In this year’s Global Enrolment Benchmark Survey (GEBS), American colleges reported a 6% decline in international undergraduates, erasing the 6% increase in the 2024 GEBS. The 19% decline in masters students, by far the largest category of international students in the country, enrolled in the 201 American universities reporting, was more than three times the size of last year’s decline. Canadian numbers can be compared to a snowball going downhill. After last year’s decline of 27% for undergraduates reported in last year’s GEBS, Canadian universities reported a further 36% decline, making a cumulative decline since 2023 of 53%. The 35% decline in international graduate students follows on last year’s reported decline of 30%.
Monday, December 8, 2025
Sunday, December 7, 2025
AI is coming for your work, expert warns university staff - Nic Mitchell, University World News
With management consultants predicting that up to one-third of work done today will be automated in the next five years – and universities under pressure to cut costs and do more with less – artificial intelligence offers a cheaper and more efficient way to keep higher education institutions running smoothly, claims an international higher education strategy expert. Instead of trying to fight to protect traditional roles and jobs, Dr Ant Bagshaw, deputy chief executive of the Australian Public Policy Institute in Canberra, Australia, urges universities to embrace the unstoppable march of generative AI and accept that it is “more harmful to keep people in jobs that could be done better by robots”.
Saturday, December 6, 2025
The Cambrian Explosion of Micro-Credentials - Bryan Penprase, Forbes
Higher education stands at an inflection point. Traditional four-year degrees often disappoint employers seeking graduates with job-ready skills, and students are eagerly seeking more flexible academic programs requiring less time and money. New micro-credentials offerings from top tech companies and universities are filling this gap – providing modular, flexible, and low-cost alternatives to the traditional college degree. The proliferation of thousands of these new programs around the world has created something of a “Cambrian explosion” of academic programs, analogous to the time in geologic history when billions of new life forms 530 million years ago.
Friday, December 5, 2025
Morgan State could one day run entirely on AI - Ellie Wolfe, The Banner
Grading assignments. Advising students. Sorting through important files. These tasks, and countless more, might not have to be done by employees at Morgan State University anymore. That’s thanks to Obsidian, a new secure artificial intelligence system created by leaders at the Northeast Baltimore university. “The university will learn from itself,” said Timothy Summers, Morgan State’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer. “It’ll adapt in real time and make smarter decisions at every level.”
Thursday, December 4, 2025
Exploring trust in generative AI for higher education institutions: a systematic literature review focused on educators - Ana Lelescu, et al; Nature
Although Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) offers transformative opportunities for higher education, its adoption by educators remains limited, primarily due to trust concerns. This systematic literature review aims to synthesise peer-reviewed research conducted between 2019 and August 2024 on the factors influencing educators’ trust in GenAI within higher education institutions. Using PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this study identified 37 articles at the intersection of trust factors, technology adoption, and GenAI impact in higher education from educators’ perspectives. Our analysis reveals that existing AI trust frameworks fail to capture the pedagogical and institutional dimensions specific to higher education contexts. We propose a new conceptual model focused on three dimensions affecting educators’ trust: (1) individual factors (demographics, pedagogical beliefs, sense of control, and emotional experience), (2) institutional strategies (leadership support, policies, and training support), and (3) the socio-ethical context of their interaction. Our findings reveal a significant gap in institutional leadership support, whereas professional development and training were the most frequently mentioned strategies.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
A leader’s guide to the future of learning at work - McKinsey
The race to embrace AI in the corporate world means that people at all levels of an organization urgently need to build new tech skills and knowledge. In turn, many companies are accelerating their learning and development programs to help executives and employees keep up with the pace of change. This dynamic landscape presents an opportunity for chief learning officers (CLOs) to reimagine the future of learning in the workplace. This week, we look at how CLOs can help organizations make learning a more fundamental part of the work experience and create cultures of continuous development.
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
The more that people use AI, the more likely they are to overestimate their own abilities - Drew Turney Live Science
Researchers found that AI flattens the bell curve of a common principle in human psychology, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, giving us all the illusion of competence. When asked to evaluate how good we are at something, we tend to get that estimation completely wrong. It's a universal human tendency, with the effect seen most strongly in those with lower levels of ability. Called the Dunning-Kruger effect, after the psychologists who first studied it, this phenomenon means people who aren't very good at a given task are overconfident, while people with high ability tend to underestimate their skills. It's often revealed by cognitive tests — which contain problems to assess attention, decision-making, judgment and language.
But now, scientists at Finland's Aalto University (together with collaborators in Germany and Canada) have found that using artificial intelligence (AI) all but removes the Dunning-Kruger effect — in fact, it almost reverses it.
