In my last piece, I argued that the reason people keep saying college is not affordable is that, by any reasonable measure, it is not.

But what is a “reasonable measure”? And how should we communicate those measures to students?

For those who believe that education, even higher education, should be treated as a completely public good, then the only appropriate measure is free. (I’m not here to debate whether this is appropriate or not, just explaining that this is one way that some choose to measure and communicate college affordability.)

But for those who believe that “free” is unrealistic, unnecessary, or even unfair, there is a burden to articulate what “affordable” means otherwise.

Is a $10,000 degree affordable? Depends on who is paying and what they are paying for. So how do we first measure what might be reasonably affordable and then communicate some type of message about what that affordability means in practical terms to students and families?

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On measuring college affordability

Most experts will say the best way to measure college affordability is to start with the “net price” – the problem is that while this may be a good way to understand what people have paid historically after the fact as an analytical tool, it isn’t a useful way to communicate with families.

For most colleges, one’s actual net price depends on a complex set of factors that relate to your Student Aid Index (formerly Expected Family Contribution), or some other proprietary calculation of what the school thinks you can afford. And most people—even experts—could not tell you how the SAI is calculated. It is a black box to the average learner and to their families.

That said, even when we do calculate an average net price (generally, as total cost of attendance minus grant aid), knowing this number alone is not terribly useful as a measurement tool.

First, it is more helpful if understood for students at different income levels or ranges, and second, even then, for policymakers it is often helpful to contextualize the number further by understanding how much of a burden it would be for those individuals. So it is one thing to know that the average net price for students at a college is $25,000 per year. It is even more descriptive to understand that for students in the $0-$30,000 income range, the average net price is $3,000, while the average net price for students in the $30,000-$60,000 is $8,000 and the average net price for students in the $60,000-$100,000 income range is $15,000, and so on.

A level more descriptive would be to contextualize these numbers to show that for families making $30,000, their average net price represents a burden that is equivalent to 10% of their annual family income. And for families making $60,000 this represents a burden of 13% of their annual family income, and so on. This kind of measurement allows us to have a more thorough understanding of whether what we are asking is reasonable for students and families.

For instance, when we talk about tax burdens, we rarely talk about the absolute amount of tax paid by individuals at different incomes. It seems obvious that someone making $400,000 will pay more in taxes (when measured in total dollars) than someone making $40,000. But when we look at the taxes as a percentage of their income, this gives us a bit better sense of what the tax burden means to them as a family.

So, as a matter of measurement among experts who study college affordability, it is probably most helpful to understand net price by family income if we are trying to really get a sense of the burden a family faces in paying for college. And to allow for greater understanding about whether this is a reasonable amount, we have to take one more step and express that price as a share of what the family actually earns.

Some scholars and organizations have taken steps to do exactly this.

Lauren Asher, writing for HCM Strategists in October 2024, published a brief — Beyond Sticker Prices — sampling affordability burdens across nine states, looking at net price by family income. She found that in six of those nine states, even the lowest income community college students faced net prices representing 20 percent or more of their incomes. At public four-year colleges the picture was worse: in all nine states, students from families under $30,000 faced net prices above 20 percent of income, running as high as 49 percent in Alabama and 41 percent in both Louisiana and Virginia.

A 2017 report from the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) found the same pattern, though its numbers run much higher, because it measures against the median income within each bracket rather than the top of it. College Costs in Context reported that the lowest income students faced net prices equal to 77 percent of their family income, on average, across public four-year institutions nationally — and 50 percent at community colleges. In all fifty states and the District of Columbia, the net price of a public four-year college was more than half of total income for families earning $30,000 or less. (Full disclosure: I chair the TICAS board.)

That brief also measured the burden a second way, against discretionary income — what is left after basic needs are covered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, families in the lowest tier have no discretionary income at all—they are just trying to make ends meet and usually come up short. This means that they simply cannot afford to pay anything additional toward college—they don’t even have enough resources to cover their own basic living costs. Yet these families were still expected to produce $9,310 a year for a public four-year college.

These are helpful statistics to understand the affordability of college among students of various income ranges, at various types of institutions. And in looking at the data this way, we can see that while the trend in net price has been downward, it is still a substantial proportion of income for many students.

On basic needs and college affordability

As noted above, when considering these burdens, we’ve also got to remember that students are managing these costs while also trying to manage the general cost of living.

And, even in those cases where the added expense of college is not overly burdensome, attending college competes with the time available to work. That is the opportunity cost: the time it takes to focus on studies crowds out a student’s capacity to work and cover necessities like food, rent, childcare, and transportation. Grant aid that exceeds the direct costs charged by the institution can be helpful in defraying some of these costs, because that aid usually gets refunded to the student, allowing them some subsidy to cover living costs so they can focus on school. This may seem like a “handout” in the US, but this funny YouTube video explains how odd the American arrangement might seem to observers in other countries.

But let’s be clear about what is happening right now. People are frustrated about the cost of living whether they are enrolled in college or not. Students are not a separate population having a separate crisis. They are the same people, at a moment when the time school demands makes it harder to earn. If we are concerned about the basic needs of students, we should also be concerned about the basic needs of people in our communities more broadly. Students experience basic needs insecurity for much the same reason their neighbors do: there is no reliable safety net underneath any of them. College only adds to it.

Oh, student loans

All of this leads to another reality to name head-on: borrowing student loans for college was made to deal with this challenge. Students don’t have the capital to invest immediately, yet completing college is likely to materially impact their earning potential. So, provide them with loans that allow them to cover the immediate cost until they have the payoff that allows them to pay it back.

Sounds simple enough. The problem? While student loans should, in theory, ease people’s affordability concerns about the upfront cost of college, adding the element of borrowing changes the dynamic in real and perceived ways. Student loans can be a fantastic tool for access to a credential and network that is valuable. But they are a burden and a bad bet for anyone who does not complete a credential, whose credential has little value in the labor market, or who faces higher than average barriers to being paid fairly in the workplace. This means the calculation is not so easy and not such a slam dunk if loans are meant to be a key access point to affordability.

On communicating about college affordability – other options

Ok, so if this is how we think about the confusing conundrum of how to calculate college affordability, how do we tackle the related problem of how to communicate about affordability?

Almost no one talks about a college’s “net price” in real life. People wonder whether they can get a scholarship or a grant, whether loans are reasonable, whether they have savings or can work to pay the cost, and how they might be able to cobble together any remaining gaps. They are often trying to figure out how much they will have to work to afford it — before, during, or after the degree.

Even for students who aren’t literally working their way through, the language of work likely resonates. It is how families talk about money—how much will you need to work to afford this or that? And for advocates, policymakers, and institutional leaders, putting the number in hours makes the trade-off concrete in a way a dollar figure does not.

Thankfully, there are some useful examples of good analysis and an emerging set of affordability practices that can provide some guidance about what a more compelling national narrative around affordability might entail.

The TICAS report I referenced earlier ran these numbers using the net price data. Their conclusion was that assuming a student worked only during the nine-month academic year — 39 weeks — at their own state’s minimum wage, the lowest-income students at public four-year colleges would have had to work more than 20 hours a week in every state but California — and more than 40 hours a week in nine states and the District of Columbia. In New Hampshire, 56 hours. That is a full-time job and then some, on top of a full-time course load. Those figures are now a decade old, which underscores the point about needing to update these data more regularly.

Others have measured it differently and landed in the same place: college costs more than any reasonable amount of student work can cover. Randal Olson recently noted that a student could cover the sticker price of public in-state tuition with about five hours a week of minimum-wage work in 1970 and needs roughly five times that amount today. NCAN’s annual affordability gap research starts from net price and asks whether the gap closes once you assume a full-time summer job at the state minimum wage, plus work-study and loans. By that standard, only 35 percent of public bachelor’s-granting institutions and 48 percent of community colleges were affordable in 2023–24.

Some policymakers and institutions have begun to talk about affordability in other ways.

For instance, some have begun to talk about affordability in income tiers — essentially a sliding scale, where a family under a certain income pays nothing and the price rises gradually from there. Colleagues and I sketched out something like this in a paper about affordability guarantees last year. Kevin Carey just wrote a thought-provoking piece in the Washington Monthly about how such a system might work.

And of course, many communities with “College Promise” programs discuss affordability in terms of free tuition and fees for a subset of students (often those residing in certain communities or under a certain income range.)

For those doing research to understand what resonates with students and communities, these framings might be useful to test.

Where do we go from here?

My plea to anyone who cares about making college more affordable is that, as we begin to search anew for policy solutions and ways to talk about this issue, we do so 1) appropriately informed about the problem and 2) in language that resonates with learners and families.

If we were serious about this issue, I’d like to think that a set of actors with moral and policy authority would consider the data and name an ideal number. What amount (share of family income, hours you’d need to work to pay for a degree, number of years you’d need to repay at what amount, etc) do we think is reasonable to ask? And then we should measure against it every year, in public, the way we measure unemployment or inflation. This would create a goal we could work towards, a commitment we could make to the public, an anchor for advocacy. (For what it’s worth, I actually did something like this in 2015. I’m like a dog with a bone on this one.)

Until we determine and say plainly what we think is reasonable to ask of a family, we are just going around and around without any hope of solving a very real problem in people’s lives. It’s past time to stop being polite, and start getting real with people about college affordability. (IYKYK)

I have spent the better part of my professional career focused on helping people access high-quality college, which mostly meant focusing on how they could do so at a cost they could manage. Until recently, that was probably the biggest thru line in my career.

It’s a career that started with a question I couldn’t answer.

A junior at a high school in Boston asked me whether taking on student loans would be a good bet.

I was in grad school. My work study job was with low-income students at that school, helping them navigate the college-going process as part of something called the GEAR UP program. More explicitly, my job was to encourage them to go to college. I was what you would call a “college access provider,” though the title on my paperwork was “intern.”

I loved that job. And I remember the particular feeling of a student asking me something entirely reasonable — whether her loans would pay off, whether a student like her had a real chance of finishing, which major was the right fit, whether she’d get a good job at the end of it — and understanding that the system had not given either of us what we needed to answer her. The answer, of course, was that on average, student loans are a good bet. But as the adage goes — people don’t live their lives on average.

That was twenty years ago.

That experience stuck with me as I got a job in the US Department of Education, working on solutions to expand access to financial aid for more low- and moderate-income students. It stayed with me as I moved on to the White House and was tasked with answering President Obama’s questions about why college costs so much. It was in the forefront of my mind as I drafted the memo to the President and led the policy process that would result in the first College Scorecard (among other fun ideas that received less traction over time.) We have made some progress, to be sure, but unfortunately, many of the core challenges facing low-income students when it comes to figuring out their options after high school remain the same. And the main challenge, I’d argue, remains some version of “affordability.”

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“Affordability” is all the rage these days. Everyone seems to be talking about how to make life more “affordable” for Americans. Unfortunately, the term means different things to different people, and policymakers often don’t take the requisite time or care to be thoughtful about what achieving “affordability” might actually look like on an individual level.

So why haven’t we made more progress on the conundrum of college affordability and in the way college affordability is experienced by individuals? I think higher ed administrators and policy experts have made two main mistakes in how we think and talk about college affordability.

The first is that we decided there is no real affordability problem. Not in those words, of course (mostly). But strip away the policy speak and the expert position amounts to: the price is fine, people are wrong about it, and they just don’t understand what a good deal they have.

The second is that on the rare occasions we do concede there’s a price problem, and try to work toward solving it, we describe the challenge and solutions in vocabulary that is difficult to understand.

We keep telling people they’re confused, and then try to help, in terminology that confuses them. But…

People aren’t confused. The math just ain’t mathing.

We know from polling and survey data that individuals consistently view higher education as unaffordable. Gallup and Lumina found in June that just 12 percent of Americans rate four-year colleges as excellent or good on affordability, while 63 percent rate them poor — the worst score of any attribute they tested. On other questions about higher education, the partisan gap runs as wide as 48 points. On affordability, it’s 14 percent of Democrats and 5 percent of Republicans. There is no partisan divide here — across the board, people seem to agree that there is a problem.

Before we reach for sophisticated explanations of that view, we should take seriously the most straightforward one — people think college is unaffordable in large part because, for many of them, it is.

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By any reasonable measure, postsecondary education has become dramatically more expensive over the span of a generation. After adjusting for inflation, average published tuition and fees at public four-year institutions roughly doubled between 1995–96 and 2025–26, while median household income rose only modestly.

We can argue about “sticker price” versus “net price,” but the sticker price is what people see when they look at a website. It’s what gets touted in the news. And for all our attempts to build calculators that help people understand net price, the sticker price is what drives impressions of what college costs. But let’s go ahead and talk about net price, because if you are at all engaged in higher ed policy, that is usually the first rebuttal.

Mistake one: the information explanation — weak sauce

The dominant expert explanation for the public’s concern about college affordability goes something like this: students and families don’t actually know what college costs after grants and other aid are taken into account (i.e. the “net price”); if they did, they’d see that “real” prices are lower than the sticker shock suggests. In doing so, their fears would be allayed, and they would go off to college, happily ever after. This has the appeal of an answer (Better information!) that feels useful, especially to people who trade in information, but that doesn’t get at the crux of the problem — that most people cannot actually afford the price of the average four-year public (or private) college, even if it is now lower than it was in the past.

And to be fair — net tuition really has come down among students who do not pay sticker price. After adjusting for inflation, average net tuition and fees at public four-year institutions peaked around 2012–13 and has fallen substantially since. At community colleges, net tuition is often in the negative. (Though I’m not sure most people ever saw community colleges as the real source of the college affordability problem to begin with.) If you look at this downward trajectory on a chart, and then you hear the public say college is still unaffordable, a very natural conclusion is that the public has bad information.

