What to check before paying for online certifications, coaching or mentorships, BBB says - KOMO

Cameron Nakashima with the Better Business Bureau said BBB sees “hundreds of complaints and negative reviews involving education, training, and coaching programs each year,” and that the volume has remained fairly steady, making it “a persistent consumer issue.” Nakashima said many of the companies offering these programs are legitimate, but the concern is whether the training or credential carries the value suggested by the advertising. Costs can range widely, from a few hundred dollars to $3,000, $5,000 or even $10,000. In some cases, consumers finish a program only to find the credential is not widely recognized or the training did not build the promised skills.

https://komonews.com/news/local/online-coaching-and-certification-training-skills-buying-into-programs-what-to-know-before-better-business-bureau

The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. - Bill Gates, linkedIn Pulse

We need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad.

• The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.
• Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition.
• If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/turbulent-ai-era-here-choices-we-make-now-critical-bill-gates-kkmze/

How New Visa Limits Are Already Affecting Colleges - Johanna Alonso, Inside Higher Ed

International applicants dropped by over 25 percent at Illinois’s flagship university and several dozen international students withdrew from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, just weeks before the start of the semester. Those are just two of the ways colleges said, in court filings, that new limits on how long international students can stay in the U.S. are already having an effect, even before the rule officially kicks in next month. Under the rule, international students can stay for only four years before seeking an extension. Previously, they could remain in the country until their studies were completed.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2026/08/24/international-student-rule-already-spurring

Now Is the Time to Plan and Prepare Your Students and Colleagues on Workplace AI - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

If ever there was a most important era in which we must emphasize discourse with our students, it is today. We are in the midst of major changes in our culture and society as a whole. How, then, do we prepare our learners to enter a job market where the primary tools are making huge advances two or three times within the span of a single semester? First, we, ourselves, must become AI fluent. Through professional development either at our own institution or online via short courses, we need to master the foundations. Then, we must build regular update readings into our weekly schedules. There are scores of high-quality blogs, podcasts and YouTube series designed to keep readers and viewers up to speed. For example, I publish a free and open daily reading list on “AI in Higher Education by UPCEA.” There are several steps in the process that we should consider applying across our curricula to ensure our graduates and certificate holders are best prepared for job interviews and ensuing careers in the rapidly changing workplace.

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/online-trending-now/2026/09/02/time-plan-and-prepare-students-and-colleagues-ai

Report: Benchmarking Online Ed - Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed

Last year, the online and professional education association UPCEA urged institutions to close the gap between student expectations on institutional preparedness for online learning as part of its annual report on the Benchmarking Online Enterprises Survey. This year’s report, released Monday, warns that the story beneath the 2026 data isn’t one of a “rising tide lifting every online enterprise equally, but rather a sector beginning to sort itself into those pulling ahead and those bracing for contraction.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/08/18/report-benchmarking-online-ed

With New AI Requirements and Courses, Colleges Eye AI Fluency - Emma Whitford, Inside Higher Ed

Their approaches may differ but their motivations are the same: Employers are, at breakneck speed, increasingly asking for graduates who know how to effectively use AI. It’s called AI fluency, said Ray Schroeder, a senior fellow at the online and professional education association UPCEA, and it “can be a decisive factor between getting a job and not, especially at entry level,” he said.  “Corporate HR departments who do the hiring are requiring or evaluating how much experience and ability applicants have in [AI], and it’s very important to those corporations because AI is becoming very important in their day-to-day operations,” he added.  As of March, more than a third—35 percent—of entry-level jobs require AI skills, up from 13 percent six months prior, according to the most recent job outlook survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/teaching/2026/08/20/ai-requirements-and-courses-colleges-eye-ai-fluency

Once globally preeminent, U.S. universities are sliding into decline - Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report

Now, as a new academic year begins, American dominance in higher education globally is incontrovertibly in decline, according to data, international rankings and independent experts.  The slide has been accelerated by a year and a half of funding cuts, restrictions on international students and curbs on what can be said or taught. But it began before those political challenges, with enrollment declines, lackluster returns on ever-rising prices and public mistrust. “It takes a while for all of these problems to trickle down, but they are beginning to trickle down,” said Eric Mlyn, a faculty fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University who studies academic freedom.

https://hechingerreport.org/once-globally-preeminent-u-s-universities-are-sliding-into-decline/

College costs for families up 10% from last year, poll finds - Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive

College costs for families averaged $34,019 during the 2025-26 academic year, up 10% from the previous year, according to an annual report from financial services company Sallie Mae. Families paid out of pocket for 49% of those costs — which include tuition, fees, housing and other expenses — drawing from student and parent income and savings, according to a poll for Sallie Mae conducted by Ipsos. They covered another 27% through scholarships and grants and 22% through borrowing. A much smaller amount, 2%, came from gifts from friends and family. How families pay for college could change in the coming years with the implementation of new federal student lending caps. Even so, two-thirds of surveyed families said they support federal lending limits, and 53% said colleges should respond by lowering tuition rates. 

