Fear Of Saying It Out Loud

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, before we dive in, my husband and I were supposed to get tacos last night. That did not happen because I was too busy spiraling about this episode. I was scared, like genuinely scared to say out loud what I actually think about higher education right now. And my husband could tell, because this is not the first time this has happened. So he pulled over and gave me a full pep talk. No tacos, just tough love. Now here's what you need to know about my husband. We went to high school together outside of Chicago. And back then, while I was just living my life, I would walk around the city and see these little concert posters, and his face was on them. He was out here at 15 years old sneaking into the house of blues, hanging backstage with the roots, getting rides home from common and a kiss on the cheek from Erica Badu as he always reminds me. Just fearless, a performer down to his bones. So when I came to him like, but they don't know me, meaning you, this audience, the people I'm trying to reach, he didn't even blink. He said, Exactly, they don't know you, and you need to speak to them like they need to know you. I just sat there for a second, and then I said, Okay, fine, so here goes.

Creators Out-Influence Elite Faculty

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Right now, a 19-year-old on YouTube might have more influence over a student's thinking about finance than the entire faculty of Harvard. Stay with me. This is going somewhere I think we need to go. But that entire mental model is completely outdated. The biggest existential threat to traditional education isn't the college one state over. It is TikTok, its conversational AI, and its independent creators who are commanding millions of daily views. We're looking at a major shift in how society defines knowledge, how we seek it out, and ultimately who we actually trust to deliver it. I recently joined one of Gary Hubble's Reflect and Refract Conversations. They are live small group discussions that gather thoughtful people around timely ideas and honest dialogue. If you have not come across them, they are worth your attention. This session featured Christoph Kemkes from Atmos. During his introduction, he began naming the different forms of intelligence in the room, emotional intelligence, creative intelligence, and others. I'll be honest, I was only half listening at first. Then he named one that made me pause, artificial intelligence. And he was right. AI has become a mainstream form of intelligence in the room with us. It is already reshaping who can participate in the talent competition that universities are facing. Many institutions still assume they're competing for the same learners in the same ways they always have, but AI is widening the field, changing who can build, who can advise, who can personalize, and who can compete for attention, trust, and enrollment. So I'm asserting that the traditional gatekeepers are just no longer the default authorities. And we are going to try to figure out today how this happened. We're pulling insights from a pretty wide range of sources. We've got polling data from Pew Research and Gallup, business strategy from Harvard Business Review and Stratechary, some really interesting tech investment trends from Andreessen Horowitz, and academic perspectives from Stanford's Human-centered AI Institute. Our mission today is to map out the forces pulling your students away from you and to figure out what you can actually do about it.

Attention Becomes The Learning Currency

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Okay, let's unpack this, because the first thing we really need to look at is the math of where everyone's attention is actually going. Attention is the absolute baseline currency of learning. Without the learner's attention, the environment just doesn't matter. You can have the best classroom in the world, but if nobody's listening, it means nothing. And the data paints a very stark picture of this new reality, especially when you look at recent morning consult research. Tracking Gen Z adults, content creators and influencers are now their absolute go-to sources for information. And this goes way beyond figuring out which sneakers to buy or what makeup routine to try. The shift cuts much deeper into complex, high-stakes topics like actual news, financial advice, serious career guidance. Authority has historically lived within our slow, credentialed institutions, but now it is shifting rapidly toward individuals who build what psychologists call parasocial trust. So let's break down how parasocial trust actually functions. Think about a traditional professor, standing at the front of a lecture hall twice a week, separated by a podium and a significant power dynamic. Now think about a creator who looks directly into the camera, speaks from their messy bedroom, shares their failures, and shows up every single day. One is a brilliant expert delivering knowledge on a schedule. The other is a 24-7 personal coach in your pocket. That sheer volume of intimate FaceTime builds a bond that feels like a real friendship. And here's the part I think is hard for us in higher ed to hear. That bond wins. Even when the professor is light years ahead in knowledge, depth, and intellectual firepower. Parasocial trust doesn't care about credentials. It responds to proximity, consistency, and the feeling that someone is talking directly to you. And that bond is incredibly sticky for acquiring and retaining learners. Pew Research data on teen behavior from late 2025 and early 2026 confirms it. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube are the places your students go before they ever think to come to you. I was on Threads recently and a woman commented that she was going to see how much she could learn through the platform before she decided whether to pursue a master's degree. And I know what some of you are thinking. Good luck with that. But that reaction is exactly the problem. She's not confused, she is not naive, she is a rational consumer and she's doing a cost-benefit analysis in real time. And our colleges and universities didn't even make the first round of consideration. This woman isn't asking whether Threads is better than your program. She is asking whether your program is worth what it costs her to find out. That is a different question entirely. And it deserves a different answer than a dismissive