Monday, December 1, 2025
Beyond the Hype: Transforming Academic Excellence and Leadership Culture in the Age of AI - Joe Sallustio, Campus Technology
While most higher education leaders focus on AI's operational benefits — and rightfully so — the deeper transformation lies in how artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping what it means to learn, teach, and lead in the 21st century. The question isn't just whether institutions can keep pace operationally; the real challenge is whether we can maintain academic rigor and cultivate critical thinking in an AI-enhanced world while fostering the leadership culture necessary for sustainable transformation. In the Educause 2024 AI Landscape study, approximately 64% of students indicated regular use of generative AI tools as part of their coursework. This isn't a future trend — it's today's reality. Advanced AI tutoring systems can now offer formative feedback that encourages deeper critical analysis beyond mere surface editing, helping both students and faculty engage more meaningfully in learning.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Administration takes big steps in breaking up Education Department - Micah Ward, University Business
The Trump administration has announced six new interagency agreements to “break up” the U.S. Department of Education. Here’s what’s being changed. New partnerships with the Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services and State aim to leverage each partner agency to deliver programs that are better suited based on their respective areas of expertise. For instance, the partnership with the Department of Labor, labeled the Elementary and Secondary Education Partnership, allows the department to take a greater role in administering federal K12 programs, “ensuring these programs are better aligned with workforce and college programs,” according to a press release.
Saturday, November 29, 2025
No, the Pre-AI Era Was Not That Great - Zach Justus and Nik Janos, Inside Higher Ed
There are dozens of examples we could pull together here, and we could dive much deeper into the historical archive to find professors complaining about study/reading/writing habits, but the point is clear enough. What we are interested in is, what are the impacts of being overly nostalgic about pre-AI/pandemic education? First, it allows us to blame everything wrong with education on generative AI rather than acknowledge deep and justifiable concerns we have had for a while. The current technology serves as a convenient scapegoat for problems we may have been aware of but decided to live with. Course Hero, Chegg and other providers had industrialized academic dishonesty before ChatGPT was launched. We decided not to deal with that and, rather than face up to our past oversights, we have simply forgotten.
Friday, November 28, 2025
AI in the Ivory Tower: A Necessary Evolution or a Threat to Academic Integrity? - TokenRing AI, WRAL
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into higher education has ignited a fervent debate across campuses worldwide. Far from being a fleeting trend, AI presents a fundamental paradigm shift, challenging traditional pedagogical approaches, redefining academic integrity, and promising to reshape the very essence of a college degree. As universities grapple with the profound implications of this technology, the central question remains: do institutions need to embrace more AI, or less, to safeguard the future of education and the integrity of their credentials? This discourse is not merely theoretical; it's actively unfolding as institutions navigate the transformative potential of AI to personalize learning, streamline administration, and enhance research, while simultaneously confronting critical concerns about academic dishonesty, algorithmic bias, and the potential erosion of essential human skills. The immediate significance is clear: AI is poised to either revolutionize higher education for the better or fundamentally undermine its foundational principles, making the decisions made today crucial for generations to come.
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Gemini 3 Is Here—and Google Says It Will Make Search Smarter - Will Knight, Wired
Google is also using AI to build popular new tools like NotebookLM, which can auto-generate podcasts from written materials, and AI Studio which can prototype applications with AI. It’s even exploring embedding the technology into areas like gaming and robotics, which Hassabis says could pay huge dividends in years to come, regardless of what happens in the wider market.
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
The New Cliff Facing Higher Ed and How AI Might Help Solve It - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
There is a new “cliff” in American higher education, and it is not the demographic cliff. Rather, it is the dramatic cliff in math knowledge, skills and abilities. Let me be clear that other discipline deficiencies are found in this new generation of college students, however they are dwarfed by those in math. These have most recently been quantified in a report from the University of California San Diego. The official “Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions Final Report” (released November 6, 2025) contains disturbing findings. This widely discussed report revealed that nearly one in eight incoming freshmen couldn’t meet middle school math standards!
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Student cheating dominates talk of generative AI in higher ed, but universities and tech companies face ethical issues too - Jeffrey C. Dixon, Times-Union
As a sociologist who teaches about AI and studies the impact of this technology on work, I am well acquainted with research on the rise of AI and its social consequences. And when one looks at ethical questions from multiple perspectives – those of students, higher education institutions and technology companies – it is clear that the burden of responsible AI use should not fall entirely on students’ shoulders. I argue that responsibility, more generally, begins with the companies behind this technology and needs to be shouldered by higher education institutions themselves.
Monday, November 24, 2025
Meet The AI Professor: Coming To A Higher Education Campus Near You - Nick Ladany, Forbes
AI professors, in many ways, will be the best versions of the best professors students can have. AI professors will be realistic avatars that go far beyond the simple tutor model based on large language models, and will likely be here before anyone sees it coming. AI professors will: be available 24 hours, 7 days a week; have an exceedingly large bank of knowledge and experience that they can draw from to illustrate concepts; be complex responders to students’ learning styles and neurodivergence thereby providing truly personalized education with evidenced-based effective pedagogy; have the ability to assess and bring students along on any topic about which students desire to learn, thereby increasing access; teach content areas as well as durable skills such as critical thinking; and have updates in real time that fit the expectations and needs of the current workforce. A reasonable concern that has been raised is how to prevent AI professors from hallucinating or providing inaccurate information. One mechanism to guard against this is to ensure that the course and teaching that occur are within a closed system of content and have oversight by human professors.
