The state of international enrollment in 6 charts - Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive

Last summer, financial analysts predicted that the Trump administration’s restrictions on international enrollment and increased scrutiny of foreign students would create financial risk for colleges. They argued that those policies tarnish the reputational shine of U.S. higher education and could have an outsized impact on tuition revenue, as international students often pay full price. nrollment data has done little to assuage those concerns. Even before President Donald Trump retook office lastE year, growth in international enrollment in the U.S. had slowed after rebounding following the pandemic.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/the-state-of-international-enrollment-in-6-charts/821753/

Transforming Enrollment Managementin the Field of Online Learning - Vickie S. Cook, OLC Online Learning Journal

The landscape of enrollment management in higher education related to all modalities of learning is undergoing a significant transformation driven by evolving student expectations, shifting demographics, and the necessity for institutions to optimize operational efficiency. Traditionally centered on human-driven processes and relational strategies, enrollment management for online learning enterprises must now integrate advanced technologies such as Business Process Automation (BPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to remain effective and competitive. This manuscript for online learning administrators and enrollment management leaders will explore the systems-level continuum from Business Process Mapping (BPM) to AI-driven functionality, highlighting the strategic evolution of enrollment operations within the field of online learning. 

https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/article/view/5482/1584

Where today's job seekers have the best chance of getting hired - Mark Huffman, Consumer Affairs

If you're looking for the fastest path to employment, restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues, and tourism-related businesses are leading the way. Leisure and hospitality added roughly 70,000 jobs in May, making it the strongest-performing sector by a wide margin. Employers appear to be ramping up staffing ahead of the summer travel season. Healthcare continues to be one of the most reliable sources of job growth in the U.S. economy. The sector added between 35,000 and 47,000 jobs in May, depending on the data series cited, continuing a multiyear hiring trend fueled by an aging population and persistent demand for medical services. Local government hiring surged in May, adding approximately 55,000 jobs. Schools, public services, and municipal agencies accounted for much of the increase. 

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/where-todays-job-seekers-have-the-best-chance-of-getting-hired-060526.html

Online Is a "Safe Space" in War - Robert Ubell, AI Learning Insights Substack

 When remote classes were first tested so many years ago, who would have dreamed they would become a refuge for students and faculty cut off from campus by traumatic conflict? When the U.S. and Israel unexpectedly launched a war with Iran in late February, American colleges with branches in the Middle East took cues from the global Covid epidemic, closing campuses, moving everything online.1 Qatar ordered all schools and universities to switch to distance learning on the first day of the conflict. By late March, after Iran threatened that U.S. campuses were legitimate targets, American campuses in the country—including those run by Georgetown, Virginia Commonwealth, and Texas A&M—had moved online-only, where they remain.2 Universities in Ukraine and Gaza also found a haven in remote education, moving to digital learning to maintain classes. Online education has assumed a grim challenge for which it was never intended, securing higher education for students as campuses crumble under attack. In Gaza, for example, despite the destruction of nearly all universities in the zone, learning and academic life continues remarkably online.  

https://ailearninsights.substack.com/p/online-is-a-safe-space-in-war

Higher ed’s next crisis won’t start in the classroom. It will start in the cloud - James L. Norrie, University Business

 Higher education has spent years worrying about enrollment cliffs, declining public trust, political polarization, and, as we enter the AI era, the commoditization of knowledge and the future value of degrees. Those concerns are real and deserve attention. But another crisis is quietly forming beneath the surface of nearly every college and university, and unlike many institutional challenges, this one may arrive globally and all at once, in a wave of distrust and disruption. This month’s breach involving the Canvas learning management platform was a stark warning. The immediate discussion focused on familiar questions: Who was responsible? Was the institution or the software vendor liable? Could FERPA violations emerge if protected student information had been exposed? Even institutions not directly impacted by the incident should pay attention because the uncomfortable answer to many of those questions is some version of “yes.”

https://universitybusiness.com/higher-eds-next-crisis-wont-start-in-the-classroom-it-will-start-in-the-cloud/

Five words and a GenAI prompt to spark deeper online learning - María Robertha Leal Isida and Dania Arriola Arteaga, Times Higher Ed

 We developed the “5E” framework (engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate) to structure our online sessions around five learning stages. We then used GenAI to speed up lesson design and respond to our students’ needs in real time. Not only did this approach increase participation and deepen understanding of complex topics but it also allowed us to cater to students’ varying levels of existing knowledge and disciplinary backgrounds. 

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/five-words-and-genai-prompt-spark-deeper-online-learning

Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers - Alejandro Salinas, et al; SSRN

 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. Law provides a sharp test. We conducted a blinded evaluation of short-answer tutoring in contracts courses with sixteen U.S. law professors. Participants created 40 representative questions, wrote answers, and judged 2,918 anonymized comparisons between human and LLM responses. Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53% vs 12.06% for professors). Preferences for LLM answers were consistent across evaluators and reflected shared professional standards. Our evaluation can be reliably extended to additional models by employing a separate LLM as a judge, rendering expert agreement an effective, scalable method to evaluate AI tutors in judgment-rich domains.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6849678