Parasocial Trust Beats Credentials

SPEAKER_00 6:48

laugh. AI chatbots are woven into your students' daily lives, and all we're talking about is how they use it to do homework. They turn to conversational AI for deep research, complex summarization, even emotional support and daily mentorship. A thought partner available at 2 a.m. who never sighs, never checks the clock, and never makes them feel like a burden. This shouldn't be a surprise, because many of us are doing the exact same thing. Higher ed used to be the only power source in town. If you wanted the electricity, the knowledge, the mentorship, the credential, you had to hook up to their power lines. But now, creators and AI act like solar panels on every individual roof. The grid is totally decentralized. You have an assistant that speaks your exact language and knows your specific habits. Of course, you're challenging this premise, and I'm going to challenge it a bit too. Am I really saying a random lifestyle influencer or a predictive text chatbot has the same level of actual legitimate authority as a tenured professor with a PhD and decades of peer-reviewed research? Well, to answer that, we really have to separate academic expertise from functional market authority. Research from Harvard Business Review on Modern Digital Strategy shows us that creators are fundamentally rewriting how consumers, and I think by proxy learners, search for information and more importantly, what they actually value in the results. In the modern digital age, authority isn't just about the credentials hanging on your office wall anymore. Authority is the combination of distribution and daily trust. So it's not just what you know, it's who's actually listening to you. Think about it. If a brilliant researcher publishes a paper that 300 people read, their market authority is actually pretty low because nobody sees it. But if an influencer spends hundreds of hours a year speaking directly to an audience, answering their comments, and translating complex ideas into actionable advice, they hold the market authority. The infrastructure of attention has just completely changed. Prospective learners evaluate and trust knowledge through these creator-driven channels far more readily than through faceless institutional brands.

AI Unbundles Content From Degrees

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Here's where it gets really interesting. Creators are not just capturing attention. They are actively dismantling the educational model and making money doing it. Here's why. For the first time in history, anyone can produce a world-class syllabus in four seconds using AI. Ben Thompson at Stratechery calls this the unbundling. Generative AI removes the barriers to content creation entirely. The information is free, so the information is no longer what your students are paying for. You've probably seen the article about the woman who earned her bachelor's degree in three months, self-paced and done. And if you work in higher ed, you probably watched that story spread through your circles like a five alarm fire. My threads feed lit up with more stories just like it. But I think we're scared of the wrong thing. She didn't need the institution for the information. She needed it for the credential. And she got through it as fast as possible because nothing in the experience gave her a reason to slow down. No community pulling her in. No mentor who saw something in her she hadn't seen yet. No connection that made her want to stay. So what did she miss out on? Not the content? She clearly got the content. She missed the thing that cannot be sped through. The cohort that challenges your thinking at 11 p.m. before a presentation. The professor who writes something in the margin that changes how you see your entire field. The moment you realize you don't actually understand something until you have to defend it out loud to someone who pushes back hard. That human layer is our product now. Just about everything else your institution offers to learners can be replicated for free. And the Andres and Horowitz data on the top consumer AI apps confirms this is not a fringe trend. Here's what that means practically. Your students are not waiting until they get to campus to learn anymore. They are learning right now, from a creator on YouTube, from an AI chatbot at midnight, from a podcast on their commute. Learning finds them wherever they are. The question is whether your institution is one of those places that can find them, or whether it continues to be the one destination that requires them to come to you.

Creator Cohorts Compete With Programs

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Richard Florida noted in Fast Company that the creator economy is no longer a side hustle or a fringe phenomenon. It is a mature industry, one where people build careers, generate real income, and find genuine purpose. It grew up, and it grew up competing directly with the path your institution represents. We are seeing this happen in the wild with massive success. Look at Colin and Samir. For those who don't know, they're prominent YouTube creators who cover the business of the creator economy. They partnered with a platform, Kajabi, to launch a highly structured 30-day course specifically for creators who want to build their business. They took what is essentially a specialized entrepreneurship curriculum, packaged it into a short, intense identity reinforcing cohort, and charged premium prices. And people flock to it because Colin and Samir have spent years building both the distribution and the trust. The tech platforms themselves recognize that the educators and the talent are the key to this entire ecosystem. Neil Mohan, YouTube's CEO, said it plainly in a 2025 interview. YouTube ships AI tools and monetization features specifically to keep creators loyal. They are not building for viewers, they are building for the talent, because whoever holds the talent holds the audience. They treat independent creators as their primary constituents. The platforms are building heavily fortified environments to keep that talent locked in, because whoever holds the trusted talent holds the learner's attention. If these platforms are essentially subsidizing creators to keep them loyal, the creators have a massive advantage over a legacy institution. If I can get a life-changing identity-building experience from a 30-day sprint offered by Colin and Samir, an experience where I'm surrounded by a highly engaged community of my peers, learning a modern skill directly from people who are practicing it daily. Why in the world would I sign up for a traditional master's degree or certificate? That is the exact vulnerability our traditional institutions are failing to grasp right now. By the time that student arrives on your campus, creators, influencers, learning platforms, the whole gamut, have already been shaping her expectations for years. She already knows what she thinks college should feel like, what it should deliver, how quickly it should matter to her life. And if your institution doesn't match that picture, if it feels slow or generic or disconnected from the specific future she's been imagining, you don't lose her to a dropout decision. You lose her to disengagement. She finishes the degree. She just learned somewhere else while she does it. And the pressure isn't just coming from nimble internet creators.

