Ethical AI in higher education: boosting learning, retention and progression - Isabelle Bambury, Higher Education Policy Institute

New research highlights a vital policy window: deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) not as a policing tool but as a powerful mechanism to support student learning and academic persistence. Evidence from independent researcher Dr Rebecca Mace, drawing on data generated by a mix of high, middle and low-tariff UK universities, suggests a compelling, positive correlation between the use of ethically embedded ‘AI for Learning’ tools and student retention, academic skill development and confidence. The findings challenge the predominant narrative that focuses solely on AI detection and academic misconduct, advocating instead for a clear and supportive policy framework to harness AI’s educational benefits.

https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2025/12/19/ethical-ai-in-higher-education-boosting-learning-retention-and-progression/

Artificial intelligence: Embracing agentic AI coworkers - McKinsey

Employees started the year more ready to adopt gen AI than their leaders. And the technology itself continued to build momentum, developing at a striking pace. But while nearly all companies have invested in AI, few have seen tangible benefits—the so-called gen AI paradox. As we move into 2026, companies have the opportunity to advance beyond incremental gains from copilots, chatbots, and other reactive, gen AI–based tools. The best are acting now to transform workflows, functions, and, ultimately, their entire organizations by onboarding AI agents to work side by side with their people.

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/year-in-review#artificial-intelligence

Women in the Workplace 2025 - Alexis Krivkovich, Drew Goldstein, and Megan McConnell; McKinsey

Women face less career support and fewer opportunities to advance as companies show declining commitment to women’s progress. While women are as dedicated to their careers as men, there is a gap in their desire for promotion. That’s according to the latest Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org. Corporate America risks rolling back progress for women. According to this year’s Women in the Workplace study, only half of companies are prioritizing women’s career advancement, part of a several-year trend in declining commitment to gender diversity. And for the first time, there is a notable ambition gap: Women are less interested in being promoted than men. When women receive the same career support that men do, this gap in ambition to advance falls away. Yet women at both ends of the pipeline are still held back by less sponsorship and manager advocacy.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/women-in-the-workplace

Higher education enters a new age of mergers and partnerships - Christopher R. Riano, University Business

For much of American history, colleges and universities existed in a world largely insulated from the market forces that shaped other sectors of the economy. Stability, independence and mission were their cornerstones. The idea of one college acquiring another—or joining forces with a competitor—was almost unthinkable. But the landscape has changed. Across the country, institutions are confronting steep enrollment declines, rising costs, shifting federal oversight and new state and accreditor expectations. Faced with these converging pressures, more presidents and trustees are now considering mergers, acquisitions and strategic partnerships not as signs of weakness, but as instruments of reinvention. The playbook for higher education is being rewritten—driven by data, regulation and necessity.

https://universitybusiness.com/higher-education-enters-a-new-age-of-mergers-and-partnerships/

Teachers are using software to see if students used AI. What happens when it's wrong? - Lee V. Gaines, NPR Illinois

The school district, Prince George's County Public Schools, made clear in a statement that Ostovitz's teacher used an AI detection tool on their own and that the district doesn't pay for this software. "During staff training, we advise educators not to rely on such tools, as multiple sources have documented their potential inaccuracies and inconsistencies," the statement said. PGCPS declined to make Ostovitz's teacher available for an interview. Rizk told NPR that after their meeting, the teacher no longer believed Ostovitz used AI. But what happened to Ostovitz isn't surprising. More than 40% of surveyed 6th- to 12th-grade teachers used AI detection tools during the last school year, according to a nationally representative poll by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age.

https://www.nprillinois.org/2025-12-16/teachers-are-using-software-to-see-if-students-used-ai-what-happens-when-its-wrong

The future of higher education in an AI-driven economy - Davenport University

Higher education is entering its most transformative era in generations. Artificial intelligence is reshaping what we learn and how we learn. In the next decade, we’ll witness wholesale changes in higher education, career development and workforce readiness. For forward-thinking institutions, employers and entrepreneurs, this is a moment of enormous opportunity. We’re building the intellectual infrastructure of the future. AI is the most disruptive force in education and employment since the internet. This is about AI literacy, but it is also about the transformation of entire career paths. At Davenport University, our strategic vision for 2030 is rooted in the reality that education must align with an economy that will be increasingly AI-driven, skills-based and fast-moving. Employers will be looking for talent that is just as dynamic.