This narrative, however, is challenged by the way people actually experience affordability. Lumina and Gallup’s State of Higher Education report, Strada Education Foundation’s Cost Confusion research and a number of other recurring polls all show that Americans don’t accurately estimate the cost of college. Shocker.

The interesting thing about this research is that accuracy doesn’t seem to change the verdict. Most people significantly overestimate what college costs. Some — particularly those with a high school diploma or less — dramatically underestimate it. Either way, 77 percent say college is unaffordable.

I’d argue that people aren’t confused so much as responding accurately to something true. Whatever the precise figure, college costs a lot, and a great deal more than it did a generation ago. “Unaffordable” is a reasonable read of their reality, not a misunderstanding of the data.

If you think an affordable gallon of gas is $2.50, a drop from $4.50 to $4.00 is a real decline that still doesn’t register as reasonable for your budget. A declining number that is still too high does not feel like particularly good news. It is a slightly less bad version of bad news.

Mistake two: net price won’t save us

The second mistake is more nuanced and I think it persists because many of us higher ed administrators and policy wonks are so deep in the weeds that we don’t even notice it.

Here is some of the vocabulary we ask a first-time college goer to master before she can find out what college costs.

Cost of attendance. Net price. Expected family contribution — oops, now Student Aid Index. Direct costs and indirect costs. Gift aid versus self-help aid. Verification. Professional judgment. Satisfactory academic progress.

None of these terms can reasonably be considered “plain language.” Several of them mean different things depending on who is using them. This vocabulary is fine for the field to talk to one another (every field has its own shorthand and jargon), but we must translate when it is time to take the message to students and families. And though transparency and better language is absolutely necessary, it is not enough in isolation. A May 2026 report from Strada concluded that while greater transparency about college costs is an imperative, transparency alone is unlikely to rebuild confidence without addressing the price itself.

The centerpiece of our vocabulary about college affordability is net price — generally considered to be the cost of attendance minus grant aid. As an analytic concept, net price is a real improvement on sticker price; it captures the fact that what families pay is shaped by financial aid, not just published tuition. As a frame for public conversation, it has three problems we know about and still haven’t accounted for when we talk about solutions.

First, it arrives too late to be used. A high school junior can’t know what a particular college will actually cost her until she has applied, been admitted, filed a FAFSA, and received an aid award letter — and those letters are notoriously inconsistent in terminology and format. uAspire reviewed more than 200 aid offers this past January and found eleven different ways of calculating the cost of college. Their earlier review of 500 offers turned up 136 unique terms for a single unsubsidized loan — 24 of which didn’t include the word “loan.” We built a metric that is structurally hard to act on and then expressed surprise that the public doesn’t reach for it. The usual fix has been net price calculators, which are clunky at best, even if folks are working to make them better. (Work I think is wonderful, needed, and worth supporting in every way!) And “average net price” is close to meaningless to an individual with a specific income profile.

Second, it often bundles what you owe with what you spend. Net price can be calculated in several different ways, but it often mixes direct costs paid to the college with the indirect costs of living and studying. For the many students who don’t live on campus, a single number that combines tuition with what they’d spend on rent and groceries anyway is confusing. Colleges are required to publish cost-of-attendance budgets covering both, but the underlying estimates are inconsistent across institutions in the same region and likely behind reality. We should absolutely pursue policy that addresses both sides of that equation — basic needs are a real component of what students must have covered to be successful. That said, our public messaging and communications should be clearer about what is owed to whom.

Third, it assumes a family that many students don’t have. The aid formulas that produce a net price inclusive of one’s SAI (RIP EFC) include expectations about what parents are willing and able to pay and what students themselves should be able to contribute to the cost of their education. For large swaths of today’s students — older students, students whose parents can’t help, students estranged from family, students who are parents themselves — those assumptions simply don’t apply. When family contribution is a hidden anchor, the frame fails to describe a growing share of the people it’s meant to inform.

Net price is a genuinely useful concept for us to use as a policy community to measure affordability over time. It is not the way to talk to the public about college affordability.

A suggestion for a better way to communicate about college affordability

If you spend time listening to learners talk about whether college is affordable, they tend to land somewhere near this: can a student reasonably work their way through? Can you hold down a part-time job during the school year, maybe full-time in the summer, and pay for college without going into life-altering debt?

That’s the frame your aunt uses at Thanksgiving. It’s the frame your state senator uses in town halls. It may seem outdated, even a little cute, given current realities and higher education cost inflation.

And of course the math doesn’t work that way anymore for most students. That much is clear, and it isn’t really the point. My point is that people keep returning to this frame because it is made of something they actually have and understand. Not dollars they don’t have yet, from a formula they can’t see, based on a family contribution that they don’t understand.

Nearly everyone can relate to the question underneath it: how much would I have to work to make this thing happen? And it carries something our preferred metrics don’t: a claim about what should be possible. A person willing to work hard should be able to get an education without mortgaging her future. That’s a value statement about what would be true of higher education if we were doing it right.

Fortunately, a number of organizations have built variations on this measure: TICAS’s College Costs in Context and Closing the College Affordability Gap series; the Ed Trust affordability gap measure; Strada’s State Opportunity Index; and the Rule of 10 framework I led development on at Lumina, which set 10 hours per week of minimum-wage work during the academic year as a reasonable student contribution and used that as one input to a broader affordability test. The basic question across all of these efforts is the same: how many hours of work, at what wage, would it take to cover what financial aid does not?

This is an answerable question and worth digging into with current data. The higher ed policy community can do more to unpack this and other data about college pricing and costs, with more nuanced looks at different states with different amounts of aid availability across income levels, and different levels of minimum wages. I hope to explore these and other affordability themes in future posts.

For now, twenty years on, I still think about that student in Boston. I don’t know that I could give her a much better answer today than I gave her then. We have made some progress, for sure. And yet we remain too focused on relying on better information to make “better consumers,” and not focused enough on the math problems underneath.

For all the hand-wringing over what AI can and can’t replace, I’ve started to wonder whether the policy, consulting, and advisory jobs I’ve spent the majority of my career in look anything like the jobs everyone else is worried about.

Perhaps everyone else has been working in spaces where everyone is always clear-eyed about the mission of the organization, never distracted by fires that are seemingly urgent but not important in the long run. Where no one ever argues over the PowerPoint deck longer than they argue over the premise of why we’re having this particular discussion in the first place. Where the workday never looks like this:

• Round four of comments on a memo, and the live controversy is whether the recommendation should “urge” or “encourage” — while the question underneath it (what do we actually want this institution to do, and what are we prepared to spend to get it?) sits politely unasked, because that one would require a real conversation where everyone came to the meeting having read the underlying document and supporting information fully.

• Forty minutes of a sixty-minute meeting on whether the chart should come before or after the recommendations, and whether it reads better stacked or side-by-side — and not one minute on whether the data supports the recommendation at all.

• Reconciling tracked changes from seven reviewers, three of whom contradict each other, none of whom read past page six.

• The pre-meeting to align before the meeting. The readout that summarizes the summary. The public statement wordsmithed within an inch of its life that will not meaningfully change anything for any actual person, in the near term or the long.

Maybe it really is just me. If so, why are you still reading? Go enjoy your beautiful, perfect work life existence!

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But I’ve had my fair share of jobs in this life — I’ve worked in federal government and in state government, I’ve worked with nonprofits and with for-profits, I’ve worked with colleges and with school districts. In all of those spaces, I’ve seen time and again that people spend a lot of time fussing over makework rather than focusing on the big ideas that got us excited about our jobs in the first place.

Perhaps there is a person who really really wakes up every morning thinking about how best to optimize font sizes in Powerpoint decks. (Sorry to that man if this is you.) But I entered the workforce excited about the prospect of improving the lives of others (I know, how idealistic of me…) so when a full day is spent on reviewing the deck before the deck, on recapping the meeting before the meeting, or on summarizing to-dos that everyone heard at the same time on the call, a little piece of my soul dies.

Uncovering the real work

We tell ourselves the back-and-forth is the work. It isn’t.

I realize that for most of our adult lives, this is what work has felt like. But I promise it doesn’t have to be this way.

The examples I’m describing are akin to sediment that settles on top of the work. Why does it accumulate? My theory is that a surprising share of these fights are proxy wars. The argument about “urge” versus “encourage” is very often an unresolved disagreement about values masquerading as a copyedit. We fight about the word because the word is small enough to fight about. The real question is not.

And the real question is precisely the thing AI cannot answer.

At the individual level, AI can’t decide for you whether to open with the analogy about the enormous ship that’s hard to steer or the one about replanting a forest. It can make a recommendation — and you could blindly accept it. Or you could decide that you know this specific audience better than any model ever will, because you’ve sat across the table from the people who will be in that room. You know which of them has heard the ship metaphor four times this year. You know who just lost a fight over something slow-growing. Sure, you could feed AI all of that context. But that’s probably not a good use of your tokens.

At a systems and policy level, where I’ve worked most of my life, AI can’t decide for you whether $50 million in a state budget should go toward expanding housing, providing universal childcare, or making community college tuition-free. It can make a recommendation based on which program is most likely to grow the state’s GDP, or which will have the most immediate impact on poverty, or on quality of life. It can cull through public polling data and tell you what your state’s residents say they find most useful, what they’d prefer their elected officials prioritize. All genuinely valuable inputs.

But it cannot make the value judgment about what you, as an elected official or policy advisor, should care about more. Neither, for the record, can another human — not your chief of staff, not your pollster, not the loudest advocate in the room. That is a personal decision that doesn’t have a “right” answer.

Where the hand-wringing belongs

To be fair to the worriers: in domains where there is a clear right answer, the worry is well-warranted. If the question is “what strategy is most likely to maximize revenue?” or “how do we resolve the most customer complaints within 24 hours?” — then yes, it’s possible AI is coming for that job. Optimization problems get optimized.

But the jobs I’ve been describing aren’t optimization problems. The entire job — the part we keep deferring while we fight about fonts — is weighing things that don’t share a unit of measurement. That work isn’t threatened by AI. It’s buried, and AI might be the thing that actually allows us to see the layer beneath the sediment.

The trade I want to make

So let AI take the mechanical layer. The first draft synthesis. The reconciliation of seven reviewers’ comments into a clean list of actual decisions to be made. The initial summary of the report. The formatting, the reformatting, the first draft of the statement. That’s the optimization layer — let it be optimized.

And notice what’s left when the copyedit charade ends: the disagreement itself. That’s not a loss. That’s the real job finally showing up to work.

Imagine the trade concretely. Instead of spending Tuesday synthesizing notes from the listening sessions, you’re discussing what you heard and what tradeoffs it poses for policy design. Instead of producing the deck about the report, you’ve moved on to consider how to actually get people to adopt its recommendations. Instead of summarizing the latest news into an email blast, you’re considering the implications of that news for your work and your stakeholders, and considering what actions to take.

What if AI cleared away enough of the makework that we finally had calendar space to read the things we keep saying we want to read? To engage critically with thoughtful arguments from people we respect, instead of skimming the executive summary twenty minutes before the call? To be in community with one another, discussing ideas that could actually shape the future in ways that promote human potential and thriving?

To be honest, I’m ok if the machines take the optimization problems. The value problems don’t have a “right” answer and literally cannot be taken by AI. If anything, there's far more of this work waiting than we currently have the capacity to do.

And, if we’re honest, we haven’t been giving those problems our best hours. We’ve been giving them whatever attention survives the churn.

AI will never be able to determine what you value. But it could make space for you to find out, and allow you to focus more clearly on advancing those ideas well.

What would that world look like?

I’d love to find out.

P.S. — I keep thinking I should just make a list of everything we could actually be doing if we handed the makework to the machines. Maybe that's the next post…

P.P.S. — I can already hear the objection being drafted in the comments: but aren’t these the jobs we hand to junior staff precisely so they learn? I take the concern seriously. But it raises a bigger question I keep coming back to — what were those early jobs ever supposed to develop? Judgment, or formatting? This is a delegation problem, and I’ll come back to it in a future post. Subscribe if you’d like to argue with me about it.

The stories you are about to read are true*. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (or at least the ego.)

You know this person. You might be this person.

She’s the senior researcher at a policy think tank who’s been the go-to expert on workforce development for a decade. She wrote the landmark report that everyone in the field still cites. She knows every funder’s priorities, every stakeholder’s history, every nuance in the data. She’s brilliant, deeply experienced, and genuinely good at what she does. She’s also the reason every brief sits in draft until she personally reviews it — and the reason the junior analysts still can’t write a policy recommendation without her in the room.

He’s the program officer at a major foundation who’s built the portfolio everyone points to as a model. He knows which grantees deliver and which ones overpromise. His judgment on strategy is sharp, his instincts are usually right, and his standards for what gets funded are exacting. He’s also the one personally redlining grant proposals at 11 p.m. instead of trusting his team to manage the pipeline — and telling himself that the stakes are just too high to let go.

If you recognized either of those people — or felt a small pang reading the description — this post is for you.

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———

In my last post on AI and delegation, I argued that the biggest barrier to using AI well isn’t the technology — it’s that most knowledge workers haven’t developed the skill of delegation. We struggle to articulate what we need, we skip the feedback loops that make collaboration work, and we haven’t built the systems to let anyone else in.

But there’s a layer underneath all of that I want to name — because it shapes how we delegate to everyone, whether that’s an AI tool or a talented colleague we’re not quite ready to trust with the work.

It’s not that we can’t delegate. It’s that we don’t want to. And the reason we don’t want to is because somewhere along the way, our expertise stopped being something we have and became something we are.

