E48 -- You Wonder about High Schools: How About Colleges?

NewTech High Blog
August 17, 2026

I apologize for the gap in messaging. During this brief hiatus, we have had a few cancellations and seemingly a lot of golf getting in the way of my long-term focus to publish. That freedom shall pass as we are ramping up to start the 2026-2027 campaign again. That is exciting. 

Next Podcasts: Dr. Jason Berg, Superintendent, Farmington, MN and Corey Mohn, National Director of the CAPS Organization. 

Minnesota Governor's Race

In Minnesota, we have so many things happening right now. We have a hot Governor's race now between two fine women, Amy Klobuchar and Lisa DeMuth. There is a lot of anticipation over their upcoming debates and platforms. Fortunately, they have both published them. Klobuchar. DeMuth. Klobuchar's priorities are laid out a bit more clearly, including education. I'm sure Lisa's will expand over the near future as she had a hot race this summer to get this far. I can see how you would rally around either candidate. If I had to name three topics that I was most centered on for HS Education, I would offer skills acquisition, workforce readiness, the redefinition of what high school actually is and personalization. Someone talented may say that those are the same thing. If packaged expertly and widely, they actually are horses of the same color! 

Learning Omnivores Conference

We are back on again! The new conference will be held on Thursday, October 29th at Resource Training & Solutions. Most of our Main Acts are returning. It actually came up in a Google search today, so we're cooking with gas finally! 
There will be a couple of changes. One of those changes is that all active NewTech High schools get 4 enrollments for free. There is also a feature in which a team can get 25% off each member. Everyone needs to sign up for the conference to reserve your space and meal. Let me know if you are having any problems. This is still my first rodeo in terms of setting up a conference. The Central Minnesota Manufacturing Association (CMMA) is sponsoring the event along with NewTech High.  Featured presenters include: 

Conference Registration - Learning Omnivores

Ric Dressen & Jake Trippel -- Quantum Bridge Solutions

Luke Greiner -- Regional Analyst, Minnesota DEED

Jerrid Sebesta -- Growth & High Performance

Stevie Ray -- Improv and Leadership

College Doubts & Axios

I was really moved by these Axios excerpts on college enrollments and trends. You can't hardly look anywhere without seeing the signs of some major transitions in our society for early adults -- cost of having children, cost of new housing, the costs of going to college, coupled with the value for their degrees. I've advocated for you to sign up for it before, but Axios can provide you with a lot of trend information in the smallish bites possible. I'm going to post briefs on their briefs as this is all important information for your high schools and counselors to know.  If colleges were to know how high schools are going to be reinvented or morphed, they will probably have to rethink everything as well. As for Axios, you can get a customized newscast event every day! You want to find a way to keep up with something that doesn't take you too long. I've found Axios to be that place. 

1 big thing: New college doubts

College was once sold as a ticket to the American dream. But students today are taking a tougher look at the college tradeoff: burdensome debt and no guarantee of a dream career — or employment at all, as AI threatens the jobs that the degrees were meant to unlock, Axios' Avery Lotz reports.

"People didn't ask whether college mattered 20 years ago," says Courtney Brown, VP of impact and planning at Lumina Foundation.  Now, they're asking: "Are today's students going to be prepared for tomorrow's jobs? Is it really helping them out?"

📉 By the numbers: Confidence in higher education has slipped this year among both parties and all levels of educational attainment, according to Gallup. Job market fears are also surging: Gallup found last year that just 19% of those with a college degree or more said it was a good time to find a quality job at the end of 2025, compared to 35% of those without one. 

But there's a paradox: Even as Americans sour on higher education, they keep sending their kids to campus.