https://post.davenport.edu/academics/the-future-of-higher-education-in-an-ai-driven-economy/

You Can’t AI-Proof the Classroom, Experts Say. Get Creative Instead. - Emma Whitford, Inside Higher Ed

Experts agree that instructors must remind their students that learning requires practice. Blue books made a comeback in 2025. In an effort to prevent students from feeding final essay prompts into ChatGPT, some professors asked their students to sit down and write in-person in the lined, sky-blue booklets that served as the college standard for written assessments in the pre-laptop era. But it may not be the foolproof way to prevent AI-assisted cheating that faculty are looking for: Meta now offers Ray-Ban glasses with a built-in AI assistant that sees what the wearer sees and can communicate silently and privately via an in-lens display.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/learning-assessment/2025/12/16/you-cant-ai-proof-classroom-experts-say-get

McKinsey Publishing’s year in charts - McKinsey

McKinsey Global Publishing’s data visualization team shares a curated selection of the most compelling data it worked with this year—spotlighting the major themes that defined 2025. Our Week in Charts series showcases charts that help explain a rapidly changing world. From artificial intelligence to population transitions and shifting trade routes, the forces reshaping the global economy are accelerating—and intertwining. This year’s charts reveal how innovation, demographics, and geopolitics are redrawing the contours of growth.

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/year-in-review/year-in-charts

AI Isn't Killing Education - John Nosta, Psychology Today

AI isn’t destroying learning, it’s exposing how education replaced thinking with ritual. Knowledge has shifted from static maps to living webs that demand judgment, not recall. The real risk isn’t ignorance, but fluent minds that no longer notice when thinking stops. For the first time, machines outperform humans in domains that education has long treated as proxies for intelligence, like recall, synthesis, linguistic fluency, and pattern recognition. That shift does not eliminate learning, but it does destabilize a system that equated those outputs with understanding. When the nature of advantage changes, institutions designed to preserve the old order rarely adapt gracefully. And brittle towers fall hard.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202512/ai-isnt-killing-education

University-Developed AI Tool Helps Simplify Transfer Process - Abby Sourwine, GovTech

A new tool developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, is helping colleges simplify transfer credit evaluation, potentially reducing labor and expediting decisions. About 120 college campuses across the U.S. are piloting a new artificial intelligence tool designed to make transfer course equivalencies clearer and more standardized. Credit transfer is a point of friction for students moving between institutions and for the administrators that manage it, according to Daniel Knox, director of the Center for Data & Analytics at the National Association of Higher Education Systems (NASH), a partner organization in the CourseWise pilot. Knox, who previously served as assistant provost at the State University of New York (SUNY), said evaluation practices vary from campus to campus and aren’t always systematically tracked.

https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/university-developed-ai-tool-helps-simplify-transfer-process

Purdue unveils comprehensive AI strategy; trustees approve ‘AI working competency’ graduation requirement - Phillip Fiorini, Purdue

Purdue University on Friday (Dec. 12) unveiled a broad strategy of AI@Purdue across five functional areas: Learning with AI, Learning about AI, Research AI, Using AI and Partnering in AI. A key element of the comprehensive plan came as the Board of Trustees approved a first-of-its-kind plan in the country to introduce an “AI working competency” graduation requirement for all undergraduate students on main campus (Indianapolis and West Lafayette). “The reach and pace of AI’s impact to society, including many dimensions of higher education, means that we at Purdue must lean in and lean forward and do so across different functions at the university,” Purdue President Mung Chiang said. “AI@Purdue strategic actions are part of the Purdue Computes strategic initiative, and will continue to be refreshed to advance the missions and impact of our university.”