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There’s a progression that happens quietly over the course of a career, and it goes something like this:

First, you develop expertise. You get really good at something. That’s earned, and it’s real. Then that expertise becomes your reputation — the thing people know you for, the reason you get hired, the basis for your professional identity. And then, almost imperceptibly, your identity becomes a bottleneck. Because if being the expert is who you are, then letting someone else do the expert work isn’t just inefficient — it’s an existential threat.

This is not a novel observation. Marshall Goldsmith wrote a whole book about how the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that make you successful as a leader. Simon Sinek has argued that great leadership means putting your people’s growth ahead of your own comfort. Almost every book and article on leadership development notes that at some point, you have to shed the “individual contributor” identity and become someone who builds capacity in others. But knowing that intellectually and actually doing it are two very different things — especially when your entire career has rewarded you for being the person who does the work, not the person who helps others do it.

I’m not describing a character flaw. This is a completely rational response to how knowledge work is structured. We are hired for what we know, promoted for what we produce, recognized for individual contributions — the sharp analysis, the winning argument, the elegant solution. Almost nobody gets a performance review that says, “Excellent job making yourself less essential this year.”

Yes, there are very real AI-specific challenges we need to navigate. Some companies are absolutely using this technology to justify laying people off, hiring fewer staff, or making already heavy workloads even more unmanageable. Those concerns demand serious attention and advocacy. (Ezra Klein recently argued that the mass-unemployment story may be overblown — but that the disruption to specific workers and communities is real and uneven, even when the macro numbers look fine.) But the ego trap I’m describing here — the conviction that you are what you produce — is a different problem.

And it’s one that is preventing too many of us from imagining a future where we harness technology to work less, dream bigger, and use our time and talents on work that goes beyond what we currently think we’re capable of.

The inability to let go — rooted in an inflated sense of what “only we” can do — doesn’t just cost us professionally. It costs us personally. It prevents us from turning our attention to grander pursuits, and from resting in ways that let us actually enjoy our lives outside of work.

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The first might be true. You might genuinely be the most qualified person in the room for a particular task. But the second is almost never true — and it’s the one we default to, because it feels true, and because no one around us is going to challenge it. When you’re the senior person, the expert, the one with the institutional knowledge, people stop pushing back. They just let you do it. And that feels like validation, when really it’s just path dependence.

Ethan Mollick has posed a useful version of this question as it relates to AI: is the AI output better than what your best available human would produce? But I think the more honest question for most of us isn’t about AI versus humans at all. It’s about whether we’ve ever really tested the alternative — whether we’ve given anyone else enough context and trust to show us what they can do.

The cost of not delegating is real, and it compounds. The associate who never gets to write the first draft doesn’t develop judgment. The deputy who’s never trusted with the client relationship doesn’t build the muscle. The team that waits for you to start the meeting — as I confessed in the last post — stops developing the capacity to move without you. And you end up more essential, not because you got better, but because everyone around you got more dependent.

This is the trap. The more you hold on, the more it confirms the story that you need to hold on. It becomes self-reinforcing. And what I’m really describing is an underdeveloped leadership skill — one that matters for AI adoption, yes, but also for growing a team of people who can increasingly lead work and become experts in their own right. This is why we struggle with succession planning in things big and small. Why it feels like there is just no one else who can run for that office, lead that client project, or manage that portfolio.

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There’s a question I’ve started asking myself when I notice the impulse to take something back, to rewrite someone else’s work from scratch, to just-do-it-myself:

What am I actually protecting? My standards, or my sense of self?

Sometimes the honest answer is that the work genuinely needs to be at a level that only I can deliver right now. That’s real, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But more often — if I’m being honest — the work is good enough. It would land. It would serve the purpose. It’s just not how I would have done it, and that gap between “good enough” and “mine” is where a lot of time, energy, and capacity gets buried.

And what gets lost in the human context when I give in to that impulse is the opportunity to let someone else lead — to receive feedback, determine what to accept and what to discard, and get better over time. When you don’t let someone truly own a project, they never learn to judge for themselves when it’s good enough, when it still needs outside perspectives, when more research will sharpen a point, and when to move on because no one has responded to the third email asking for review. They also never learn from failure — from the presentation that doesn’t quite land, and the reflection afterward about why.

Yet this plays out with AI in an almost comically direct way. I’ve watched smart, capable people dismiss AI output that was 85% of what they needed because it wasn’t 100% in their voice, their structure, their framing. And instead of spending ten minutes editing it into shape — which is what good delegation looks like, the review and refinement — they throw it out and start over from a blank page. Two hours later, they’ve produced something marginally better and reinforced the belief that AI doesn’t work.

But AI didn’t fail. The willingness to work with a different starting point failed. And that’s the same failure mode you’d see with a junior hire, a contractor, or a new team member.

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Letting go feels risky because, in many environments, it is risky — if the output drops and your name is on it, you pay the price. But too often I think this is a constraint of our own minds. If you spend your time coaching others, you may actually collectively produce more than you ever would have on your own. I work primarily in policy, and this is especially visible in that world — we venerate the expert, the indispensable wonk, in ways that actively discourage developing the next generation of leaders. You’ll need to share the credit, and you may be enabling your replacement — but I hope we can begin to see that as a good thing rather than a threat.

But here’s what I think can shift on an individual level, even within those constraints: awareness. Naming the pattern. Recognizing the moment when you’re about to rewrite your colleague’s draft from scratch and asking yourself whether this is about quality or about control. Considering whether this regulatory summary is really something that requires your energy on the first pass or whether your expertise can be saved for higher order analytical and creative thinking.

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There’s one more thing I want to name, because it speaks to the big picture that I hope to explore in a future post.

Everything I’ve described here at the individual level — the expertise that becomes identity, the identity that becomes a bottleneck, the knowledge that lives in one person’s head and walks out the door when they leave — all of it plays out at the organizational level too. Think about the senior leader who retires and takes three decades of institutional memory with them. The political leader who won’t retire because they haven’t developed the bench who could take the mantle for the next generation. (Ahem…) The team that can’t function without its founder.

These aren’t just individual management problems. They’re the same ego trap, operating at a larger scale — and the stakes are rising. The next generation of leaders will have to navigate an AI-enabled world, and they’ll need to do so with the skills, knowledge, and hard-won failures that only come from working with someone who trusted them enough to let them lead. I think the path starts with the same move: letting go of the idea that the work has to come from your hands to be any good.

You can believe you’re the best at something while also believing that you don’t have to bring your individual expertise to every task in order for good work to get done — work that advances your collective mission—or (on a deeper level) for your life to have meaning.

Sit with that one during your next therapy session. And make sure you subscribe for the next post in this series, whenever I get around to delegating enough work to bring my best self to focusing on that task that only I can do :)

*A throwback to the classic Dragnet opening. These aren’t meant to describe any real people — but rather a type of person we’ve all encountered before. Or, if we’re being honest with ourselves, a type of person we’ve all been.

I’ve been thinking for the past few weeks about a story from Georgia in 1941 — one that helps explain why independent accreditation exists, and why it still matters. I posted a shorter version of this on Instagram, but the fuller story is worth reviewing.

At its core, this is a story about how accreditation is supposed to serve as an independent arbiter of institutional quality, even in the face of blatant politicization — and why that role matters especially now.

So, storytime.

In the summer of 1941, Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge became concerned that Walter Cocking, the dean of the College of Education at the University of Georgia, was promoting racial integration. Cocking was from Iowa, trained at Columbia, and — Talmadge claimed — had designs on integrating a demonstration school in Athens. There was no real evidence he had done any such thing. But evidence was not the point. Talmadge announced he would remove anyone in the university system who advocated “communism or racial equality,” and he meant it.

When the Board of Regents voted to keep Cocking, Talmadge fired the regents who had voted against him and replaced them with loyalists. The reconstituted board dismissed Cocking on July 14, 1941.

The firing of one dean was the first shoe to drop. What came next was even more disturbing.

Once Talmadge fully controlled the board, the purge of administrators expanded beyond Cocking. Ten educators across the university system were dismissed. Libraries were combed for books on race — physically searched, with materials pulled and removed. Textbooks were censored. Administrators who tried to push back were intimidated into silence. Talmadge was using the levers of state authority to impose a political agenda on what should have been a wholly meritorious academic enterprise. (In doing so, he also likely violated the First Amendment by using the apparatus of government to silence speech he found objectionable, but that is not actually the main argument I want to focus on today.)

What did Governor Talmadge’s actions mean for the University of Georgia? The institution remained open. The buildings still stood. Classes still met. But the thing at the heart of any credible academic institution — the independent judgment of scholars about what is true, rigorous, and worth teaching — had been replaced by the political judgment of the governor’s office.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools looked at what was happening and concluded, plainly, that it violated their standards for academic integrity. In December 1941, SACS withdrew accreditation from ten of Georgia’s public white colleges, including the flagship in Athens. The reason, as SACS framed it, was not the politics of the dispute. It was the structure. An institution whose hiring, firing, library holdings, and curricular content were being dictated by a governor with a political agenda was not, in any meaningful sense, operating as an independent academic institution. Its degrees could no longer carry the same public assurance of academic quality.

The political fallout was enormous. Parents whose children’s degrees had just been devalued were furious. Students burned Talmadge in effigy. A young state attorney general named Ellis Arnall ran against him in 1942 on a campaign centered on restoring accreditation — and handed Talmadge the only gubernatorial loss of his career. Arnall did restore it in 1943, first by reconstituting the Board of Regents through legislation, and then by sponsoring a constitutional amendment, approved by voters that year, that made the board’s independence permanent. The structure that had been compromised was rebuilt to resist compromise.

That is the story. Now here is why I am telling it.

The Cocking affair is the clearest American example we have of why accreditor independence exists in the first place, and what it is actually for.

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Accreditation in the United States is a strange beast. It is not a government function. It is a peer-review system, run by private nonprofit agencies, that the federal government has chosen to rely on as the gatekeeper for federal student aid. Accreditation is not perfect, and it absolutely needs reform. I have argued before that it should be more rigorous, more transparent, and more responsive to whether institutions are actually serving students well. But the legitimacy of the enterprise rests on accreditors’ independence from political pressure. They function, in effect, as a structural check — making judgments about academic quality that political actors may seek to influence, but should not be able to simply command.

When SACS pulled Georgia’s accreditation in 1941, it was not acting because Cocking was a hero or because integration was right. This was 1941; the South’s accreditors were not exactly in the vanguard of civil rights. SACS acted because the structure of decision-making had been compromised. Hiring, library holdings, and curriculum were being driven by political priorities rather than academic judgment.

Now, let’s pause here and turn to what is happening in Texas right now.

In recent months, Texas A&M and Texas Tech have adopted sweeping restrictions on how faculty can teach about gender, sexuality, and race — policies handed down by governor-appointed boards or system leaders that experts say appear to conflict with the SACS standard requiring faculty to have primary responsibility for the content and quality of the curriculum. SACS has not opened an investigation. The reasoning offered, in essence, is that the accreditor cannot hold institutions to a standard that would require them to violate state law.

That posture is new. The Cocking affair in Georgia was not the only instance in which SACS acted in the face of state politicization. SACS suspended degrees from four Mississippi public universities in 1930 after Governor Theodore Bilbo ordered the firing of 179 faculty members and replaced multiple university presidents with political allies. SACS placed the University of Texas on probation in 1945 over board interference with the university president. The historical pattern is clear, and it ran consistently for much of the twentieth century. Accreditors used to act on this.

What has changed is not only the law. What has changed is the willingness — and the political environment in which accreditors are operating. Multiple states, including Florida, North Carolina, and Texas, have passed laws that make it easier for institutions to switch accreditors and easier to punish accreditors that act too independently.

The institutional muscle that allowed SACS to face down a governor in 1941 is atrophying in real time.

And lest this seem like a problem only of one political coalition: in 2020, the California legislature passed AB 1460, requiring all California State University students to take an ethnic studies course to graduate. Both the CSU Chancellor’s Office and the system’s Academic Senate opposed the bill, calling it legislative interference in higher education curriculum. They had been developing their own ethnic studies requirement through the system’s academic governance process. The bill eventually became law. (FWIW, the final law nodded toward academic governance and accreditation concerns, but it still superseded the requirement the university itself had proposed through its own governance structure.)

Reasonable people can disagree about whether ethnic studies should be required. That is not the question. The question is whether decisions at this level of curricular granularity belong to faculty and trustees operating within an academic framework, or to legislatures operating within a political one. An accreditor that takes faculty governance seriously — a longstanding principle of accreditation — might have legitimate concerns about either Texas’s curriculum bans or California’s curriculum mandates. Under the proposed federal rule, neither concern could be acted on. And if that is true, the authority of accreditation as an independent arbiter of quality is badly weakened.

To be clear, there are appropriate roles for state government oversight of public institutions of higher education. States have an interest in the economic mobility of their citizens, to which higher education contributes directly in many ways, and in the appropriate use of taxpayer dollars. I worked in a state for a governor who was keenly focused on higher education as an engine of economic opportunity. That role matters.

But accreditors, too, have an interest in evaluating quality in higher education. That is their job. These actors in our system are supposed to work in complementary ways as part of what is often called the triad: states, the federal government, and accreditors each serving different functions in the oversight of higher education.

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Which brings us, at last, to the Department of Education.

The Department of Education is currently running a negotiated rulemaking process through the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization committee, known as AIM, that would substantially rewrite the rules governing accreditor recognition. The draft regulations are 151 pages long. Some of what is in there is genuinely worth debating, and some may well be needed. Reasonable people across the political spectrum, including me, have argued for years that accreditation could be more rigorous and more responsive — particularly when it comes to student outcomes and transparency.