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Today's doubts fall into three buckets — in students' own words:

1. 💵 Affordability: "I didn't want to take out loans, and I didn't want to put my family through that stress of trying to fund it." —Gabriel Sheahan, a 24-year-old studying welding and fabrication at Lincoln Technical Institute, a trade school in New Jersey.
2. 🏛️ Value "How does it make sense that you're giving me this deadline to have my degree finished, and I can't even get the classes that I want? ... It feels ... like a rat race." —Rachel Sukkar, a 19-year-old philosophy major at UNC Chapel Hill.
3. 🎓 Outcomes: "There's just so much volatility, and you can't guarantee the same amount of success that you could 20 years ago with a college degree now." —Moksha Agrawal, a 17-year-old incoming high school senior.  Share this story.
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3. 🔄 Colleges race to be AI-forward

AI is forcing colleges to rethink what students need to learn — and what a degree should prepare them to do, Axios' Megan Morrone and Herb Scribner write.Why it matters: Employers increasingly expect new graduates to arrive with AI fluency, even as colleges are still figuring out how to teach it. 

💻 Split screen: This year's graduating high school seniors have had access to ChatGPT since freshman year, while this year's graduating college students booed mentions of AI at commencement.

• As students' command of AI has improved, colleges have revisited whether using it should always count as cheating.
• "Now anyone can get that expertise in a minute," OpenAI's VP for education, Leah Belsky, tells Axios. Higher education "is more coaching, mentoring, guiding students" through prompts and analyzing outputs, she says. [NOTE: High schools need to offer the same--across the board. Instead of only curriculum, we ought to be more focused on skills, attributes and dispositions.]

🎟️ Another route: Short-term certificate programs are becoming a faster, cheaper way to build AI skills — and a way for universities to reach a broader pool of students, Bloomberg reports (gift link).

• In 2022, just 2% of the professional certificate market focused on AI. This year, short-term AI training programs take up nearly a third.

📚 What students are saying: UC Davis student Burton Baecker told Axios he added finance to his accounting studies after seeing how quickly AI could perform accounting tasks.

• New graduates are now expected to manage projects and AI agents, conduct deeper research, present findings and defend their work, Casey Evans, interim dean at American University's Kogod School of Business, tells Axios.

5. 🔨 Gen Z nails its AI backup plan

Some young workers are swapping laptops for hard hats, betting that a welding torch or a tool belt could offer more protection from AI disruption, Axios' Josephine Walker writes.

🧰 Why it matters: More young Americans are looking to the skilled trades for lower debt, stable pay and work that's harder to automate.

• John Zink, vice president at the PHCC Educational Foundation, an apprentice training group, puts it bluntly: "We have the high-demand jobs that AI can't take because AI can't run pipe or install HVAC systems."

🛠️ What to watch: High schools are expanding programs that give students a direct path into skilled work.Case in point: Philadelphia's Father Judge High School graduated 24 students from its welding course last year. All got jobs paying $50,000+ a year.

Go deeper.

6. 🚪 Sorry, we're closed

The pandemic accelerated a higher-ed shakeout that's still forcing colleges to close, merge or reinvent themselves. Since March 2020, at least 49 nonprofit colleges have closed or announced closures. Forty others have merged — affecting more than 53,000 students, according to the higher-ed site BestColleges.

Historically, fewer than half of students reenroll elsewhere.

7. 🚫 Tech's pitch to skip college

Some of the tech industry's most influential CEOs are challenging the four-year degree as the default path for elite talent — and building alternatives to it, Axios' Herb Scribner writes.

• Palantir created the Meritocracy Fellowship, which urges high school grads to "skip the debt" and "skip the indoctrination" in favor of a "Palantir degree."
• Peter Thiel founded the two-year Thiel Fellowship, where participants skip or leave college.

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8. ⏱️ 1 for the road: Speedy degrees

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Virginia and Ohio are developing 90-credit bachelor's degrees that students could finish in three years — joining a fast-growing national effort to rethink how long college should take.

• The two states hope to launch pilot programs in 2028, Axios Richmond's Karri Peifer reports.

💰 Colleges struggling to fill seats see the programs as a way to attract students put off by the cost and length of a traditional degree. 

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