https://www.highereddive.com/news/college-costs-for-families-up-10-from-last-year-poll-finds/827623/

More Than a Virtual Class: How BU Virtual Brings the Classroom to Students Around the World - Boston University Virtual

For a student logging into a live session in one of Boston University’s online graduate programs, the experience can look deceptively simple: a faculty member appears on screen, classmates join from around the world, and the class begins. What students don’t see is everything happening around that moment. Behind each live online class is a coordinated team of producers, technicians, learning facilitators and instructional designers working alongside faculty members to create an experience designed specifically for working professionals. Cameras are positioned, audio is monitored, presentations and video are queued, graphics appear at the right moment, student questions are managed, and faculty are supported throughout the session. The goal is not to showcase the technology. It is to make the technology disappear.

https://www.bu.edu/online/2026/08/13/more-than-a-virtual-class-how-bu-virtual-brings-the-classroom-to-students-around-the-world/

One New Thing: Virtual Reality Brings Collaborative Learning to Life - Melissa Morriss-Olson, US News

Purdue University’s Envision Center has developed CollabXR, an extended reality platform that allows faculty and students to enter the same immersive virtual environment and interact with three-dimensional models together. During a spring 2025 pilot, instructors in disciplines ranging from nursing and aeronautics to the liberal arts used the platform to help students visualize and explore complex concepts that would be difficult to experience in a traditional classroom. According to CollabXR’s website, the tool can allow students to “watch a heart beat in the palm of [their] hands, annotate the Hubble telescope or dive into an exploding star in space.”

https://www.usnews.com/education/u-s-news-higher-ground/articles/2026-08-13/virtual-reality-brings-collaborative-learning-to-life

From Workshop to Anytime: Bringing Live Training Online - Office of Innovative Technologies (UK)

Some of the most valuable learning opportunities on campus happen in workshops. Whether they happen in a conference room or over Zoom, they create energy, connection, and opportunities for real-time questions. Workshops support learning and engagement across campus throughout the year. What a single session can’t do is reach everyone who needs it or remain available when future learners are ready. When a workshop is worth offering again or making available to an audience that can’t all gather at once, an online, self‑paced version keeps that good work going. Creating an effective online learning experience is more than simply posting a recording. 

https://oit.utk.edu/news/from-workshop-to-anytime-bringing-live-training-online/

A look at trends in college consolidation since 2016 - Higher Ed Dive Team

We’re tracking major closings, mergers, acquisitions and other consolidation among public and private nonprofit institutions from 2016 to the present. The last few years have been tumultuous for many U.S. colleges. Pressure to lower tuition, stagnating state funding and a shrinking pool of high school graduates has strained many institutions’ bottom lines and questioned their long-term viability. Those pressures have caused some to close. We’ve been tracking consolidation across higher education since the fall of 2018, looking back as far as 2016. Our goal was not to create a death watch but rather to give our readers a tool to show the scope of that activity and any patterns within it. To make those trends easier to detect, we updated our tracker with a map showing closings and significant consolidations by state. In doing that, we also revised our list to omit certain consolidation activity among public institutions in which their footprints remained largely the same. Prior to this update, we removed for-profit colleges from our list; this was due to their differences in scale from private nonprofit and public institutions as well as the sometimes fragmented nature of their closings.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/how-many-colleges-and-universities-have-closed-since-2016/539379/

What Canvas learned from a massive cyberattack - Alcino Donadel, University Business

Artificial intelligence has made it easier for cyberattackers to breach college and university systems and steal valuable student and staff data. Canvas, higher education’s most high-profile victim this year, is remodeling its security to prepare for the inevitable next attempt. What experts have learned is that colleges may be sorely underprepared for the next evolution in cybersecurity. “A lot of the conversation around cybersecurity in the next six months is going to be about speed,” says Zach Pendleton, chief architect at Instructure. “Everything that made a good security program a year ago still matters, but the speed at which we’re implementing them doesn’t match the moment.” Instructure, the edtech company behind learning management system Canvas, suffered one of the largest data breaches in the U.S. this year after cybercriminals gained access through a third-party vendor—an increasingly common occurrence in higher ed.

https://universitybusiness.com/what-canvas-learned-from-a-massive-cyberattack/

Focus on the Quantum Future - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

While artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence will mark significant improvements in AI algorithms, there is not a single clear definition of either of these terms. Therefore, some experts believe that we have already achieved AGI and that ASI is just a year or two away; others say it will be the middle of the century before either is achieved. So, without minimizing the impact of any of the steps toward general and super intelligence, I think we are better served by focusing on more solidly defined steps in AI advancement. That brings us to what may become a pivotal stage of development in AI, the use of stable quantum computing to accelerate and extend the potential of algorithms. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/online-trending-now/2026/08/19/focus-quantum-future

Loss of International Students Could Cost Economy $3.4B - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed

