three orientation options to choose from. One effort lets new students meet classmates in breakout Zoom calls. Another program brings students and families to campus for a day to learn about university traditions and how to get involved on campus. And those looking for an immersive experience can attend ‘Camp Chip’ — they’ll spend two nights on campus connecting with other students, getting to know the campus and seeing what life will be like in college.
Before the pandemic, the university’s summer orientation had been mostly online, with an in person “welcome week” before classes began. But these days there’s a greater interest (and expectation) from students and families in the need to help students feel like they belong on campus, says Joe Thomas, president of Association for Orientation, Transition and Retention in Higher Education, known as NODA.
“In 2019, I probably would have heard from parents and students, ‘It's annoying,’ ‘It's hard to get here,’ ‘How could you possibly require this in-person orientation?” he says. “Now they're like, ‘Oh we get it, we would really love to be there and watch our student get to know other folks.’ There's just more buy-in now.”
Colleges have another reason to try to get orientation right: It’s the first step to building belonging and, hopefully, convincing students to stay. That’s especially important for first-generation students and those transferring from other colleges.
“It is truly the kickoff to retention,” says Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University. “If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”
Flexibility Is Key
Many institutions are still in the process of “throwing darts at a dartboard” to see what sticks best for orientation, says Thomas, of NODA. This means they need to be adaptable, and offer a range of ways students can prepare to enter college.
Most colleges now have some online component to their orientation process that’s left over from the pandemic, Thomas says. Often the online portions are more “transactional,” he notes. Students learn about registering for classes, connect with their academic advisor and go through required trainings. The number of topics these trainings cover has increased as colleges feel pressure to better regulate artificial intelligence, create stricter free speech regulations or enforce hazing regulations, among other changes.
"It is truly the kickoff to retention. ... If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”
—Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University.
As a result, orientations are required to cover much more information now than even a few years ago, says Jenny Osborn, associate director of the first year experience at The Ohio State University. In Ohio, for example, state lawmakers passed anti-hazing legislation in 2021 that requires colleges to create an educational program on hazing that students can complete during orientation.
Once students have finished the online portion, colleges bring them into in-person or virtual sessions either during the summer or right before classes start to help students connect with one another.
At Towson University, for instance, students must complete a series of online modules, which typically take a total of about 35 minutes, before they come to orientation, Murray says. Then, they attend a one-day session in the summer, which can be in person or virtual, followed by a four-day program before the first day of classes.
The goal, Murray adds, is to spread information out over time, while also encouraging students to connect with one another.
“We know that sense of belonging ebbs and flows throughout a student's experience,” Murray says. “But if we can start off on the right note, that information piece can happen in a bunch of different ways.”
Creating a range of orientation options also helps colleges assess what students need, says Thomas, who is also the associate vice chancellor for student affairs at Boulder. Much of Boulder’s student population comes from out of state, he says, which makes it difficult to visit the city, where summer is one of the peak tourist times. If students can’t come to Colorado but still want to connect with future classmates, they can attend a virtual session, where they’ll be split into breakout rooms led by orientation leaders.
“We're hyper aware of making sure that our orientation programs are accessible to students, whether you have the financial means or not,” Thomas says. “We're gonna use that information to then say, ‘Ok, [for] future summers, here's what we need to be the balance to meet our first generation students with what they need, what any of our marginalized populations may need that may be different, and the population en masse for our 7,000 plus students at CU Boulder.’”
Changing Social Skills
Colleges have also begun adapting their orientation programs to the ways students’ social skills have changed coming out of the pandemic.
Many students now have a harder time saying goodbye to their families, Osborn says. Before the pandemic, about 70 to 80 percent of students would stay in residence halls during the university’s overnight summer orientation. Now more than half of the students opt to stay with their parents in a hotel. Students also usually turn to their siblings or parents for information about college rather than relying on orientation, she adds.
When it comes to choosing a date for orientation, students used to go for the earliest possible dates. Now, they want to try to coordinate with a future roommate or classmate they met online, Osborn says.
“What we're seeing student-behavior-wise at orientation is a real sense of clinging to safety,” she says.
To help students feel more comfortable meeting other students, Ohio State has begun offering more small-group and “low- risk” activities, Osborn says. Rather than hosting a large scavenger hunt, for example, Osborn says students can do jewelry making, coloring, board games and pick-up volleyball or basketball games. That way, students can connect with one or two people rather than be overwhelmed by a large group.
Other colleges have created small group atmospheres that bring students together based on similar interests or identities. This gives them a leg up when they meet each other because they already have something in common, says Gregory Wolcott, the associate vice president for student success at San Jose State University.