But tucked inside the draft is a provision that should make every higher education leader pay attention. Accreditors would be barred from having standards that “encourage, direct, or otherwise require” institutions or programs to violate federal or state law. Elsewhere, the draft says certain accreditor expectations should not be construed to require action that would conflict with applicable state law.

[Insert raised eyebrow here.]

It seems logical, on first read, that accreditors shouldn't encourage institutions into illegal behavior. Of course they should not. But consider the case that is no longer hypothetical. A state passes a law that conflicts with an accreditor’s standards. Maybe it dictates what can be taught about gender and sexuality, as Texas has done. Maybe it bars certain student support services. Maybe it restructures governance in ways the accreditor considers incompatible with academic integrity. Under the proposed framework, the accreditor may be unable to ask the institution to comply with the standard, because doing so could be framed as requiring the institution to violate state law.

The accreditor’s professional judgment becomes the thing that yields. The state’s political judgment becomes the thing that prevails.

This is precisely the configuration SACS refused to accept in 1941, holding to its principles and standards.

I do not think the people agreeing with these rules see themselves as Eugene Talmadge. Almost no one ever does. Talmadge believed he was protecting Georgia from communist infiltration and racial subversion. He believed he was answering to the people who elected him. He believed the regents and the dean and the accreditor were the ones overstepping.

The reason the Cocking affair is useful as history is not that it shows us what villainy looks like. It shows us what it looks like when political authority decides that academic judgment is illegitimate unless it confirms political priorities — and it shows us what accreditation is meant to do as an independent check on institutional quality.

The AIM proposal is not yet final. The second negotiating session is scheduled for later this month, and public comment will follow. There is still time for the people who care about this — institutional leaders, faculty, students, accreditors themselves — to make the structural argument clearly.

The argument should not be that accreditors are always right. It should be that if accreditation standards must automatically yield whenever a state politicizes curriculum or governance, then accreditation is no longer an independent quality-assurance system at all.

Independence is not some abstract aspiration when it comes to accreditation. It is the condition that makes accreditation mean anything at all.

The people of Georgia, faced with a political assault on their universities, did the hard work of rebuilding the structure that had been compromised. They restored what had been lost. The lesson from 1941 is still available to us. We have already learned it, if we can remember.

I promise- back to the Delegation series next week.

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I’m writing this on the way back from a gathering hosted by the Noēsis Collaborative at Jesus College, Cambridge, where a group of higher education leaders, technologists, and philanthropists spent two days wrestling with a single question: How do we design higher education for human flourishing in the age of AI?

It was the kind of room where you’d expect sharp disagreements—people from different countries, different sectors, different politics. And there were real tensions. But one thing struck me: nearly everyone agreed that the liberal arts will be more important in the age of AI, not less.

Liberal education (the philosophy, not the ideology) is grounded in the idea that education should develop reasoning, judgment, and the capacity to think critically across domains. These capacities will undoubtedly become more valuable as AI takes on the technical execution of tasks that used to define what it meant to be skilled.

I agree. But I think the reason goes deeper than what most people are arguing right now.

• • •

The usual case for liberal arts in the AI era is essentially defensive: Don’t worry, your degree still matters. Employers will still value critical thinking and communication. That’s true enough. But it’s a thin argument—it reduces the liberal arts to a bundle of marketable soft skills and hopes that’s sufficient.

I think what’s actually at stake is more fundamental. AI is only as useful as your ability to evaluate what it gives you. And that ability—the capacity to interrogate an output, to know whether the premise is sound, to sense when something is missing—doesn’t come from a prompt engineering course. It comes from having built a base of knowledge and experience deep enough that you can actually judge.

I’ve written about this before: the realization I keep having with generative AI is that its output is only as useful as you can trust it. When I asked Claude to draw connections between George Orwell’s work and current events in higher education, the output was genuinely helpful to me—because I’d read the books. I had the context to know whether the analogies held up. Without that foundation, the response would have been impressive-sounding and uncheckable.

So the question for higher education isn’t just what skills will the AI economy reward? It’s what kind of knowledge do students need in order to use these tools effectively— with judgment rather than blind trust?

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• • •

This is where experiential learning coupled with liberal education comes in—and where I think higher education has both an enormous opportunity and a deep structural resistance to seizing it.

I experienced this personally when I studied political science in college. It is one thing to read about political parties, political action committees, or how a bill becomes a law. It is quite another to work, as I did, as an intern on Capitol Hill and get a glimpse of how these concepts play out in real life. The experience was transformative—so much so that I wondered how it was even possible to actually master the concept without having spent time in the context. If you have ever had the experience of reading about something and then seeing it in real life, you know what I mean.

Now layer AI on top of that. A student who has used AI to summarize every major Supreme Court decision has information — but not the knowledge that comes from sitting across from a client whose life will be shaped by whether you bring their case forward. The judgment involved in that decision — weighing the strength of the legal argument against the cost to the client if you lose, considering what a ruling would mean not just for one person but for the precedent it sets — isn't something you develop by reading case summaries. It's something you develop by being close enough to the consequences to feel their weight.

We know this, actually. Play-based learning, scaffolded with formal instruction, is generally considered superior (the research on this is robust) to rote memorization for young children. As students grow into adolescents and young adults, the form of “play” changes, but the principle holds: learning is richer when it is connected to real life. Even the best teachers and the most vivid books cannot replace the experience of being in something yourself.

So if we know that the humanities will be increasingly important for developing students with the skills of curiosity, critical thinking, and judgment—and if we know that experiential learning is key to unlocking those skills—how might we develop institutions that marry these ideas?

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This isn’t a new idea. Apprenticeship models, co-ops, and clinical rotations have done this for decades in fields like nursing, engineering, and social work. Researchers like Mary Alice McCarthy at New America have long discussed the benefits of “degree apprenticeships” that formally integrate work-based learning into higher education—drawing on models from the UK and pushing to make these pathways structural rather than ad hoc. More recently, Molly Kinder at Brookings has argued that as AI hollows out entry-level knowledge work, we need something like a medical residency model—structured, mentored programs where learning is the job itself. Some institutions are going further still: the London Interdisciplinary School, for example, was founded on the premise that real-world problem-solving—not disciplinary silos—should organize the entire educational experience. The question is why we treat experiential interdisciplinary learning as the exception rather than the rule.

Part of the answer is that it requires faculty to engage differently—not abandoning their research, but putting it in conversation with the people and contexts where it applies. I’d suggest that the best faculty already do this: they are embedded in research relevant to their field and in conversation with people who apply it. But systematizing that connection—making it structural rather than incidental—is a different kind of challenge. It asks institutions to let go of some of the boundaries they’ve built between the academy and the world outside it.

And it asks something of us as senior professionals, too. If AI is hollowing out what we used to think of as “entry-level” work, we need to reimagine what students are capable of when they arrive. That requires letting go of some of the paternalism embedded in how we think about readiness—the instinct that says you’re not ready yet when what it often really means is I’m not ready to let you try. It may mean being willing to let people in to the more challenging work earlier, giving them opportunities to test their knowledge in real settings.

• • •

I’ll be honest: I think what stops us from this kind of change is something a bit more uncomfortable than logistics. It’s the quiet conviction that we have nothing more to add than what we’re already giving. That if we can offload some of our work—to AI, to junior colleagues, to students themselves—there may be nothing else for us to do.

I don’t believe that. I’d be more inclined to feel threatened by that scenario if my to-do list wasn’t already too long, if the list of challenges I see in the world around me wasn’t already too weighty, if the time I felt I had to contend with them all wasn’t already too short. We do not have a shortage of hard problems. What we have is a shortage of capacity to throw at them—and a reluctance to build that capacity by letting others in.

I’ll write more about this in my next post. For now, I want to name it as the quiet force shaping both our action and our inaction.

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• • •

I’m finishing this draft in the hours before the Artemis II crew launches for the moon—four astronauts strapped to the most powerful rocket ever flown with a crew aboard, heading farther from Earth than any human being has ever gone. Among them: the first woman and the first person of color to leave Earth orbit.

I remain convinced that the potential of the human race to innovate is boundless—hampered only by the limits of what we believe we’re capable of. And by our willingness to let more people in to the work of pushing those limits further.

This week, the Department of Education sent letters to two accreditors — the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education — directing them to permanently eliminate their diversity, equity, and inclusion standards. Both agencies had already suspended those standards following the President’s executive order last year, but the Department is now pushing them to go further. The letters assert that even suspended DEI language could compel institutions to engage in unlawful discrimination — a framing that, in my view, collapses critical distinctions between unlawful conduct and the broad range of lawful efforts institutions undertake every day to serve students well.

This is the environment heading into next week’s NACIQI meeting — the federal advisory committee that reviews accrediting agencies and provides input on recognition decisions. I serve on the Committee, and I’ve prepared two issue statements for the policy discussion portion of the agenda.

I’m sharing them here because the questions they raise matter well beyond the committee room. (Though the meeting is public and you should totally watch online if you are available.) My NACIQI college Bob Shireman has also prepared some discussion topics which can be found on his Substack here.

The first, “Precision in Defining ‘Unlawful’ Practices in Accreditation Oversight,” argues that when “illegal DEI” can mean whatever an administration wants it to mean, the term stops providing meaningful guidance — and students who lose access to support programs that were never unlawful in the first place pay the price. Recruiting veterans, supporting first-generation students, expanding the nursing pipeline — none of this is unlawful. We need to say so clearly.

The second, “The Freedom to Teach, Study, and Pursue Knowledge Must Protect All Viewpoints,” makes the case that intellectual freedom isn’t a partisan value, and that accreditation should safeguard against politically motivated interference in academic matters from any direction. If we only defend the freedom to inquire when it protects viewpoints we already agree with, we’re not defending the principle at all.

Both are linked in the text above.

The views are my own and don’t represent the official position of NACIQI or the Department of Education.

Most of the conversation about AI adoption in white-collar work focuses on the technology: what it can do, what it can’t, whether it’s coming for your job. But I think we’re misdiagnosing some of the resistance. In my observation, one of the biggest barriers to using AI effectively isn’t the really about the technology at all. At its core is something much more human, much more familiar, and honestly, much harder to fix.

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It’s that most knowledge workers are terrible at delegation: loathe to let go of work they have spent their lives building, distrustful of others to be as good as they are at completing tasks, and unskilled at providing feedback that improves both the work product and colleagues’ ability to manage that work over time. And AI requires these exact same skills to use it well.

Now, let me be clear: there are real and legitimate reasons to be cautious about AI. The energy costs are significant and not always equitably distributed. Questions about how AI models use and credit the work of others raise serious ethical concerns. And the bigger questions about what mass adoption means for humanity — for labor markets, for how we think, for what we value — deserve serious attention. I’m not dismissing any of those serious and heady concerns.

But I think there’s also something more familiar at play — something that isn’t unique to AI at all. And because it’s not unique to AI, we actually know a lot more about how to address it.

Add on top of this an additional challenge with executive function that is a silent killer in too many organizations — the lack of time for planning (or the stubborn resistance to making time for planning) and the absence of dedicated time to stop and consider what the goals of the work actually are — and you have the real workings of an exponential gap between those who will be able to use AI like a superpower and those who will struggle to figure out how to make best use of it in their lives.

Those who use AI well and for whom it is most impactful typically have clearly outlined goals and deliverables, a good understanding of what needs to be done to make good on those goals, and a healthy ability to let go of the process and allow someone (or something) else to take the lead.

Now, these are great skills to hone as a leader in general, as I’ve written about before. But add AI on top, and the gulf between both individuals and organizations who are able to take advantage of this moment and those who struggle to do so widens by the minute.

Think about the last time you tried to hand off a task to someone on your team — a colleague, an assistant, a contractor. If you’re like most professionals I know, one of two things happened: either you spent more time explaining the task than it would have taken to just do it yourself, or you gave vague instructions and were disappointed by what came back.

Now think about the last time you tried to use AI for something meaningful at work and felt like it fell flat. I’d bet the failure mode was eerily similar.

That’s not a coincidence.

I want to offer a different way to think about the challenge with AI adoption: before you can delegate anything to anyone — human or machine — you have to know what you actually need. You have to be able to articulate, in clear enough terms for someone outside your own head to understand, what the task is, what good looks like, and what context matters. Neither your colleague nor Claude can read your mind. (Yet.)

And that’s where it breaks down for a lot of us.

Knowledge workers — lawyers, consultants, policy analysts, researchers, executives — are often the worst delegators in any organization. Not because we’re bad managers, but because our work lives inside our heads in ways that feel impossible to externalize. We’ve spent years building specialized expertise, developing instincts, accumulating context. The idea of handing a piece of that to someone else feels not just inefficient but risky. They won’t get the nuance. They’ll miss what matters. It’ll be faster if I just do it myself.

And let’s be honest — sometimes that concern is legitimate. Sometimes you are the person best positioned to do the thing, and the output will suffer if someone else takes it on without sufficient context or skill. That’s real. But here’s what I’ve learned: people (and AI) will never get better at doing something if you never trust them to do it. Continuing to be the one who always leads means… you will always have to lead. Your team will begin to rely on you as a crutch, their own talents and skills to do the hard work atrophying over time.

The nice (???) thing about AI is that this isn’t the case with this technology. It won’t get worse over time because you don’t use it. But what is likely to happen is that your competitors get exponentially better over time if they do learn to use it effectively.

And of course, good delegation isn’t a single handoff. It’s a process with checkpoints.