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/purdue-unveils-comprehensive-ai-strategy-trustees-approve-ai-working-competency-graduation-requirement/

2025: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise - Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, Deedy Das, Derek Xiao, Menlo

Venture funding surged back toward all-time highs, with nearly half of it concentrated in just a handful of frontier AI labs. Then the euphoria peaked. An MIT study2 claiming that 95% of generative AI initiatives fail rattled markets over the summer, exposing how quickly sentiment could shift beneath the weight of AI’s massive capex spend. The whispers of a bubble became a din. The concerns aren’t unfounded given the magnitude of the numbers being thrown around. But the demand side tells a different story: Our latest market data shows broad adoption, real revenue, and productivity gains at scale, signaling a boom versus a bubble. 

https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative-ai-in-the-enterprise/

Gpt-5.2 is the first human replacer -Wes Roth, YouTube

This video by Wes Roth, published in December 2025, discusses the release of OpenAI's GPT-5.2, describing it as a massive leap forward rather than a small incremental update. The second half of the video focuses on the economic implications, specifically analyzing a new benchmark called "GDP-eval," which measures performance on real-world, economically valuable tasks. In this benchmark, GPT-5.2 Pro achieved a 74% win/tie rate against human industry experts—a significant jump from the ~39% score of previous models just months prior. Roth argues this signals a critical turning point where AI is beginning to outperform experienced professionals (with an average of 14 years of experience) at a fraction of the cost, citing a 400x cost reduction in one year. The video concludes with a discussion on the potential for "catastrophic job loss" as AI intelligence per dollar continues to skyrocket, validating fears that human labor in many sectors could soon be replaced.  (Gemini 3 Pro assisted with this summary).

https://youtu.be/aNYl-O-XxCA?si=XAiloZMgd3f5Ct_4

AI in Higher Education: A Guide for Teachers - Alexandra Shimalla, EdTech

For many faculty members in higher ed, conversations about artificial intelligence in academia often include the same concerns: There isn’t enough time in the day, AI will erode critical thinking, educators are already stretched thin, and we have to consider compromised data and privacy concerns. The list of fears and frustrations from faculty go on, but as universities explore the benefits of generative AI in higher education and look to the future of their classrooms and what’s best for students, it’s obvious that AI needs to find a place on the syllabus. “At a time when everybody’s overwhelmed, having to do more new things is hard,” says Laura Morrow, senior director for the Center for Teaching and Learning at Lipscomb University. “Fear of what’s going to happen is a big barrier.”

https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2025/12/ai-higher-education-guide-teachers-perfcon?amp

To AI-proof exams, professors turn to the oldest technique of all - Joanna Slater, Washington Post

A growing number of educators are finding that oral exams allow them to test their students’ learning without the benefit of AI platforms such as ChatGPT. When students in Catherine Hartmann’s honors seminar at the University of Wyoming took their final exams this month, they encountered a testing method as old as the ancient philosophers whose ideas they were studying. For 30 minutes, each student sat opposite Hartmann in her office. Hartmann asked probing questions. The student answered. Hartmann, a religious studies professor who started using oral examinations last year, is not alone in turning to a decidedly old-fashioned way to grade student performance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/12/12/ai-artificial-intelligence-college-oral-exam/

What and How to Teach When Google Knows Everything and ChatGPT Explains It All Very Well -Ángel Cabrera, President, Georgia Tech

In higher education, we have no choice but to accept that machines already are — or very soon will be — better than humans at virtually every intellectual and cognitive task. We can resist, we can throw tantrums, we can ban AI in classrooms. It is a futile battle — and, in fact, it’s the wrong battle. It's true that, after the Industrial Revolution, a few artisanal shoemakers remained, and beautiful Steinway pianos (which take a year to build and cost $200,000) are still made by hand. But they are exceptions — luxury niche products for nostalgics and enthusiasts. Meanwhile, Pearl River in China produces 150,000 pianos per year (400 per day) that sound excellent and cost a fraction of the price. 

 If resistance is pointless, what is the  so we do not become relics of the past?

Teach AI.

Teach with AI.

Research AI.