During San Jose State’s two-night orientation, students are split into groups of about 20 based on what they’re studying, Wolcott says. Orientation leaders host interactive activities with their groups.
CU Boulder also splits students up based on commonalities. During the university’s fall welcome program, orientation leaders host about 40 “Buff Meet Ups” for students who all have shared interests, such as gaming or music. The “meet-ups” could also be taking a tour of local restaurants or going on a hike together, which helps them connect in a smaller setting, says Lizzie Brister, director of new student and family programs at Boulder. Some of the events are also identity based, such as one for Latinx students.
Coming out of the pandemic, “there was an indication that [students] wanted to be together, they wanted to do stuff in community, but didn't know how to engage or interact with each other,” Thomas says. “Orientation programs are shifting more toward that — getting to know each other again, which is the classic thing that we try to do, but it can't just be in solely one program type.”
Orientation offices have also changed the way they train their student leaders, often to account for the same issues the pandemic has caused for incoming students.
These days many students are reluctant to sign up as orientation leaders, Osborn says. In the same way that new students don’t want to stay in the dorms, families would rather have their older students spend time at home than stay on campus during the summer, she says.
They’re also coming in with less background knowledge, Brister says. Before the pandemic, orientation leaders typically held leadership positions in high school, as a club president, for example, Brister says. Now students are coming in with less experience public speaking or facilitating a small group. Some also haven’t ever experienced an in-person orientation, but now need to lead most of the activities for the incoming class (though that has become less of an issue as students who experienced the pandemic in college graduate).
Journey leaders, as CU’s orientation leaders are called, now attend an eight-week leadership course to prepare them for orientation. They learn how to run orientation events, leadership skills and ways to engage students who may be more socially anxious, among other things, Brister says. Before the pandemic, that information was all squeezed into just four days of training.
“That's pivotal to build our culture for those student leaders of how we want to share what it means to be a Buff, how we want to present the university and be ambassadors for the university to these new students and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Brister says. “That's been huge in building that culture for our student leaders and then hopefully communicating that to our whole incoming student population.”
And with high college costs, it’s more important than ever for colleges to offer supports and to make sure students and families know where to find that help, says Wolcott, of San Jose State.
If colleges don’t provide all the support orientation programs need, students may end up transferring to somewhere that does.
“College campuses need to understand that it's a competitive market,” Wolcott says. “If you're not rolling out the red carpet, if everyone's not on board with ‘this is orientation season and it's everybody's job,’ then campuses are really gonna struggle.”
When ChatGPT and other new generative AI tools emerged in late 2022, the major concern for educators was cheating. After all, students quickly spread the word on TikTok and other social media platforms that with a few simple prompts, a chatbot could write an essay or answer a homework assignment in ways that would be hard for teachers to detect.
But these days, when it comes to AI, another concern has come into the spotlight: That the technology could lead to less human interaction in schools and colleges — and that school administrators could one day try to use it to replace teachers.
And it's not just educators who are worried, this is becoming an education policy issue.
Just last week, for instance, a bill sailed through both houses of the California state legislature that aims to make sure that courses at the state’s community colleges are taught by qualified humans, not AI bots.
Sabrina Cervantes, a Democratic member of the California State Assembly, who introduced the legislation, said in a statement that the goal of the bill is to “provide guardrails on the integration of AI in classrooms while ensuring that community college students are taught by human faculty.”
To be clear, no one appears to have actually proposed replacing professors at the state’s community colleges with ChatGPT or other generative AI tools. And even the bill’s leaders say they can imagine positive uses for AI in teaching, and the bill wouldn’t stop colleges from using generative AI to help with tasks like grading or creating educational materials.
But champions of the bill also say they have reason to worry about the possibility of AI replacing professors in the future. Earlier this year, for example, a dean at Boston University sparked concern among graduate workers who were on strike seeking higher wages when he listed AI as one possible strategy for handling course discussions and other classroom activities that were impacted by the strike. Officials at the university later clarified that they had no intention of replacing any graduate workers with AI software, though.
“Our intent was not to put a giant brick wall in front of AI,” Brill-Wynkoop says. “That’s nuts. It’s a fast-moving train. We’re not against tech, but the question is ‘How do we use it thoughtfully?’”
— Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges
While California is the furthest along, it’s not the only state where such measures are being considered. In Minnesota, Rep. Dan Wolgamott, of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, proposed a bill that would forbid campuses in the Minnestate State College and University System from using AI “as the primary instructor for a credit-bearing course.” The measure has stalled for now.
