Sam Altman says four years of college is too long. The math says he is closer than higher ed wants to admit. Sam Altman went to Stanford. He left after two years. He now runs OpenAI. Last month he spoke at an event for tech interns. Someone asked him about college. He said two years was the right amount of time for him, and that the way the world has changed, college should not be as long as it is. He said staying two more years would have given him very little. (TechSpot) He

Not long ago, an R1 research university was on the verge of receiving a $50 million gift. Transformational money. The kind that gets announced at a board meeting and celebrated with a press release. The donor had one condition: naming rights for the college of business. The development office was thrilled. The IT team was not. What followed was not a legal negotiation or a donor relations problem. It was an infrastructure crisis. The university operated dozens of independent

Sterling College sits on 130 acres in rural Vermont, its isolation both its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. There are no cell towers and barely any passing traffic. For students, that remoteness can feel intentional, a refuge from the scale and pressure of traditional universities. But in today's digital-first college enrollment ecosystem, isolation doesn't just mean distance. It means invisibility. Sterling recently announced it would close at the end of th

For years, higher ed told itself a comforting story: put programs online and geography stops mattering. Students can come from anywhere. Scale becomes unlimited. Nice theory. Wrong reality. In a recent article, industry analyst Phil Hill used NC-SARA (National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements) data to reveal something that should stop every digital leader in their tracks — online higher education still follows geographic patterns far more than most inst

I remember walking across campus late one night when I was a university web director. I realized something fundamental had changed as I walked through a computer lab that used to be packed and found almost no one there. Years earlier, that room was a bottleneck. Students waited for stations. Access was managed. Space mattered. That night, the lab was clean, fully powered on, and nearly empty. Nothing was broken. Students were still learning. They just no longer needed the roo

As we close out 2025, it's worth looking back at a year that felt different for higher education. The conversations shifted. The pressure points became clearer. And a handful of leaders stepped up with frameworks, tools, and ideas that actually moved institutions forward. This wasn't a year for grand proclamations. It was a year for practical solutions. Students showed up with higher expectations and shorter attention spans. Search behavior evolved faster than most content st

Higher education stands at the edge of its most challenging chapter yet. The demographic cliff has arrived, with a 15% enrollment decline between 2010 and 2021. Meanwhile, budgets shrink, political scrutiny intensifies, and students expect digital experiences that rival Silicon Valley's best. This perfect storm isn’t just reshaping higher education, it’s an awakening. The institutions that thrive will reimagine their digital foundations and embrace future-proof digital campus