Sunday, November 23, 2025
Opinion: Higher Ed Should Embrace AI as an Opportunity - Kimberly E. Estep, GovTech
Colleges and universities that thrive in the era of artificial intelligence will be those that see AI not as a threat but as an opportunity to advance economic mobility through accessible, personalized education. Many colleges and universities have seen steady decline in enrollment since 2010, exacerbated by the pandemic five years ago and new applications of technological advancements. In a recent report, bestcolleges.com counted 84 colleges that have closed or merged since March 2020, including my own undergraduate alma mater, Judson College in Alabama. Despite this concerning trend, there are colleges and universities that are thriving in this new reality. My accredited online school, Western Governors University, is one of them. The strong University of Georgia network and the 22 colleges that make up the Technical College System of Georgia are a few other examples.
Saturday, November 22, 2025
AI in HE: Assessment at risk or curriculum rethink needed? - Cristina Costa, University World News
In the frenzied attempt to address the impact of generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) in higher education, universities have narrowed their concerns to a key question: how to design ‘secure’ assessments that resist the influence of Gen-AI large language models. Such framing implicitly casts students as being at risk of Gen-AI influence. This is evident in institutional memos, working groups and practitioner discussions, which reflect a persistent concern with upholding academic integrity and ensuring that student work reflects their own effort. Yet, conversely, these same institutions champion Gen-AI as a tool for innovation and learning. These inconsistencies are too apparent to be ignored. This contradiction is not just ironic; it is symptomatic of a more profound issue. Gen-AI has come to expose higher education’s long-standing curriculum crisis: the transactional, performative approach to education that has undermined the deeper aims of higher learning, that of fostering meaningful intellectual growth and critical inquiry.
Friday, November 21, 2025
WVU Professor: After three years, ChatGPT has become a coworker—not a boss - David Sibray, West Virginia Explorer
Joshua Meadows, an assistant professor and director of Data Driven WV at the WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics in Morgantown, said the technology’s role has matured dramatically since its 2022 debut, moving from a “neat demo” to an essential part of daily operations for businesses and public institutions alike. Joshua Meadows, director of Data Driven WV, and service assistant professor, says "ChatGPT is now a household name and an essential business tool,” Meadows said. “But where it needs to shine is as a workflow assistant with accountability. To serve our needs, ChatGPT must treat its own outputs merely as drafts, keeping humans responsible for decisions. That’s how its early promise is going to translate into repeatable, trustworthy results.”
Thursday, November 20, 2025
Accumulating Context Changes the Beliefs of Language Models - Jiayi Geng, et al; arXiv
Language model (LM) assistants are increasingly used in applications such as brainstorming and research. Improvements in memory and context size have allowed these models to become more autonomous, which has also resulted in more text accumulation in their context windows without explicit user intervention. This comes with a latent risk: the belief profiles of models -- their understanding of the world as manifested in their responses or actions -- may silently change as context accumulates. This can lead to subtly inconsistent user experiences, or shifts in behavior that deviate from the original alignment of the models. In this paper, we explore how accumulating context by engaging in interactions and processing text -- talking and reading -- can change the beliefs of language models, as manifested in their responses and behaviors. Our results reveal that models' belief profiles are highly malleable: GPT-5 exhibits a 54.7% shift in its stated beliefs after 10 rounds of discussion about moral dilemmas and queries about safety, while Grok 4 shows a 27.2% shift on political issues after reading texts from the opposing position....Our analysis exposes the hidden risk of belief shift as models undergo extended sessions of talking or reading, rendering their opinions and actions unreliable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01805?et_rid=508865405&et_cid=5790354
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Empowering personalized learning at scale: Loyola Marymount University’s AI course companion - Lorin Miller, Matt Frank, and Brian Drawert, AWS Public Sector Blog
LMU’s mission emphasizes personal connections in learning through a high-touch, individualized approach. With most students turning to generic, off-the-shelf AI tools, the university saw an opportunity. “One of the things that sparked this is, ‘How do we make a better version of what’s currently available?’” said Matt Frank, director of teaching, learning, and research technology at LMU. Brian Drawert, manager of research computing at LMU and the AI Study Companion’s developer, explained the core issue: “AI was already trying to help students with their coursework, but doing it poorly. The challenge was giving them a chat interface that actually answered questions for their class.” Modern learners also juggle complex schedules, including jobs, family commitments, and study abroad programs, making traditional faculty office hours inaccessible to many students. Building a 24/7 solution was particularly important.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
EDUCAUSE ’25: How AI Policies Affect Student Mental Health - Abby Sourwine, GovTech
Punitive, fear-driven approaches to rule-making about artificial intelligence in higher education can deepen mistrust, stress and disconnection among students. Alternatively, there are opportunities for teachable moments. As some institutions and instructors respond to the boom of artificial intelligence with bans and automated detection tools, students are worried about being falsely accused of using AI. At the 2025 EDUCAUSE conference, Ashley Dockens, associate provost of digital learning at Lamar University, and Cindy Blackwell, director of academic faculty development at Texas A&M University, warned that higher-education leaders and teachers may be holding students to an unreasonable standard — expecting students to inherently understand when AI use is appropriate and inappropriate and, in the latter case, to keep a perfect track record of resisting temptation.
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