Any functional working relationship — with a colleague, a contractor, a direct report — has built-in moments where you check in, review progress, course-correct, and refine. You don’t write a brief on Monday, disappear, and expect a perfect deliverable on Friday. You look at a first draft. You flag what’s working and what’s off. You provide additional context that you didn’t realize was missing until you saw the output. The work gets better through iteration, not through a perfect initial ask.

The same is true with AI — and I think this is where expectations go sideways in both directions.

On one end, there are people who expect AI to nail it on the first try, hand it a complex task with a single prompt, and then dismiss the whole technology when the output isn’t what they envisioned. That’s not a delegation failure — it’s the absence of delegation altogether. You wouldn’t evaluate a new hire based on a single deliverable with no feedback loop. Why would you do that with AI?

On the other end, there are people who are actually quite comfortable handing off entire projects without any touchpoints at all — and interestingly, those people often do get more use out of AI, because they’re at least willing to let go. But “letting go” without checkpoints isn’t really delegation either. It’s abdication. And it produces uneven results with AI for the same reason it does with humans: without your judgment at key moments, the work drifts.

The sweet spot is in between. It’s treating AI the way you’d treat a talented but new team member: give clear direction, check in at meaningful intervals, provide feedback that sharpens the next iteration, and resist the urge to either micromanage or disappear. The knowledge workers who use AI most effectively aren’t the ones who write the perfect prompt. They’re the ones who know how to stay in a productive back-and-forth — to manage the process of shared work, not just the initial ask.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been on both sides of it. In my policy career, I’ve managed teams, supervised staff, and worked with dozens of consultants and contractors. And I’ll be honest — learning to delegate well was one of the hardest professional skills I’ve ever developed. Not always because I didn’t trust the people around me, but because articulating what I needed required a kind of clarity about my own thinking — and discipline around planning my work — that I didn’t always have.

I recall one time when my team was waiting on me to start a staff meeting. I’d gotten stuck in a stakeholder conversation and wasn’t answering text messages. The entire team was waiting — for nearly an hour — to begin the meeting. When I came back to the office and realized how much time had been wasted, I felt terrible, and it was a kick in the pants to develop structures and systems to ensure meetings moved forward even when I was not available. Standard agendas set in advance, real distributed leadership, and clear identification of where something actually required my approval to move forward were some of the things that helped.

That experience taught me something I’ve been applying ever since: if the work can’t move without you, the problem isn’t everyone else’s capability. It’s that you haven’t built the systems to let them contribute. The same principle applies to AI. If you can’t figure out how to use it, it might not be the tool that’s lacking — it might be that you haven’t built the structures in your own workflow to let anything or anyone else in, and let go of the reins enough to allow them (or it) to try.

Effective delegation — to anyone — requires you to first stop and actually think about what needs to be done. Not in the vague, swirling way we carry our to-do lists in our heads, but with real specificity. What’s the deliverable? What’s the audience? What does the person need to know that I take for granted? What does “done” look like?

If you don’t have dedicated time in your day to stop and think about what you need to accomplish — to get out of reactive mode and into intentional mode — then no one can help you. Not your direct report. Not your executive assistant. Not the most powerful AI on the planet. You’ve essentially made yourself a bottleneck, not because you’re actually indispensable, but because you haven’t created the conditions for anyone else to contribute.

I think a lot of the resistance to AI in professional settings is actually a mirror being held up to this deeper problem. When someone says “AI doesn’t understand what I need,” what I often hear is: I haven’t figured out how to explain what I need to anyone. When someone says “it takes longer to prompt the AI than to do it myself,” what I hear is: I’ve been doing everything myself for so long that the transaction cost of sharing the work feels prohibitive.

These aren’t technology problems. They’re project management problems. They’re self-management problems. And they existed long before ChatGPT.

And there’s something deeper here too — something about identity. Knowledge work rewards individual expertise. You’re the person who knows the regulatory landscape, who understands the funder’s priorities, who can draft the brief in the right voice. When your professional identity is built on being the person who does the thing, delegation starts to feel less like a management skill and more like a threat. That’s worth its own conversation — and I’ll dig into it in the next post in this series — but for now, I’ll just name it: the resistance isn’t always about efficiency. Sometimes it’s about control and ego. And AI surfaces that tension in ways we weren’t expecting.

Next up in the series: why the smartest people in the room are often the worst at letting go — and what that costs them. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Today I had the opportunity to share some thoughts on the future of higher education at the American Council on Education annual conference. The conference was exactly what the moment demands — grounded in current realities and focused on what higher education could and should mean for America.

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I was honored to be invited to speak as part of Ted-talk style mashup of a panel moderated by the amazing Adam Harris. (Please check out his book for a phenomenal history of resource inequity in higher education.)

While I don’t have a recording of my session, the slides are available for anyone interested [here]. They draw on my previous Substack posts laying out a student-centered blueprint for higher ed reform — if you’ve been following along, you’ll recognize the framework.

Any other policy architects out there? I’d love to hear what resonates, what you’d push back on, and what you’re building toward.

I, like nearly every other knowledge worker these days, am contending with the most effective and ethical way to use AI in my work. I’ve had conversations regularly with colleagues and friends to see if they are using generative AI in their work, and if so, how so.

While I am deeply concerned about the ways in which the resources necessary to power AI can be destructive to our environment, and concerned about the impact of gen AI on the job prospects of recent college graduates and on our economy more broadly, I also find it to be…quite useful.

Often I have a thought (or sometimes just a half-thought), and share that half thought with gen AI to see what “it” comes up with.

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Take, for example, the thought that what we are experiencing now as it relates to censorship and the freedom to openly discuss and debate ideas related to race and equity within higher education. The situation at Texas Tech is just one example of this playing out within the state level.

As a student in high school, I very much enjoyed books by George Orwell, but truthfully I have not read 1984 or Animal Farm in full in decades. I know enough, and remember enough though, to know that they are relevant to the current moment. I would love to write a thought piece that explores connections of themes between those books and what we are seeing now…so I asked Claude.

Here is the exact prompt I used: “How does what is outlined in this article around teaching practices at Texas Tech relate to the future envisioned in George Orwell books like 1984 and Animal Farm Texas Tech Faculty Are Pressed to Ponder: Is Your Course Content ‘Relevant’ and ‘Necessary’?” I linked (not copy/paste) the article and hit send.

Claude searched 9 additional articles for context, and then produced this response:

This is a really rich question that connects contemporary policy developments to Orwell’s critiques of totalitarianism. Let me walk through the parallels.

The Texas Tech Policy in Brief

Under the policy, faculty will no longer be allowed to teach any content that promotes “activism” on issues related to race or sex, imply that one race or sex is “inherently superior” to another, or say that a person can be inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive. All course content that mentions sexual orientation and gender identity will require administrative review. Faculty who think their course content violates the policy are encouraged to consult a flow chart to help determine if their material is both “relevant” and “necessary” to classroom instruction. [The Chronicle]

Orwellian Parallels

1. Language Control and Thought Restriction

The most direct parallel is to 1984‘s concept of Newspeak—the deliberate narrowing of language to make certain thoughts impossible. In Orwell’s Oceania, the Party reduces vocabulary specifically so that concepts like freedom or rebellion become inexpressible. At Texas Tech, faculty also cannot teach that there are more than two sexes, male and female, citing “state law and federal policy.” [The Dallas Morning News] This isn’t merely restricting how something is taught—it’s declaring certain empirical and conceptual frameworks inadmissible, making certain discussions structurally impossible within the institution.

2. Bureaucratic Enforcement and Self-Censorship

1984‘s most chilling insight is that totalitarian control works best when people police themselves. The flow chart requiring faculty to justify whether content is “relevant and necessary” mirrors Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth—constantly revising the historical record to align with current orthodoxy. Faculty will be required to submit the materials to department chairs, university administrators and ultimately the Board of Regents for their review and approval. [The Texas Tribune] The multi-layered review creates what Orwell depicted: a system where the fear of transgression produces anticipatory compliance. As the Tribune reported, professors told The Texas Tribune at the time that Mitchell’s guidance prompted them to delay lessons, strip terms like “transgender” from curricula and self-censor.[The Texas Tribune]

3. Doublethink and “Academic Freedom”

There’s something distinctly Orwellian in how administrators frame this policy. “The purpose of this framework is to support both strong academic freedom and the accountability needed to maintain excellence,” [KCBD NewsChannel 11] Chancellor Creighton said. This echoes doublethink—holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both. The claim that restricting what can be taught supports academic freedom is logically parallel to “Freedom is Slavery” or “War is Peace.”

4. Animal Farm: “All Animals Are Equal, But...”

The Animal Farm parallel is perhaps more subtle but equally apt. The pigs’ gradual corruption of revolutionary ideals—”All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”—mirrors the selective application of standards. If a transgender student writes about their identity in an essay, how are professors supposed to respond? [The Chronicle] The policy creates a hierarchy where certain identities and ideas are deemed legitimate subjects of study while others require bureaucratic permission, much as the pigs incrementally revised the commandments while insisting nothing had changed.

5. The Ministry of Truth’s Logic

“We’re making sure that course material is relevant and necessary for obtaining a professional license or certificate,”[The Chronicle] Creighton explained. This instrumentalist framing—education exists only to produce “marketable” credentials—echoes the Party’s reduction of all knowledge to what serves its purposes. In 1984, history exists only as the Party requires it; here, knowledge exists only as the labor market (or political authorities) deem useful. The question of whether Walt Whitman’s sexuality is “relevant” to understanding American Romanticism becomes absurd when filtered through a licensure framework—but that’s precisely the point.

A Key Difference Worth Noting

Orwell depicted systems that were explicit in their totalitarian aims. What makes the Texas Tech situation arguably more insidious is the maintenance of democratic and academic language while hollowing out its substance. “The new framework supports faculty by providing direction and guardrails, while preserving academic freedom to teach, analyze, and debate ideas within the bounds of the law.”[Texas Tech University] Orwell might recognize this as a more sophisticated form of control—one that doesn’t need to declare itself authoritarian because it operates through the language of quality assurance, compliance, and institutional excellence.

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Now- what to do with this output? For one, I found it to be a helpful refresher, as someone that had previously read these books in detail and who remembers enough of the key themes to find the summaries useful. This helped me clarify thoughts about potential ways in which I might use these concepts in the future.

However, without the context of having read the books initially, the output might not be as useful. One wouldn’t be able to know if the underlying premise was correct or not.

That said, a realization I have over and over as it relates to genAI is that it is only as useful as you can trust from the output. If you read this over and feel that there are hallucinations, or ways of characterizing the concepts that are not resonant, the only way to modify this output would be to do so with that baseline knowledge in hand.

So, we’ve got to preserve in some way that baseline knowledge that is not dependent on AI as a starting point. That actually suggests that some core cannon of shared knowledge is more valuable for students in the age of AI than ever before. We might also benefit from a system of “auditing” AI outputs that are meant to be used for public purposes—similar to how Wikipedia has community editors who focus on “verifiability” of content.

I’m curious—how do you think about the utility of AI for tasks relevant to your work in public policy? And of course, if you have thoughts on the substance of the output above, I would love to hear them.

Higher education is overdue for transformative redesign. But too often, conversations about reform happen in silos—or start from scratch when good work already exists that could serve as a useful starting place.

Over the past several months, I’ve been working to articulate a clear vision for what higher education could look like if we truly designed systems around what students need to thrive. Drawing from my experiences in New Jersey, the Obama administration, and years of working on these issues from multiple vantage points, I’ve developed two companion documents that I’m sharing today.

The Vision and the Framework

I’m sharing these not as finished products, but as contributions to an ongoing conversation.

• The Student-Centered Principles for Higher Education Reform offer a framework for policymakers, institutional leaders, funders, and advocates. They articulate 10 principles across six domains. The Principles acknowledge complexity and tradeoffs—they’re meant to be a starting point for the hard work of policy development and implementation.

• A Student Bill of Rights for Higher Education translates those principles into something more direct: a declaration of what every student pursuing postsecondary education deserves. It’s written for students and the broader public—a stake in the ground about the experience we should be guaranteeing.

The Principles are where we work through the “how.” The Bill of Rights is where we plant a flag on what students deserve. A preview of the toplines included within both documents is below; the actual text of each is linked throughout this post.

Preview: A Student Bill of Rights for Higher Education

This document establishes a vision for what should be fundamental commitments to every learner.

• Article I & II: Access and Affordability. Guaranteed pathways to public institutions with transparent, predictable pricing that ensures finances never prevent attendance.

• Article III & IV: Flexible, Seamless Pathways. Early exposure to college rigor, multiple re-entry points for adult learners, and the ability to transfer credits without loss.

• Article V & VI: Quality and Value. The right to enroll in programs that demonstrably improve life prospects and support holistic success, including civic engagement.

• Article VII & VIII: Connected Support. Learning that connects to work and life, supported by proactive advising that combines technology with human connection.

• Article IX: Freedom of Inquiry and Responsible Governance. The right to learn without censorship and a meaningful voice in the decision-making processes that shape the educational experience.

• Article X: Inclusive Environments. Campus environments that foster belonging, affirm diverse identities, and support respectful dialogue across difference.

Preview: Student-Centered Principles for Reform

These principles shift the focus from incremental fixes toward a fundamental reimagining of the system.

1. Access Without Barriers: Make enrollment simple and eliminate tuition as a barrier at public institutions.

2. Quality Outcomes: Governments should only subsidize programs that demonstrably improve students’ lives.

3. Relevant Learning: Embed work-based learning and practical experience directly into curricula.

4. Anticipatory Support: Use technology to identify struggling students early and intervene before problems escalate.

5. Responsible Governance: Protect institutional autonomy from political interference while ensuring students and faculty have a meaningful role in decision-making.