Trust Collapse And Employer Upskilling

SPEAKER_00 13:53

It's coming from all sides. Traditional corporate employers are actively squeezing higher education from the other side. And this is all happening against the backdrop of a public crisis of faith in the university system. You can learn more about that in my episode, What Higher Ed Leaders Can Learn from the Trust Collapse. Current Gallup polling data on this is incredibly revealing. U.S. confidence in higher education is closely divided right now, and the primary drivers of that skepticism aren't just ideological. People only want to make it about politics, but it's also really highly pragmatic concerns over relevance and cost. People are asking, are they actually teaching the skills I need for today's world? Combine that fear with skyrocketing tuition, and learners are far more willing to experiment with alternative, non-university learning paths because the traditional path suddenly feels inherently risky, incredibly expensive, and potentially outdated. Isn't that essentially what that woman on threads was saying? And while confidence in higher ed waivers, employers are stepping right into that void. The Gallup data shows that employers are increasingly using upskilling as a core retention strategy, a huge shift in HR strategy. They are no longer expecting employees to arrive fully trained. Instead, they are treating continuous learning as an employment benefit. They are essentially telling their talent, stay with us and we will train you for the future. These employer partnership often go to a small number of institutions, usually big online players. So if you're not one of those partners, you're being cut out of a growing enrollment channel entirely. Second, and more importantly, the employer is now sitting between you and the learner. They decide what gets funded, what credentials count, and what skills matter. That shifts power away from the institution. You're no longer defining what's worth learning. The employer is. So here is what all of this has in common. The creators building cohorts, the AI platforms available at 2 a.m. The employers offering learning as a job benefit, the platforms subsidizing talent to lock them in. They are all competing for the same person your institution assumes will just show up. And the woman on threads doing a cost-benefit analysis before she applies anywhere, the woman who sprinted through her degree in three months because nothing gave her a reason to slow down, sure you can take those as cautionary tales of the students you don't want to admit, but you also have to recognize them as rational responses to a market that finally gave learners other options, and a market that is increasingly taking those other options seriously as training. That is what this episode is about. Not whether creators are as rigorous as your faculty, not whether AI is a threat or a tool. The real question is much simpler. In a world where employers, startups, training programs, and content creators are all competing for the same learners you assume will come to you. What is your institution doing to earn that assumption? And here is the second question. Where does your institution show up in the world where your prospective students already live? Because right now the answer for most institutions is not where it counts. Your prospective students are not reading your website. They're not scrolling your course catalog. They're on YouTube watching someone explain exactly what a career in urban planning actually looks like day to day. They're on Instagram following a first-generation college student document, her entire graduate school experience in real time. They're in Discord servers and Reddit threads and Substack comment sections having the kinds of conversations about their futures that your institution used to be the home for. And your institution is largely absent from

How Universities Earn Attention Again

SPEAKER_00 17:38

all of it. Now let me be clear, I am not saying your tenure track faculty need to become YouTubers. That is not the point. The point is that your institution needs a serious, resourced, strategic presence in the places where your prospective students are already forming their opinions about what education is worth and who they want to become. That might mean investing in people whose entire job is to translate your institution's expertise into formats that actually travel. It might mean creating real support and real incentives for the faculty member who genuinely wants to build a public presence. Because that person exists on your campus right now and is probably doing it on their own, with zero institutional backing. It might mean partnering with creators who already have the audience you are trying to reach. The concept sometimes described as building MKBHDs for your institution, referring to the wildly popular tech reviewer Marcus Brownlee, who built one of the most trusted voices in consumer technology not through credentials, but through consistent, high-quality public presence over years. That is not a social media strategy. It is a trust-building strategy. And trust is what brings students to your door before your competitors even get a chance to introduce themselves. However, you get there, the question is the same. Are you showing up in the places where your prospective students are deciding who they want to become and who they trust to help them get there? Or are you waiting for them to find you? Because the creators are not waiting, the employers are not waiting. And your prospective students are making those decisions right now based on who showed up and who didn't.

Closing Reflection

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Thanks for listening. I look forward to looking beyond the Ivory Tower with you again.