Teachers in K-12 schools are also beginning to push for similar protections against AI replacing educators. The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, recently put out a policy statement on the use of AI in education that stressed that human educators should “remain at the center of education.”
It’s a sign of the mixed but highly charged mood among many educators — who see both promise and potential threat in generative AI tech.
Careful Language
Even the education leaders pushing for measures to keep AI from displacing educators have gone out of their way to note that the technology could have beneficial applications in education. They're being cautious about the language they use to ensure they're not prohibiting the use of AI altogether.
The bill in California, for instance, faced initial pushback even from some supporters of the concept, out of worry about moving too soon to legislate the fast-changing technology of generative AI, says Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, whose group led the effort to draft the bill.
An early version of the bill explicitly stated that AI “may not be used to replace faculty for purposes of providing instruction to, and regular interaction with students in a course of instruction, and may only be used as a peripheral tool.”
Internal debate almost led leaders to spike the effort, she says. Then Brill-Wynkoop suggested a compromise: remove all explicit references to artificial intelligence from the bill’s language.
“We don’t even need the words AI in the bill, we just need to make sure humans are at the center,” she says. So the final language of the very brief proposed legislation reads: “This bill would explicitly require the instructor of record for a course of instruction to be a person who meets the above-described minimum qualifications to serve as a faculty member teaching credit instruction.”
“Our intent was not to put a giant brick wall in front of AI,” Brill-Wynkoop says. “That’s nuts. It’s a fast-moving train. We’re not against tech, but the question is ‘How do we use it thoughtfully?’”
And she admits that she doesn’t think there’s some “evil mastermind in Sacramento saying, ‘I want to get rid of these nasty faculty members.’” But, she adds, in California “education has been grossly underfunded for years, and with limited budgets, there are several tech companies right there that say, ‘How can we help you with your limited budgets by spurring efficiency.’”
Ethan Mollick, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has become a prominent voice on AI in education, wrote in his newsletter last month that he worries that many businesses and organizations are too focused on efficiency and downsizing as they rush to adopt AI technologies. Instead, he argues that leaders should be focused on finding ways to rethink how they do things to take advantage of tasks AI can do well.
He noted in his newsletter that even the companies building these new large language models haven’t yet figured out what real-world tasks they are best suited to do.
“I worry that the lesson of the Industrial Revolution is being lost in AI implementations at companies,” he wrote. “Any efficiency gains must be turned into cost savings, even before anyone in the organization figures out what AI is good for. It is as if, after getting access to the steam engine in the 1700s, every manufacturer decided to keep production and quality the same, and just fire staff in response to new-found efficiency, rather than building world-spanning companies by expanding their outputs.”
The professor wrote that his university’s new Generative AI Lab is trying to model the approach he’d like to see, where researchers work to explore evidence-based uses of AI and work to avoid what he called “downside risks,” meaning the concern that organizations might make ineffective use of AI while pushing out expert employees in the name of cutting costs. And he says the lab is committed to sharing what it learns.
Keeping Humans at the Center
AI Education Project, a nonprofit focused on AI literacy, surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. educators in 2023 about how educators feel about how AI is influencing the world, and education more specifically. In the survey, participants were asked to pick among a list of top concerns about AI and the one that bubbled to the top was that AI could lead to “a lack of human interaction.”
That could be in response to recent announcements by major AI developers — including ChatGPT creator OpenAI — about new versions of their tools that can respond to voice commands and see and respond to what students are inputting on their screens. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, recently posted a video demo of him using a prototype of his organization’s chatbot Khanmigo, which has these features, to tutor his teenage son. The technology shown in the demo is not yet available, and is at least six months to a year away, according to Khan. Even so, the video went viral and sparked debate about whether any machine can fill in for a human in something as deeply personal as one-on-one tutoring.
In the meantime, many new features and products released in recent weeks focus on helping educators with administrative tasks or responsibilities like creating lesson plans and other classroom materials. And those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes uses of AI that students may never even know are happening.
That was clear in the exhibit hall of last week’s ISTE Live conference in Denver, which drew more than 15,000 educators and edtech leaders. (EdSurge is an independent newsroom that shares a parent organization with ISTE. Learn more about EdSurge ethics and policies here and supporters here.)
Tiny startups, tech giants and everything in between touted new features that use generative AI to support educators with a range of responsibilities, and some companies had tools to serve as a virtual classroom assistant.
Many teachers at the event weren’t actively worried about being replaced by bots.
“It’s not even on my radar, because what I bring to the classroom is something that AI cannot replicate,” said Lauren Reynolds, a third grade teacher at Riverwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City. “I have that human connection. I’m getting to know my kids on an individual basis. I’m reading more than just what they’re telling me.”