6. Inclusive Communities: Position institutions as vital parts of a vibrant community ecosystem, partnering with local organizations and employers.

Collaborate, Adapt, and Remix

These principles are intended to articulate a vision—a destination toward which we might orient our efforts. Translating this vision into reality will require substantial additional work in policy development, implementation strategy, and navigating the inevitable tradeoffs that arise in complex systems change.

I welcome your thoughts, critiques, and adaptations. Use them, share them, and refine them for your own contexts. Both documents are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Access the “Workroom”

You can view the full text and “Make a Copy” of the documents to adapt for your own institution or organization here:

• Student-Centered Principles for Higher Education Reform

• Student Bill of Rights for Higher Education

I look forward to the conversation and seeing how these ideas evolve with constructive dialogue.

Within a year, I was able to implement a plan for free community college, draft and release a state plan for higher education, and develop a new funding formula for New Jersey’s public colleges and universities. On a shoestring budget and with a staff of less than 20 people (this was AFTER I went on a hiring spree) no less.

Recently at a grantee convening for a funder, I was asked, how was I able to do all of this in such a short time frame? Of course, I didn’t do it alone. I led a small but mighty team and took a self-led crash course on leadership and project management. I want to share with you some of what I learned about accomplishing great things with limited time, capacity, and resources, in case you too have bold vision but always feel crunched for time and energy.

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The Mandate

When I started as the Secretary of Higher Education for the state of New Jersey, I had a mandate from the Governor: help me to enact free community college for students in the state. This had been a key campaign promise, and now that he was elected, the Governor was looking for someone to help him implement what had been portrayed by his detractors during the campaign as a fanciful, impractical idea.

During our first conversations about the role, he also mentioned an interest in developing a state plan for higher education and a funding formula for its 4-year colleges and universities. College presidents in the state had been pressing him on both issues.

So, I came into the role of Secretary with a clear sense of what I wanted to accomplish: develop a policy outline and implementation plan for free community college, develop a funding formula for the state’s public 4-year colleges, and develop a state plan for higher education. Clear, simple–right?

Reality Check: Day 1

Of course, this is a tall order at any time, but it is especially challenging when, as I realized on Day 1 in office, you have very few staff and those that do work there are already overworked and underpaid. After some weeks trying to power through with myself and my deputy, I realized I needed help–and a lot of it.

I realized I needed not only people-power in the form of more humans, but I also needed to up my own game in terms of leadership and management. I had managed people before, but not at this scale and not with this level of responsibility.

So, I found resources where I could. (Shoestring budget, remember?) I took a course on “Managing to Change the World” at the Management Center. I dug into book after book on leading teams and people. I listened to podcasts on effective management and leadership. I basically went down the rabbit hole on how to lead people and manage my time most effectively. None of the resources I found offered specific leadership advice for those working in government; but I adapted to my circumstances.

What I found in this journey was that most of our management and leadership challenges are not novel–some version of each challenge has been encountered by someone else. The real challenge is in being humble enough to realize when you need help and then in figuring out how to adapt the lesson for your individual context.

You will likely have trouble accomplishing your most challenging goals and feel constantly overwhelmed unless you look beyond yourself for guidance and create some systems and structures to support your work.

So, what did I learn from this plunge into the world of leadership and management of myself and others? In a previous post, I mention that we are often bringing our worst selves to perhaps society’s most important moment of this generation. I shared a list of books you can read to help you work smarter, not harder.

But you’re busy- you barely even have time to read this post. (Thank you in advance.) What can you do if you don’t feel like you have the time to dig into it all?

Three Things You Can Do Right Now

If you don’t have time to read the books, but still want to do something to work towards bringing a better version of yourself to the moment, I have three suggestions for what to do in the near term. You can even start right now.

1. Make time to set some goals for the year.

   This is a perfect time of year to do some reflection and goal-setting for the year ahead. Notice that I didn’t say “set some goals”-- the first step is actually to find the time to do this thoughtfully. You’ll need to find a good chunk of time if you want to do this well. Look at your calendar for the next 3 weeks and identify a one or two-hour block that you can dedicate to this task. (One or two days would be even better, but baby steps…)

   I take time each year for a personal retreat, where I bring a planner to reflect on what happened over the past year and consider how I want to use my time, talents, and energy in the new year. A planner with guided questions like this one helps me reflect on the past year and plan for the next one.

   I like to take this time solo, away from work and family distractions, but do what you can. This helps me enter the new year feeling grounded, with direction about what to prioritize and what can’t make the cut if I want to preserve my energy for the most important tasks.

2. Set and prioritize your goals; delegate ruthlessly for everything else.

   After making time to set goals, and preparing to use that time well, you will come up with a list of things that you want to accomplish. Even if you think you can or must do everything on this list, just for kicks, prioritize your top three priorities. Then, be intentional about sharing power and tasks with others on your team and in your network for other things that need to be done. This not only helps you focus on the areas where you most want to spend your time, but also grows the capacity of your team.

   I mentioned above that I accomplished three big things in one year. There were, of course, other things that came up throughout the year, and at times I had to consider whether those other things should become more important than the three things I identified.

   For example, during the year the Governor announced a priority to develop the state’s wind energy plan and infrastructure and he wanted to ensure that higher education was at the table in terms of workforce development and research related to this plan. This is a fantastic goal and priority–but was NOT one of my three priorities.

   So, I delegated responsibility for this work to another team member with interest and capability in this area. It was a growing opportunity for this staff member, and I still was kept abreast of major developments and milestones in the work, offering feedback and guidance along the way.

   However, that person attended most major meetings on the topic (even with other cabinet members), communicated directly with business and industry leaders on the initiative, and generally led the work for our office. This allowed me the brain power and capacity to lead on the three things that were most important for me to accomplish.

3. Prioritize your day.

   Decide what 3 things are most important in a day and put your focus there. Similar to prioritizing your annual goals, at some point you realize that you cannot do it all at once, even as frustrating as that is to come to grips with. You will disappoint some people and that’s ok.

   You can either acknowledge this and decide what those three things will be, or you can neglect this and have the day determine at random what you are able to accomplish. So, before you move forward with the next task, take 5 minutes to figure out what the most important things are for you to accomplish today, and figure out when you will take time to get them done. Hopefully the things you prioritize each day and week are connected to the major goals you have set for yourself at the outset of the year.

   If you’re like me, your to-do list includes dozens of items that all feel incredibly urgent and/or important. It IS a real challenge to prioritize and to accept that there are some things that may not get done today. Building the habit of taking time each day (and/or week) to prioritize what must happen above all else (in ways that are connected to the goals you set for yourself) and then identifying the time in the day when you will be able to work on these items will transform your ability to do big things.

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My Daily Practice

Something I do (almost) every single workday is sit down with my planner, look at my goals for the week, and determine what I need to get done today to advance those goals. I literally write these three things out by hand.

Then, I look at my calendar for the day (this step is key!) and after a quick review of what I have on my docket for the day, I see what time within the day I have to get these three things done.

If I have back to back meetings scheduled all day, but these three things are literally must-do items, I must either 1) acknowledge that they will need to happen after work hours or 2) cancel something on my calendar to make time for my priorities. This is mundane and tough, but it doesn’t take long, and has been a profoundly impactful practice for me.

The Learning

I learned these things the hard way in real time—on the job as Secretary of Higher Education in New Jersey. There was simply too much to do in a given day to NOT delegate, and too much on the line to NOT share power with my team. I was forced to prioritize or risk not getting anything done. I am not perfect, and am still learning these lessons each day, but abiding by these principles (among others) allowed me to accomplish those big goals in a short amount of time. I hope you’re able to take these insights and use them to advance goals in your work as well.

***I’ll likely write more about each of these topics in greater detail in the future, as I know I’ve only scratched the surface here. As I plan for future posts, I’d love to know: What resonated with you? What would you like to see me write more about?

Implementation is what happens after the election is won, a bill is signed, after the press conference, after the champagne (or tequila) toast. It’s the moment when everyone involved in crafting policy often collectively exhales and moves on to the next fight.

But that’s not the end of the policymaking process- it is really only a different beginning.

At the end of the day, a law that no one knows about might as well not exist. A benefit that’s too complicated to access might as well be a locked door. A policy that sounds good in committee, but can’t be implemented, is just expensive theater.

Those of us who aren’t completely craven lunatics are ostensibly in the business of policymaking because we want to make people’s lives better. We aren’t just in it for the confetti that drops at an election night watch party–we do this work because we want children to have healthy food, because we want seniors to be able to age with dignity, because we want people to live full lives of freedom from tyranny with work that is fairly compensated and not die of preventable diseases…and of course because we want the price of f’ing eggs to go down.

So, when we do the work of ‘politics’ or (for those like myself that like to think of themselves as further removed from the gamesmanship of crass politics) ‘policymaking’ we do it because we want people’s lives to be better.

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The recent conversation with Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates caused a lot of people to stop and think–why do we care about “winning” in politics? The reason should be because we care about people’s wellbeing. And if this is what we truly care about–improving lives–then we have to be just as concerned (if not moreso) about the implementation as we are about the policy.

Here’s what happens when we forget to care about implementation (storytime!) ….

When I was a young staffer working at the US Department of Education in February of 2009, one of my first assignments was to check on the implementation of a newly inked bill to provide student loan relief and forgiveness for those working in public service for 10 years. The law providing for lower payments and loan forgiveness for public servants had been passed in 2007 and was set to open for enrollment in 2009, but no publicity about this new potential benefit for borrowers had been done when I started my job.

Why was this important? Because for the FIRST TIME EVER, students en masse would be able to choose a repayment plan that drastically lowered their payments if they worked in lower paying jobs, and have those payments eliminated after 10 years of working in public service. The narrative that you had to take a higher paying corporate job because you needed it for repayment of student loans was no longer fundamentally true, especially for those who were interested in public service. But…someone needed to actually inform students of that reality and craft a process for them to feel secure in this guarantee. Ideally, the Department of Education would partner with colleges and other stakeholders to get the message out, so that students could make career choices informed by this new reality.

So, I searched to find the office and individuals responsible for implementation of the law. I trudged to their office to meet, and when I asked about what plans they had to share the word, or even to do something as simple as put a PDF on the Department of Education’s website explaining the new law, the response was… “Well, the first loan won’t be forgiven until 2017, so we figured we had plenty of time…” i.e. NOTHING had been done, no plans were in place, and no one had prioritized this task as important within the Department of Education’s workflow.

(Unfortunately, this lack of prepared implementation had real implications for the program’s takeup and impact.)

To be clear, I do not blame the individuals who I met with that day. I do blame a system that valorizes policy “wins” as laws being passed rather than people being helped. The royal “we” has to consider the resources and attention needed for the full implementation of policy, not just the advocacy needed to get a law passed. There is hard and necessary work in developing a beautifully complex and nuanced policy proposal, yes, but that work is for naught if no one ever knows about the benefits of the program.

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Implementation is the part where we translate the law or the regulation into an actual real life action that makes someone’s life better. Implementation of policy occurs not on Capitol Hill or the Statehouse (though Governors and Mayors often have a greater ability to affect implementation)—implementation is crafted in the decisions about personnel, in the values and quality of leadership, and in the capacity provided to carry out a bold vision.

With that foundation in place, the nitty gritty of policy implementation occurs in the offices of obscure government employees — many of whom are currently not working due to the federal government shutdown. These are the people working jobs whose titles don’t make the papers, who often won’t become famous or have the next law named after them due to their tireless work, but whose work significantly impacts the experience that individuals have as a result of government policy. Their work is buttressed by leadership with a vision that inspires action, who provides clear guidance, and who is committed to providing the capacity needed to get the work done well.

My story is just one example of a law that wasn’t implemented as intended. I could share others, as well. There are many laws on the books that have not been implemented or whose implementation is severely hampered because the government lacks the capacity to do it well.

This is the gap we have to close: there is a huge chasm between policy writing and policy implementation. Closing that gap actually requires a sense of what ‘good’ looks like in practice, in VERY concrete terms. Not in policy-speak, but in the lived experience of the person who will use it. It’s amazing how many policy-shapers miss this simple point. It also requires a know-how about leadership and project management that is too often lacking in political leaders within our government agencies. (Perhaps another post for another day, but some initial thoughts here.)

I know how brutally hard it is to get policy ideas turned into law in the first place. I’ve been in those sausage-making sessions where good policy gets compromised, where clear language becomes murky, where simple implementation becomes complex. The deal-making process often produces policies that are genuinely difficult to communicate and implement.

But that’s exactly why we can’t stop at the signing ceremony. If the sausage-making made it messy, implementation has to untangle it to the best of our ability. A

Of course, the process is HARD. But this is the work to which we must be beholden, as policy-shapers—the work of figuring out the back end design and detail so that the front end communication and implementation is smooth.

So as we think about the system that we need to replace the one that is currently being destroyed, I hope we can consider not only the policies that will undergird that system, but also the infrastructure that is needed to help implement those policies with fidelity. That infrastructure includes leaders with experience in the areas they are tasked with managing and an understanding of and appreciation for the difficult task of leading and inspiring people with vision toward a shared goal. (This is the part where “personnel is policy” really hits home.)

Our job—whether we’re writing policy, advocating for it, or implementing it—is to close the gap between intention and reality. To be user experience designers with values as our guide. To remember that “wins” are measured in lives changed, not laws passed.

It’s harder work than we acknowledge. But it’s the work that matters.