The United States may have as many as 112,000 fewer international students enrolled in higher education this coming academic year, according to new projections that NAFSA: Association of International Educators and JB International published Tuesday. Based on data from the Institute of International Education, the analysis estimates that about 1,057,000 international students will be enrolled at a college or university during the 2026–27 academic year, compared to an estimated 1,169,000 during the 2025–26 academic year. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/08/12/loss-international-students-could-cost-economy-34b

Building expertise in the age of AI: Who trains the next generation? - Bryan Hancock, McKinsey

Building expertise in the age of AI: Who trains the next generation? - Bryan Hancock, McKinsey

For decades, organizations have relied on early-career talent to do the routine, lower-risk work that supports the business and to serve as a training ground for future leaders. Think of Peggy Olson’s trajectory on Mad Men, from novice assistant to Don Draper’s protégé to confident copy chief at an advertising agency—a climb that began because routine work kept her in the room where judgment was practiced, and where her own could be noticed. In real life, advances in automation and AI are changing the composition of entry-level work itself. Tasks such as research, documentation, data cleanup, basic coding, and preliminary analysis are being streamlined or absorbed into AI systems. These are precisely the activities through which young employees have traditionally built instincts, developed judgment, and earned the right to take on more. At the same time, fears are growing about the impact of AI on jobs. In the 2025 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, entry-level workers, particularly women, reported feeling the most worried of all age groups about how AI use will affect their jobs. 

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/building-expertise-in-the-age-of-ai-who-trains-the-next-generation

Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT—and expanding access to GPT‑5.6 Luna for free users - OpenAI

Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We’re introducing updates to ChatGPT that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for Free users. For Plus and Pro users, we’re updating GPT‑5.6 Sol in Chat to be more reliable with facts and provide more focused answers. A new slider lets you choose how much thought ChatGPT puts into each response. For Free users, we're updating the default model to GPT‑5.6 Luna and expanding access with unlimited text chats. For questions that need more thought, a new Think button lets you access higher reasoning for harder questions.

https://openai.com/index/improving-gpt-5-6-sol-in-chatgpt/

AI won’t kill the college degree, but it will change what it’s for - Colin Gabler, Atlanta Journal Constitution

In the AI era, the value of college will not be measured by the output students generate, but whether they can form and defend the judgments they make behind it. That shift to artificial intelligence is already changing what counts as evidence of real learning in higher education, how we justify the valuable time and resources students, parents, local communities and potential employers invest in the next generation of citizens. I saw this firsthand in my MBA classroom, where students recently presented market-entry strategies to a live client. Article author, Colin Gabler says  In this op-ed at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I argue that college is worth its cost in the age of AI only if it develops graduates who can interpret, challenge, and take responsibility for machine-shaped decisions rather than merely execute them.

https://www.ajc.com/opinion/2026/08/ai-wont-kill-the-college-degree-but-it-will-change-what-its-for/

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT - The Register

The House of Altman announced a trio of new education-focused offerings on Tuesday: one for K-12 teachers, another for college educators, and a third for college students. The new plugins, the company explained, will help students and educators make more use of ChatGPT’s agentic capabilities for both studying and teaching. The new features are available through ChatGPT Edu, an institutionally licensed suite for higher education, and ChatGPT for Teachers, a free resource available to verified US K–12 educators and school districts. The new offerings, says OpenAI, build on its educational AI philosophy that “AI should support learning, not shortcut it, and the best learning experiences keep educators and students in control.”

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/04/openai-wants-teachers-and-profs-to-foist-their-work-off-on-chatgpt/5283064

Fitch: New visa limits could hurt international enrollment and revenue - Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive

The Trump administration’s new rule capping international student visa stays at four years could hurt revenue and decrease enrollment at colleges, particularly those that heavily rely on foreign students, according to a Tuesday analysis from Fitch Ratings. Financial pressure will be greatest on institutions with weaker student demand, limited financial flexibility, and a high reliance on tuition and fee revenue, Fitch analysts said. Colleges with significant STEM and graduate offerings could also be particularly hit hard, as it often takes more than four years to complete such programs. These institutions may face higher expenses “to address overseas recruitment challenges,” the analysts wrote. 

https://www.highereddive.com/news/fitch-new-visa-limits-could-hurt-international-enrollment-and-revenue/827158/

Differential engagement with generative artificial intelligence in higher education: Gender, motivation, and achievement trajectories - uan-Hsuan Lee & Jiun-Yu Wu, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education

Engagement frequency was shaped by learner differences: female students, those with stronger autonomous motivation, lower prior knowledge, and higher course performance interacted more frequently, while higher-performing students were less likely to abstain from use. Importantly, engagement was not merely a matter of frequency but of inquiry quality and diversity. Growing Achievers (students who began with weaker achievement but demonstrated substantial performance gains) posed more diverse and conceptually oriented questions. In contrast, Declining Performers engaged minimally and focused on narrower, procedural inquiries despite stronger initial knowledge.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-026-00615-8