Help others benefit from AI.

https://president.gatech.edu/blog/what-and-how-teach-when-google-knows-everything-and-chatgpt-explains-it-all-very-well

Higher education faces ‘deteriorating’ 2026 outlook, Fitch says - Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive

Fitch Ratings on Thursday issued a “deteriorating” outlook for the higher education sector in 2026, continuing the gloomy prediction the agency issued for 2025. Analysts based their forecast on a shrinking prospective student base, “rising uncertainty related to state and federal support, continued expense escalation and shifting economic conditions.”  With its report, Fitch joins Moody’s Ratings and S&P Global Ratings in predicting a grim year for higher ed — Moody’s for the sector overall and S&P for nonprofit colleges specifically.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/higher-education-faces-deteriorating-2026-outlook-fitch-says/807222/

The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation - McKinsey

Key findings:

Most organizations are still in the experimentation or piloting phase: Nearly two-thirds of respondents say their organizations have not yet begun scaling AI across the enterprise.

High curiosity in AI agents: Sixty-two percent of survey respondents say their organizations are at least experimenting with AI agents.

Positive leading indicators on impact of AI: Respondents report use-case-level cost and revenue benefits, and 64 percent say that AI is enabling their innovation. However, just 39 percent report EBIT impact at the enterprise level.

High performers use AI to drive growth, innovation, and cost: Eighty percent of respondents say their companies set efficiency as an objective of their AI initiatives, but the companies seeing the most value from AI often set growth or innovation as additional objectives.

Redesigning workflows is a key success factor: Half of those AI high performers intend to use AI to transform their businesses, and most are redesigning workflows.

Differing perspectives on employment impact: Respondents vary in their expectations of AI’s impact on the overall workforce size of their organizations in the coming year

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai

As Insta-Gen Z take to microlearning, HEIs are adopting new programme modules - Education Times

The Instagram generation’s preference for short-form learning is reshaping higher education in India and abroad. Recent data shows that short-form and modular learning models are increasingly converging with accredited university programmes. This structural shift is influencing how educational providers design and deliver their programmes.  A study found that 74% of Gen Z students in India prefer online learning. The 2024 Udemy India Report shows that 98% of Gen Z learners spend at least one hour per week learning new skills. Another report, Deloitte’s 2025 Global Generation Z Survey, shared that 94% of respondents favour practical learning over traditional theoretical instruction. Gen Z has redefined how learning happens. It is shorter, faster, and more career-aligned. This generation does not reject degrees; it expects degrees to adapt to its learning habits.

https://www.educationtimes.com/article/campus-beat-college-life/99740331/as-insta-gen-z-take-to-microlearning-heis-are-adopting-new-programme-modules?amp=1

S&P: Negative outlook for nonprofit colleges in 2026 - Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive

The credit ratings agency — the second to forecast a poor outlook for the sector in the year ahead — pointed to federal policy shifts, rising costs and competition over students. S&P Global Ratings on Tuesday issued a negative 2026 outlook for U.S. nonprofit colleges, with analysts writing that institutions “will struggle to navigate through mounting operating pressures and uncertainty that will require budgetary and programmatic adjustments.” The credit ratings agency pointed to federal policy changes, competition over enrollment, rising costs and financial disruption from new revenue-sharing arrangements with college athletes.  S&P analysts expect weak operating margins at nonprofit colleges as they balance rising costs with revenue pressures. Institutions will continue shutter at higher rates than usual in 2026 as they come under mounting financial struggles, with small, regional private colleges especially vulnerable, the analysts wrote.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/sp-negative-outlook-nonprofit-colleges-2026/806983/

No college degree, no problem? Not so fast - Lawrence Lanahan, Hechinger Report

In recent years, at least 26 states, along with private companies like IBM and Accenture, began stripping degree requirements and focusing hiring practices on applicants’ skills. A job seeker’s market after Covid, plus labor shortages in the public sector, boosted momentum. Seven states showed double-digit percentage increases in job listings without a degree requirement between 2019 and 2024, according to the National Governors Association. A 2022 report from labor analytics firm Burning Glass (recently renamed Lightcast) found degree requirements disappearing from private sector listings too. But less evidence has emerged of employers actually hiring nondegreed job seekers in substantial numbers, and a crumbling economic outlook could stall momentum. Last year, Burning Glass and Harvard Business School found that less than 1 in 700 hires in 2023 benefited from the shift to skills-based hiring. Federal layoffs and other cuts pushing more workers with degrees into the job hunt could tempt employers to return to using the bachelor’s as a filtering mechanism.

https://hechingerreport.org/no-college-degree-no-problem-not-so-fast/