(this post has been updated with a photo as of Jan 22 2026)

The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) was scheduled to meet today, October 21, 2025. But the federal government shutdown has forced a postponement. (NACIQI is the federal advisory committee that makes recommendations to the Secretary of Education about the federal government’s official recognition of accrediting agencies.)

In lieu of that meeting, I want to share why the policy discussion we had at our last gathering in February still matters profoundly in this moment–a moment when diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are under attack and the freedom of inquiry that is the hallmark of American higher education hangs in the balance.

You can be forgiven for not being at rapt attention for the minute by minute play of the last NACIQI meeting–riveting as it was. So, I’ll share key themes from my remarks at that meeting here.

What I said then wasn’t meant to be political. It was a shared plea–across party lines– to be clear and steadfast about preserving some fundamental principles that undergird who we are as a nation (when we are at our best).

Here’s a more polished version of what I shared in that meeting.

The Reality of How “DEI” Is Perceived

I’ve spent the better part of the past two and a half years understanding how people think about the term “DEI.” What polling research shows is that when people hear “DEI,” they think race. More specifically, they think “Black.” And we have frankly anti-Black bias in this country that causes that term to be negatively construed.

But here’s the thing: diversity is broader than race. Equity is a concept that is broader than race. And inclusion certainly is—though it’s also inclusive of race.

However, race is important to discuss because this country has an original sin that is rooted in racism, and a deep discomfort in talking about those issues. Which is why it’s actually really important to preserve this ability —to talk about issues that impact people in our country in different ways, to talk about issues that are uncomfortable, to talk about issues in a way that sometimes people plainly disagree without resolution.

Some people might call that freedom of speech.

Academic Freedom Must Protect Uncomfortable Ideas

And this is where I bring up critical race theory. (!!!!) You don’t have to agree with it. But an institution of higher education, an institution of higher learning, needs to be able to talk about whether or not that is a valid way of looking at the world. To censure that conversation is unconscionable to me—as if we’re living in a place that has no foundational concept of free speech, where if there is something that people disagree with from a political perspective, we cannot have these conversations.

To the extent that accreditation should be looking at institutional quality, it seems like we’re all in violent agreement about intellectual diversity being somewhat important to that concept. The ability to preserve that and have these kinds of discussions is something we should protect.

And yet I worry that sometimes we’re in a space where only a certain kind of intellectual diversity is acceptable.

The Problem with Selective Free Speech

Five or ten years ago, we had a wave of so-called “cancel culture” that conservatives eschewed. There was real concern that intellectual freedom was at risk. Of course, each issue in those situations is fact-specific, and we know that you must apply appropriate time, place, and manner restrictions to each group equally without discrimination based on the viewpoint expressed.

But when the issue came up again recently with Palestinian protesters and people disagreeing with them, there were similar kinds of cancel culture, I would say, on the other side. “They shouldn’t be allowed to speak,” and so on.

The idea that there should be a space for dialogue, even with people you disagree with, is the principle that I think—that I hope—we all agree on.

And I worry that we are getting to a place where we talk about diversity of thought or academic freedom only as it relates to those who agree with us.

And that is a dangerous space.

A Different Way of Thinking About Merit

I end my comments on a very personal note. I’m a Christian, but I (like many other black Christians) don’t always align with the mainstream conservative Christian notions of these concepts. My pastor recently preached a sermon about “DEI” as biblically rooted concept, and how “the last shall be first” could mean that you should look outside of those that you might otherwise think have merit—to go beyond your normal pool.

He shared a story from Samuel about when he was

looking for the next king. David’s father, Jesse, didn’t even bring him out because he wasn’t the firstborn son.

He had to be compelled to bring someone out who wasn’t already in the natural lineup to be king.

This story illustrates something profound: sometimes the most qualified person isn’t the one who fits our traditional definition of merit. Sometimes we have to be willing to look beyond the “obvious” choices to find excellence. That’s not about lowering standards—it’s about expanding our understanding of what excellence looks like.

Now, you don’t have to agree with my way of looking at religion, or any of these issues. But the ability of all of us to have that perspective is what we should be preserving in this moment.

(One could also make a valid faith-based argument that the ability to practice “DEI” is a strongly held religious belief…)

The American Tradition

Both diversity and freedom of speech are deeply American concepts. They’re not in opposition to each other—they reinforce each other. The freedom to explore different perspectives, to challenge orthodoxies, to have uncomfortable conversations about race and equity and justice—these are all part of the same intellectual tradition.

When we lose the ability to talk about these issues in our institutions of higher learning, we lose something essential about who we are as a nation. When we allow political winds to determine which ideas are acceptable to discuss and which must be censored, we undermine the very foundation of academic inquiry.

The question before us isn’t whether you personally support DEI initiatives or critical race theory or any particular framework. The question is whether we will preserve the space for these conversations to happen—whether we will protect the intellectual freedom that allows us to grapple with our country’s most difficult questions.

That’s the American tradition worth fighting for.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the official position of NACIQI or the U.S. Department of Education.

If you currently or have ever worked in government or the nonprofit/social sectors, you have likely felt the nagging feeling of “there has to be a better way.” Infighting, lack of organization, poor management, unrealistic expectations…does any of that sound familiar?

I want to offer a couple of hypotheses for why this seems to be the case, from my time working in federal government, state government, within philanthropy and based on lots of personal reflection on management of myself, my work, and of other people.

For those that don’t know me, I started my career working for a now-defunct advisory committee, then got an unlikely position within the Obama administration’s Department of Education (RIP?), then moved on to the White House. After 4 years in the administration (which actually feels like 21 years inside), I moved on to philanthropy, where I worked for a foundation on policy strategy related to college financing and affordability. After 5 years there, I left to become Secretary of Higher Education for the State of New Jersey. I transitioned from that role to become the Governor’s Chief Policy Advisor, which the job of managing the Governor’s policy agenda across all areas (think criminal justice, health, climate/environment, education, transportation etc) and coordinating that policy with the cabinet commissioners and secretaries (all appointed by the Gov in NJ.)

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So, that’s me in a nutshell. But really, I am no one (thus the title of this Substack)—I’ve got ideas based on experiences I’ve had—just like we all do. And those experiences lead me to several reflections about the state of social change. I could write an essay (or a book!) on each of these points, but I’m trying to be quick, because who really has the time ?? That said, there is more where this came from, so if you read this and think it would be helpful for me to write more on this topic, just let me know.

1. Change is elusive because we are arrogant, stubborn, and set in our ways. Ouch! But yes. Let’s get into it: We each experience the world based on our own set of values and beliefs, and increasingly informed by our algorithmically-curated social media feeds. We think our experience of the world is genuinely reflective of reality, and often don’t try hard enough to get outside of our own bubble, pressure test our assumptions, and (importantly) get constructive feedback on our approaches and ideas.

2. Change is hard because we aren’t clear on what we hope to see as a result of our actions. Per the theme of a previous post, too many of us work very hard toward goals that are vague, at best. Sometimes it isn’t clear what we hope to get out of our actions other than dealing with the immediate fire in front of us, which is sometimes good enough, but without clear vision and goals it is difficult to achieve anything tangible with long lasting effect because you don’t know what it is you are aiming for.

3. Change is hard because we haven’t clarified our values. Too many of us have a set of personal values that we say we care about that don’t often translate to how we work. Or, worse, we haven’t considered our personal values at all to even think about what it means for how we show up in our personal or our work relationships. I try to live with honesty, empathy, and humility, and responsibility. I don’t always get it right but I at least know that these are things I am working toward that I can return to when faced with challenge. Have you spent time considering what your personal values are and how they show up for you at work?

4. Change is hard because we work too hard. This is counterintuitive, but stick with me. Tons of research says that we work best when we are rested and are able to bring our best selves to difficult tasks. Yet many of us work ourselves to the bone, don’t get enough rest, are not healthy, etc. We aren’t bringing our best selves to the task, which makes the work even harder than it should be.

5. Change is hard because we are trying to do too many things at once. Related to the point above, we multi-task to the nth degree. I will admit, that as I am writing this post, I have about 7 tabs open, am pumping, and thinking about how much time I can commit to writing before I need to go to my next appointment. Not the ideal scenario, so I am speaking to myself as much as I am speaking to whoever is reading this post!

6. Change is hard because we have difficulty prioritizing. In addition to literally doing too many physical things at once, we also generally find it difficult to prioritize our work goals (to the extent we have created them at all, per above.) As the saying goes, if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

Now, each of these insights aren’t particularly original. The idea that working smarter, not harder, and incorporating more rest into our days can actually make us more productive is a key tenet of some of the most popular works of human psychology and behavioral economics written as of late. The concept of humility and of connecting with people outside of our social bubbles is grounded in texts both ancient and recent that offer advice about how to be a better human and more persuasive communicator.

If you’re interested in exploring these concepts further on your own, becoming less frenzied, more strategic in work and in life, and generally bringing your better self to the tremendous moment we face as humanity, I’ve put together a How to Win Starter Pack.

(I fully acknowledge that these are all white authors; I would love to feature a black author and/or would love to BE the next author that writes a book about how to show up for yourself and for others and to be effective at driving change. Have a suggestion for a book written by a person of color? Are you an agent? Email me at zakiya@zakiyasmithellis.com!)

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. This book is really life-changing and will help orient you to a different, perhaps less anxiety-inducing approach to productivity.

• Deep Work by Cal Newport. I’ll be transparent and admit that I have not read this book fully— but I have listened to many podcasts about focus where this book is referenced and seen it quoted enough times by enough people I respect to add it to the list. It’s on my to-read list.

• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown. This book changed almost everything about the way I showed up as a leader, and it made me question many of the assumptions I had about what leadership looks like (most learned in the toxic environments of the halls of power in DC…stories for another day!)

Each of these books are back backed by bounds of research about how we work best as humans, and about how we can best achieve great work.

There’s perhaps never been a more important time than right now to work on ourselves. We can’t change other people, but we can change how we approach our work and relationships to show up a little better each day for ourselves and for the work we do.

PS- I really could write more on this topic, but didn’t want this post to get too lengthy. If you’d like the 201 version of this post, shoot me a note or comment below—I’m also curious about your experiences—what resonates and what have you seen?

* Note: To be fair, as a society we are indeed healthier and less poor overall in recent years—we have higher levels of life expectancy and lower overall poverty levels than we did 200 years ago; that said indicators of social progress from the last 50 years are more fluid.

Joaquin is a high school senior is excited to be the first in his family to attend college. He goes to public high school without enough counselors to provide individualized college guidance. He decides to attend the local community college because it is the cheapest option; he figures he can pay his way through while working. Through a tremendous amount of grit and determination, he is one of the 33% of first-time Latino students to complete community college, but struggles at the point of transfer. The articulation agreements are not clear, and he has an associates degree in “liberal arts” that does not provide much more earning potential than a HS graduate. Five years post graduation, he works a retail job at the mall and wonders whether he should have gone to college at all.

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In previous posts, I've argued that our systems are being burned to the ground and that we need clarity of purpose to build new structures and systems that truly meet our needs moving forward. So, then what would it actually look like if we built higher education around what students like Joaquin truly need? What if we started not with incremental fixes to existing broken structures, but with a bold vision of the future?

Now, imagine a different story.

Joaquin would be the first in his family to attend college, and he is excited about that prospect. During his junior year, he takes dual enrollment classes that offer both real-world relevance and academic rigor, giving him a clear sense of college-level expectations and helping him discover his interest in logistics and supply chain management. His school's robust counseling program, supported by technology that matches student interests to career pathways, helped him identify the perfect fit: a four-year Supply Chain and Operations Management program at a state university that was welcoming and affirming in their outreach. He received his acceptance letter—and a guarantee of no tuition costs—months before graduation, eliminating the stress and uncertainty that derail so many first-generation students.

From day one, Joaquin's program integrates classroom learning with real work experience through a paid internship with a local distribution center that rotates between different companies each semester. His coursework is clearly sequenced, combining technical supply chain courses with liberal arts requirements that prove unexpectedly valuable—his sociology class helps him understand how cultural differences affect international supplier relationships, while his writing-intensive history course strengthens his ability to craft persuasive proposals for process improvements. Of course, he uses AI in both classes to help him understand the content and craft increasingly more persuasive essays— much likely better than what he would have developed on his own—but the courses themselves offered him the opportunity to understand the difference between different types of arguments, ground him in facts vs opinions, and understand what is vs is not compelling when it comes to oral and written presentation.

When he struggles with statistics in his second year, his academic advisor reaches out immediately with tutoring resources and schedule adjustments; predictive AI gave them a heads up that he might need help before he even thought to reach out. The income from his internships covers his day-to-day expenses, while grant funding ensures he can focus on his studies without working extra hours that interfere with his ability to study.

In addition to his academic coursework, Joaquin is able to enjoy a vibrant student life that complements his classroom learning. He joins clubs that celebrate his cultural heritage, and is able to meet students from different backgrounds that expand his views and ways of thinking about the world. These experiences support his growth and development in ways that feel beneficial for his life after college both personally and professionally.

As graduation approaches, Joaquin works with both virtual and in-person career coaches to translate his classroom projects and workplace experiences into a compelling resume. AI tools help him analyze labor market trends and identify emerging opportunities in sustainable logistics that align with his interests. The multiple employer relationships he's built through his program open doors he never knew existed. Five years later, Joaquin manages logistics for a regional manufacturer, earning a great salary, with no student debt, and feels confident that his education was the foundation for a career he genuinely enjoys. The path wasn't easy—college never is—but he entered the workforce knowing he could handle whatever challenges came next.

End scene.