Christina Matasavage, a STEM teacher at Belton Preparatory Academy in South Carolina, said she thinks the COVID shutdowns and emergency pivots to distance learning proved that gadgets can’t step in and replace human instructors. “I think we figured out that teachers are very much needed when COVID happened and we went virtual. People figured out very [quickly] that we cannot be replaced” with tech.
OpenAI recently announced ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT built for universities to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations. Powered by GPT-4o, ChatGPT Edu can reason across text and vision and use advanced tools such as data analysis. This new offering includes enterprise-level security and controls and is affordable for educational institutions. “Integrating OpenAI’s technology into our educational and operational frameworks accelerates transformation at ASU. We’re collaborating across our community to harness these tools, extending our learnings as a scalable model for other institutions,” says Kyle Bowen, Deputy CIO at Arizona State University. “We built ChatGPT Edu because we saw the success universities like the University of Oxford, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania(opens in a new window), University of Texas at Austin, Arizona State University(opens in a new window), and Columbia University in the City of New York were having with ChatGPT Enterprise,” according to a May 30, 2024 message from OpenAI.Learn more.
When ChatGPT emerged a year and half ago, many professors immediately worried that their students would use it as a substitute for doing their own written assignments — that they’d click a button on a chatbot instead of doing the thinking involved in responding to an essay prompt themselves.
But two English professors at Carnegie Mellon University had a different first reaction: They saw in this new technology a way to show students how to improve their writing skills.
To be clear, these professors — Suguru Ishizaki and David Kaufer — did also worry that generative AI tools could easily be abused by students. And it’s still a concern.
They had an idea, though, for how they could set up a unique set of guardrails that would make a new kind of teaching tool that could help students get more of their ideas into their assignments and spend less time thinking about formatting sentences.
“When everyone else was afraid that AI was going to hijack writing from students,” remembers Kaufer, “We said, ‘Well if we can restrain AI, then AI can reduce many of the remedial tasks of writing that keep students from really [looking] to see what’s going on with their writing.”
The professors call their approach “restrained generative AI,” and they’ve already built a prototype software tool to try it in classrooms — called myScribe — that is being piloted in 10 courses at the university this semester.
Kaufer and Ishizaki were uniquely positioned. They have been building tools together to help teach writing for decades. A previous system they built, DocuScope, uses algorithms to spot patterns in student writing and visually show those patterns to students.
A key feature of their new tool is called “Notes to Prose,” which can take loose bullet points or stray thoughts typed by a student and turn them into sentences or draft paragraphs, thanks to an interface to ChatGPT.
“A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation — getting ideas into sentences,” Ishizaki says. “That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”
"A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation — getting ideas into sentences,” Ishizaki says. “That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”
— Suguru Ishizaki
In other words, especially for beginning writers, it’s difficult to both think of new ideas and keep in mind all the rules of crafting a sentence at the same time, just as it’s difficult for a beginning driver to keep track of both the road surroundings and the mechanics of driving.
“We thought, ‘Can we really lighten that load with generative AI?” he says.
Kaufer adds that novice writers often shift too early in the writing process into making fragments of ideas they put down into carefully crafted sentences, when they might just end up later deleting those sentences because the ideas may not fit into their final argument or essay.
“They start really polishing way too early,” Kaufer says. “And so what we’re trying to do is with AI, now you have a tool to rapidly prototype your language when you are prototyping the quality of your thinking.”
He says the concept is based on writing research from the 1980s that shows that experienced writers spend about 80 percent of their early writing time thinking about whole-text plans and organization and not about sentences.
Taming the Chatbot
Building their “notes to prose” feature took some doing, the professors say.
In their early experiments with ChatGPT, when they put in a few fragments and asked it to make sentences, “what we found is it starts to add a lot of new ideas into the text,” says Ishizaki. In other words, the tool tended to go even further in completing an essay by adding in other information from its vast stores of training data.
“So we just came up with a really lengthy set of prompts to make sure that there are no new ideas or new concepts,” Ishizaki adds.
The technique is different from other attempts to focus the use of AI for education, in that the only source the myScribe bot draws from is the student’s notes rather than a wider dataset.
Stacie Rohrbach, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, sees potential in tools like those her colleagues created.
“We’ve long encouraged students to always do a robust outline and say, ‘What are you trying to say in each sentence?” she says, and she hopes that “restrained AI” approaches could help that effort.
And she says she already sees student writers misuse ChatGPT and therefore believes some restraint is needed.
“This is the first year that I saw lots of AI-generated text,” she says. “And the ideas get lost. The sentences are framed correctly, but it ends up being gibberish.”