Are academics making an (em) dash for AI? - Times Higher Education

 In the four years since its commercial launch, generative artificial intelligence has had a profound impact on personal and professional life. But are academics enthusiasts or sceptics? Five scholars explain how the technology has affected their own practice – for good and bad. Artificial intelligence writing is instantly recognisable, we are told—soulless, dispassionate, and devoid of the spark that marks genuine thought. Historian Jonathan Rees, in Academe this spring, calls it “bland, unspecific, pedestrian prose”. Journalist and UCL academic Sarfraz Manzoor, in a recent piece for The Independent, concluded that an AI article his students read was “competent but forgettable”. Scroll through r/professors on any given day and you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of colleagues enthusiastically nodding along and complaining bitterly about students submitting work that any fool can see was written by a machine.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/are-academics-making-em-dash-ai

California Senate passes bill that would create $12B in state research funding - Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive

California’s state Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that would create a new public entity to help fund health and science research, including at California universities, amid the Trump administration’s disruption to the federal research system. SB 895, which passed by a 29-9 vote, would establish the California Foundation for Science and Health Research and issue $12 billion in bonds to fund the foundation’s grants and awards. That’s down from $23 billion in an earlier version. To become law, the proposal would require passage in the House, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature and voter approval at the next statewide general election. Dozens of unions, professional associations, faculty groups, universities and other organizations have endorsed the bill.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/california-senate-passes-bill-state-research-fund/821421/

2026 EDUCAUSE The Impact of AI on Learning Assessment Report - Jenay Robert, EDUCAUSE

Few areas of higher education have been as passionately debated as learning assessment in the age of AI. Since the debut and rapid adoption of readily available generative AI chatbots, educators have grappled with how learning assessment would be impacted.  By only surveying individuals who are currently doing the hands-on work of learning assessment, we can provide you with information about how the learning assessment landscape is changing in practice, not just in theory. Explore the full Impact of AI on Learning Assessment report: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2026/6/2026-educause-the-impact-of-ai-on-learning-assessment-report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbyxh_2G84g

Assessing critical thinking in critical times - Kate Williams, Times Higher Education

Improving critical thinking is neither easy to do nor easy to measure. Outside educational philosophers, it is often defined as something “you know when you see it”. Or, perhaps more clearly, you know it when you don’t see it. When people opine on the absence of critical thinking, they often use examples of illogical assumption, unsupported arguments and poor decision-making. Bolstering critical thinking skills prepares learners to listen to others’ ideas, seek evidence and draw logical conclusions. The way we assess critical thinking offers a pathway for higher education’s sustained relevance in the age of AI.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/assessing-critical-thinking-critical-times

eHBCU: A first-of-its-kind HBCU online consortium to expand economic mobility through education - McKinsey

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are essential for creating economic mobility. According to McKinsey research, they enroll more than twice as many Pell Grant-eligible (low-income) students as non-HBCU institutions, and their graduates are 51 percent more likely to move into a higher-income quintile than graduates of non-HBCUs. The mean mobility rate across all US colleges is 1.6 percent, but the mean mobility rate for HBCUs is 3.0 percent.Yet many HBCUs face persistent structural challenges that limit their ability to scale impact—particularly in online education. Fragmented admissions processes, limited staffing dedicated to online learners, and uneven access to capital and technology partners have constrained growth, even as demand for flexible, high-quality digital learning has accelerated.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/how-we-help-clients/ehbcu-a-first-of-its-kind-hbcu-online-consortium-to-expand-economic-mobility-through-education

Education Department releases final rule for Workforce Pell - Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive

The U.S. Department of Education on Monday released final regulations detailing the process for how programs as short as eight weeks can get approval from their governors and the federal government to be eligible for Pell Grants.  The rule carries out the statutory standards that short-term programs must meet related to student outcomes — including earnings and job placement rates — to remain eligible for the new Workforce Pell program. The rule’s provisions governing Workforce Pell take effect July 20, and institutions have the option to implement them as early as July 1. The final rule hews largely to the agreed-upon regulatory language hashed out between the Education Department and stakeholders last year during a process known as negotiated rulemaking. 

https://www.highereddive.com/news/education-department-final-rule-workforce-pell/820543/

If Canvas Goes Down Again, What’s the Contingency Plan? - Lisa Anderson and Mairéad Martin, Inside Higher Ed

Faculty and administrators across the country, shaped by their experience adapting instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, knew what to do last week. Shifting the modality of instruction is not new for us. Instructors quickly improvised alternative assignments, delayed quizzes and exams, populated offline course materials, and adjusted timelines in order to keep learning moving forward. When it came time to notify students of these adjustments, however, a more fundamental issue became apparent. Many instructors came to discover they had no reliable way to contact their students outside the learning management system itself. Some did not know how to access their course rosters outside Canvas. Others teaching large online lectures encountered institutional email delivery limits. Many had no established communication pathways beyond LMS announcements.

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/05/22/when-canvas-goes-down-whats-contingency-plan-opinion

Cuts and hiring freezes spread as spring semester closes - Alcino Donadel, University Business

Numerous public universities are closing out the spring term with hiring freezes, layoffs and structural cuts as leaders confront budget shortfalls. Last week, the University of Oregon announced that it has frozen hiring and pay increases while it works to close a projected $65 million structural deficit, largely tied to lower out-of-state enrollment and tuition revenue. These actions reflect a “changing reality across higher education” as universities wrestle with enrollment declines, state funding reductions, rising costs and uncertainty in federal research funding and other factors, President Karl Scholz said.

https://universitybusiness.com/cuts-and-hiring-freezes-spread-as-spring-semester-closes/