I could write a similar story of a vision of the future from various perspectives of learners experiencing postsecondary education; this is only one illustration. And of course, the details of policy development and implementation—including funding mechanisms, policy levers, and the like—will be crucial to making any vision reality. But those details must have some grounding in the desired destination—outcomes and goals—informed by a clear vision.

So, aligned with the example of Joaquin above, here are some concrete principles that might undergird future-focused vision for higher education.

I share this as an invitation for others to adapt and create your own vision. I start this vision with a student in high school, not because I am ignorant of the reality of the demographics of postsecondary learners, but because I find it helpful to think about a life-cycle approach (beginning earlier in life and sharing thoughts about the pathways we encounter.) You could develop your own vision beginning at whatever starting place makes the most sense for you.

One note: It is easier to tear down and to critique than it is to dream and build, so as much as possible, I share this in a spirit of encouraging others to build clear visions of the future, realizing that there are no doubt many flaws and shortcomings embedded within the vision principles outlined below.

• I envision a future where students in high school have the option to attend one of many public colleges in their state as a high-quality affordable option, based on the best fit for their interests and learning style, with predictable and transparent pricing that is not a barrier to their attendance. In this vision, there are no “bad” options for students to choose from —government doesn’t subsidize programs and pathways that it knows leave students worse off than when they started. The entire process is calm and affirming, supported by both technology and real humans in their lives who are able to provide guidance needed to inform their choice.

• In this future, there exist a variety of high-quality postsecondary education options (e.g., community college, technical college, liberal arts, and research universities) that students can choose from based on their preferences and career aspirations. Learners are able to attend with confidence that any of these paths will be available to them without financial strain and not leave them worse off than when they started. While enrolled, students receive a relevant education that includes multiple opportunities for work-based learning with faculty who have support to teach in ways that are engaging so that students actually find coursework interesting and useful.

• I imagine academic programs and coursework that are designed as clearly relevant to the life one might have outside of college, which doesn’t mean neglecting the classics or liberal arts, but does require a focus on teaching in a way that draws out the relevance of topics to life outside of the classroom. This will be increasingly important as AI changes the tasks and skills that are necessary for work in the future. (What AI won’t change is the need for enough baseline context to apply human judgement in all situations, which comes from learning how to learn, and enough about what shaped our world in the past to make a difference in the present day.)

• Faculty in higher education would receive ample support to improve engagement of students with content. In a world where AI can do most of the technical work for them, the real challenge will be in helping students to understand how different concepts apply in real life (including but not limited to work) rather than focused on determining whether they have acquired a certain amount of baseline knowledge. Contextualized learning will be the standard rather than the exception.

• In this future that I envision, if for some unforeseen reason, despite supportive structures and affordable programs that are relevant to one’s potential life and career plans, a student has to stop out for a period of time, there are multiple ways for them to re-enroll. I also envision a future where there are ample social services available such that not finishing college doesn’t condemn someone to a path of destitution and financial ruin.

  • That said, getting a postsecondary education—at any stage of life—should be a net positive to one’s life, helping students develop ways of thinking and skills that, on average, make them more marketable for employers, or more likely for them to start their own successful businesses, leading to greater economic returns.

• I envision a future where students who have stopped out, or who decide later in life that they might benefit from postsecondary education, are able to enroll in postsecondary programs that are well-designed for adult learners who need to attend part-time. These programs would be tailored to the structural realities of working adults, while still providing the academic rigor and relevance that makes the education feel worthwhile both personally and professionally. Ideally their attendance is supported by their employer(s) and integrated with their work-lives.

• Ultimately, policy and programs support students from entry through completion, with a recognition of the talents and skills students bring from various aspects of their identities and personal histories. They are affirmed and welcomed on a campus (or virtual setting) that values diversity in all forms, and affirms students for who they are fostering inclusive environments that value the difficult task of encouraging respectful dialogue around tough issues.

• Colleges and universities, technical schools, and other types of programs that lead to a credential are all part of a vibrant ecosystem within communities, partnered, where appropriate, with employers, community organizations, faith organizations, and nonprofits that all add to the rich fabric of American life and strengthen our democracy.

What is true about the future of higher education through the example of Joaquin?

• As part of his public K-12 schooling, he has had the opportunity to take classes at a local college that helped him understand what the rigor of college work might be like as well as opportunities to apply his learning in both real and simulated work settings.

• He also had the benefit of counseling services and technology that helped him determine what types of institutions might be the best match for him, and received a direct offer of admission well in advance of his graduation from high school.

• Because of the transparent and predictable pricing policies, he has known for years that his parents would not need to pay anything out of pocket to facilitate his enrollment in college—just as they hadn’t needed to pay for his public PK-12 education, he can also attend a public postsecondary program without the need to pay for tuition and fees out of pocket.

• Any program he chooses will come with some form of paid employer internship, apprenticeship, or other work-based learning opportunity embedded into the curriculum.

• While enrolled, he knows exactly what series of courses he needs in order to graduate in a specific time frame, and if he seems off course, someone reaches out to talk with him about what he needs to do to get back on track. His pay through the work-based learning opportunity is enough to help cover incidental expenses he may have, but otherwise he receives grant funding that covers his living costs, so that he need not take on additional excessive work hours that interferes with his schoolwork.

• When it is time to graduate, he takes advantage of virtual career coaching to create a resume based on his work and learning while in school. He is able to take advantage of the multiple employer relationships he built while in school to navigate the landscape for work and land a job that he enjoys out of college. His school has in person career coaches that are available to help talk him through the process in person, as well, if he feels like he needs extra support.

• The process of learning new concepts and applying them in the real world of work through his academic program was not easy, but he is entering the world of work feeling pretty confident in his ability to tackle what comes next.

I want to live in a world where we are serious about thinking about the needs of students like Joaquin and where policy leaders are able to make the time and space to envision a bold, positive future for learners like them and then take the (sometimes difficult and messy) steps needed to make those futures a reality.

What is the future of higher education that you envision?

After my last post, I received a fair number of questions about how to plan for what is next. What does it actually look like to create a vision that guides action?

First, stop.

Yes, to create an actionable vision, you do actually have to pause.

Pause the notifications, the multi-tasking, the thinking about 8 things at once. You actually have to create the space for yourself to think without a million distractions. (As a mom to two kids under the age of 5, believe me, I get how hard this can be.)

Now that you've paused, ask yourself this fundamental question: What do I want to be true about the world because of my work?

It is surprising to me how many of us in mission-oriented/social sector/do-goody spaces miss this basic principle.

We want to "make college more affordable," or "improve educational outcomes," or "reduce inequities." These are nice, laudable ideals, but not clear goals that have a desired outcome.

Which outcomes? Which inequities? How will you know when college is affordable? How will you measure progress along the way?

Consider the difference:

• Vague: "Improve educational outcomes"

• Clear: "Ensure that every high school students in the state has a post-secondary plan and that at least 90% graduate with no more than a 2% gap between racial and ethnic subgroup graduation rates."

You can argue about this goal (though no need to argue with me about this one, it’s just an example!) but the point is that it is concrete enough to be plainly understandable; clear enough to evoke disagreement. This is actually a marker of a good, clear vision.

Basic management courses will suggest SMART goals, and one of the most successful business consultants and inspirational speakers of our time has famously exhorted us to Start With Why. Even if you haven't read Simon Sinek or have never heard of SMART goals, you can access this visioning to give yourself a sense of purpose.

This purpose is necessary whether you are an executive director, team leader, or project assistant. It's helpful and ideal for leaders to shape a vision with their team, but if that isn't occurring where you are, you can still do this for yourself and your specific projects. Even when working within larger institutional constraints, you can create clarity about how your particular role contributes to meaningful change.

Be as concrete as you can be. How will you know when your vision is achieved? For instance, which educational outcomes would you be able to look at and know that things are better? What markers would tell you that something is going well? These don't have to always be quantifiable, but that often helps.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech was a speech about vision. The lines we remember are the clearest about what he saw as a possible reality. That clear vision has guided the struggle for justice of a generation.

Visioning is notoriously hard; perhaps that's why so few people do it effectively. And to be clear, our work to effect change does not and cannot end with creating the vision—you also have to be able to plan for implementation and effectively execute the plan in a way that is aligned with this vision. (Topics for later posts—hint hint.)

But beginning with this vision that leads to clear goals is absolutely necessary. I can attest to the transformative power of waking up every day with a clear sense of purpose. When is the last time you had that?

Before you check another email or attend another meeting, take five minutes to write down one specific change you want your current project to create. Your future self—and the communities you serve—will thank you.

As a bonus, here’s a step by step guide to creating a clear vision for your work, courtesy of my girl Claudette, who thought my post was awesome (naturally, lol) but could be even better with the inclusion of a framework:

A Simple Framework for Creating Clarity

Whether you're an executive director shaping organizational strategy or working within someone else's vision, you can apply this four-step process to creating clarity of purpose:

1. Define the specific change you want to see - Move beyond general aspirations to concrete transformations

2. Identify measurable indicators of success - How will you know you're making progress? What will you be able to point to?

3. Set a timeline - Sometimes it helps to think far out and then get closer: In 10 years, what do you want to be true? In 5 years? In one year?

4. Test your vision with the "elevator test" - Can you explain your goal clearly in 30 seconds? If not, keep refining.

This much is true, and yet we also have to contend with the reality that these institutions were far from perfect at the moment of their destruction. They were—at best—in need of serious reform.

They were often not serving those they were intended to serve. The service they did provide was lacking. The outcomes were poor. People were losing faith in their promise.

So, our house is on fire. This much is clear. But it was also in need of renovation. We kept meaning to get around to it, had done some tinkering, but hadn’t fully undertaken the serious changes needed.

But here we are.

So what should we do? Well, the fire is destructive; it must be stopped. There are important parts of the foundation that will be necessary for the renovation. If those burn too, the act of rebuilding will be that much harder. Some of us, in this moment, are primarily firefighters. And we are in desperate need of some firefighting.

At the same time, we need architects. We need people who are developing the vision and planning for what comes next. Those who understand the flaws of the previous structure and the needs it must be designed to serve moving forward. But this visioning and planning isn’t something that happens later, on another day, after the fire is out.

Especially when the fire is too great and it threatens to overcome your ability to resist it all, you have to have a firm understanding of which pieces are foundational, and which are expendable. To do this, you must have a vision.

Without clarity on vision for the future, you cannot effectively plan or make progress to make it a reality.

The shared quality that we need in both our firefighters and our architects is a sense of purpose and vision for the future.

I’m hopeful that as we take on the challenging task of fighting these fires, we don’t neglect the critically important task of planning for our big beautiful rebuild.

A lot of my left leaning friends have been going through it, emotionally, this year. With the passage of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, those feels may be bubbling over even more forcefully as we reflect on the vast changes that are set to befall American society as a result of the new law.

I know it’s been a while ago now, but Kendrick Lamar’s “controversial” (IYKYK - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ SuperBowl performance had me in a nostalgic Kendrick music moment. So I went back to listen to some of the old Kedrick classics that *weren’t* featured in the halftime show. One that stayed with me is “Alright”. Apropos of the moment, I suppose, as Wikipedia reminds me that this was the “unifying song” of the BLM movement.

Now too, when many people are trying to come to terms with how to show up in this moment, this song continues to provide grounding. How do we honor the legacy of others who have defied hatred and fought for justice? How do we do this while also leaning into the idea of rest (a somewhat novel, yet liberatory, pursuit for many of us) and self-care?

We do it by saying “we gon be alright”. As the visuals of the music video remind us, there may be real physical harm to come to us, but we will still be “alright”. For those of us who walk through life with a lens of faith in something greater than ourselves (for me, God rooted in the Christian tradition), this ‘alright’ is linked to the peace of God that ‘transcends all understanding.’ So even as we struggle, even as we endure indignity, even as we see others in pain, even as the world around us becomes less safe, less just, less civil, we can hold on to a faith that somehow, in our spirits, we will be ‘alright.’

In one of the most confounding passages of the Old Testament, Job says “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in Him…” (Job 13:15) For those unfamiliar with the story of Job, he was once a man rich in family and possessions, until God allowed all he had to be taken from him, including his children. His wife even told him that he should curse God and die. (Job 2:9) It is in this context, of extreme personal devastation, that Job professes his continuing trust in God.

In the New Testament, Paul references peace that transcends ‘all understanding’ through our faith in Christ. (Philippians 4:7) The theme here is the same—that no matter what is happening around us, we should find peace. I’m not as deeply rooted in other faith traditions, but the Buddhist concept of accepting the reality of suffering seems relevant too. For those that practice no faith or spiritual practice… now might be the time to get grounded in something other than vodka 😬

This isn’t to say everything will turn out the way we want it to, or that we or those we love won’t be hurt. It isn’t to say we shouldn’t be angry about those things or work to change systems and fight for what is right. It’s saying that in everything we do, we can have a peace in our spirit that actually aids us in our journey. A peace that grounds us and steels us to be more effective advocates. A peaceful resilience, if you will.

I love that this same message shows up over and over again, across generations, across millenia, across cultures. If you’re not a fan of spiritual influences (which, despite my own faith, I totally get) perhaps you can draw inspiration from Whitney Houston’s song “It’s Not Right, But It’s Ok” which has the same theme—essentially, someone screwed me over, but I’m going to make it anyway.

The message is empowering—it’s a way to think about soldiering on even in the face of great challenge, emotional, or physical harm. It’s about preserving your peace so that you can make bold moves without worry or anxiety. That’s the kind of rest my soul needs right now. That’s the peace that I’m bringing into my “postpartum working mom of two” journey.

I hope that kind of peace can be available to you —in whatever form makes the most sense for you— as well.