John Warner, an author and education consultant who is writing a book about AI and writing, says he wondered whether the myScribe tool would be able to fully prevent “hallucinations” by the AI chatbot, or instances where tools insert erroneous information.
“The folks that I talk to think that that’s probably not possible,” he says. “Hallucination is a feature of how large language models work. The large language model is absent judgment. You may not be able to get away from it making something up. Because what does it know?”
"A lot of these tools want to make a process efficient that has no need to be efficient.”
— John Warner
Kaufer says that their tests so far have been working. In an email follow-up interview he wrote: “It's important to note that ‘notes to prose’ operates within the confines of a paragraph unit. This means that if it were to exceed the boundaries of the notes (or 'hallucinate', as you put it), it would be readily apparent and easy to identify. The worry about AI hallucinating would expand if we were talking about larger discourse units.”
Ishizaki, though, acknowledged that it may not be possible to completely eliminate AI hallucinations in their tool. “But we are hoping that we can restrain or guide AI enough to minimize ‘hallucinations’ or inaccurate or unintended information so that writers can correct them during the review/revision process.”
He described their tool as a “vision” for how they hope the technology will develop, not just a one-off system. “We are setting the goal toward where writing technology should progress,” he says. “In other words, the concept of notes to prose is integral to our vision of the future of writing.”
Even as a vision, though, Warner says he has different dreams for the future of writing.
One tech writer, he says, recently noted that ChatGPT is like having 1,000 interns.
“On one hand, ‘Awesome,’” Warner says. “On the other hand, 1,000 interns are going to make a lot of mistakes. Interns early on cost you more time than they save, but the goal is over time that person makes less and less supervision, they learn.” But with AI, he says, “the oversight doesn’t necessarily improve the underlying product.”
In that way, he argues, AI chatbots end up being “a very powerful tool that requires enormous human oversight.”
And he argues that turning notes into text is in fact the important human process of writing that should be preserved.
“A lot of these tools want to make a process efficient that has no need to be efficient,” he says. “A huge thing happens when I go from my notes to a draft. It’s not just a translation — that these are my ideas and I want them on a page. It’s more like — these are my ideas, and my ideas take shape while I’m writing.”
Kaufer is sympathetic to that argument. “The point is, AI is here to stay and it’s not going to disappear,” he says. “There’s going to be a battle over how it’s going to be used. We’re fighting for responsible uses.”
ST. PAUL, Minn. — What do you want to be when you grow up? That’s a question long faced by high school students. But these days, students have access to far more information than in the past about what, specifically, they could do as a job after they graduate.
And that is changing the way students are thinking about whether or not they want to go to college — or when they want to go.
These shifting attitudes were evident in March at Central High School here, at a daylong event dubbed the “Opportunity Fair.” More than 100 local businesses set up tables with company banners and flyers about what it means to work for them, with representatives on hand to answer questions.
Some of the jobs represented require college degrees. Others don’t. Some of the employers here said they have career paths for both, such as a medical-device company that looks for folks out of high school to work on their factory floor as well as college grads to join their design teams. And other companies look for talented students for entry-level jobs, with the promise to help them pay for college or more training later if needed.
“I don't know if I'm going to go to college right after I get out of high school,” said one junior. “But I think that at some point in my future when I want to get a professional job, I probably will go to college before I do that. I don't think I need to rush into it. I don't don't want to end up failing college or anything like that.”
That’s something that people who work with high school students on their choices are hearing more these days, says Liz Williams, a senior program officer for the Greater Twin Cities United Way. Part of her job is helping high schools set up programs that show students their career options.
“When I think about my own journey,” Williams said, “I have an undergraduate degree in Spanish and Portuguese, so it was a really cool thing to study. I got to travel, I got to learn languages. But it also gave me zero direction as to what careers were possible. And so I had to sort of find that on my own.”
Today students are “asking better questions,” she said. “So I actually think there's a lot of wisdom in that skepticism of, ‘I'm not sure college is right for me. I know I'm going to have to take on debt. I have a cousin, a parent who has taken on that type of debt and I see what that is like.’ They also see adults who maybe don't have debt but hate the work that they do. … And so I think that there's this trend toward taking a step back and really thinking about what they want to do, and if it is college, thinking more critically about ‘Why college?’, and ‘College for what?’”
This is the fourth episode of our podcast series Doubting College, where we’re exploring: What happened to the public belief in college? And how is that shaping the choices young people are making about what to do after high school?
For this installment we’re focusing on the opportunities young people have these days, the changing ways that high school counselors and education leaders are presenting those choices, and what these students think about their options.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.
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