March 24, 2026 · Episode 304
Why 69% of Employers Say Grads Aren’t Ready: Inside the 2026 Lumina-Gallup Report
36 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Why is public confidence in higher education dropping? Dr. Courtney Brown unpacks the 2026 Lumina-Gallup report on employer needs and the 75% attainment goal.
A third of Americans currently have no confidence in higher education. Not low confidence. No confidence. A decade ago, more than 60 percent had a great deal of confidence.
That collapse, documented through years of Gallup tracking data, is the backdrop for Lumina Foundation and Gallup’s new report, Aligning Education and Work: What Employers Say Higher Education Must Deliver, which triangulates the public’s eroding trust against what employers, current students, alumni, and stopped-out learners are actually reporting. The result is a far more complex and strategically useful picture than the media narrative provides.
Dr. Courtney Brown, Vice President of Impact and Planning and Chief Data and Research Officer at Lumina Foundation, joins Dr. Drumm McNaughton on the Changing Higher Ed® podcast to unpack what the data show and what institutional leaders need to do about it.
Key Findings from the 2026 Lumina-Gallup Report
- 75% of employers say a college degree will be as or more important in five years.
- Only 54% of employers believe colleges are graduating students with the necessary skills.
- 69% of recent graduates require moderate or significant additional training upon hiring.
- 56% of employers find it difficult to hire candidates with the right skills.
- 93% of current students are confident they are learning the right skills for their careers.
- 38% of employers say they must hire foreign-born workers due to a perceived shortage of American workers with the right skills.
The Employer Verdict: Degrees Still Matter — But Not Unconditionally
The headline finding from the new Lumina/Gallup employer report will surprise anyone who has been following the “degrees don’t matter” narrative: 75 percent of employers say a college degree will be as important or more important to their hiring decisions five years from now than it is today. Nearly half , 48 percent, say jobs at their organizations currently require a degree, and three-quarters prefer candidates with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree even when it is not formally required.
This is especially striking given that 23% of employers have already removed degree requirements from some roles in the past three years, and another 20% are currently in the process of doing so. The preference for degrees persists even as the formal requirement disappears. That is not the picture of an employer community walking away from higher education.
But the same employers delivered findings that institutions cannot dismiss. Only about half believe colleges are graduating students with the skills their organizations need. Roughly 70 percent report that recent graduates require some or significant additional training. And approximately half are having substantial difficulty finding candidates with the right skills.
Brown notes the important question embedded in that last finding. One Lumina is actively investigating. When employers say graduates need additional training, how much of that reflects a genuine institutional failure in preparation versus the universal reality that every new hire must learn the ins and outs of a specific organization?
The answer matters significantly for how presidents and boards respond. Dismissing the employer signal entirely is not defensible. But restructuring curriculum based on a metric that may conflate preparation with onboarding would be equally misguided.
Why Public Confidence Collapsed — and Why the Ranking of Reasons Matters
Lumina and Gallup did not simply measure that confidence in higher education dropped. They asked why. For boards and presidents who have organized their entire public response strategy around cost, the ranking of reasons is a strategic wake-up call.
The number one reason Americans cite for losing confidence in higher education is politicization. The perception that campuses indoctrinate rather than educate, that students cannot freely express ideas, that ideology has displaced rigor. The second reason is lack of workforce alignment; the belief that a degree does not reliably lead to a job. Cost ranks third.
The politicization concern is not distributed evenly. When Lumina disaggregated the data, Republican respondents drove the politicization concern far more than Democrats, who were more focused on affordability. But here is what makes that finding strategically important for institutional leaders: current students, regardless of political affiliation, report a dramatically different experience than the general public perceives.
Among students on campus, 73 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of independents say their institution promotes free speech well. Only about 5 percent say it does not. Most students report feeling personally free to express their views on campus.
The perception problem, in other words, is concentrated among people who are not on campus — including the 43 million Americans who started college, accumulated credits, and left without a credential. That population has a direct, often painful experience of the higher education system and continues to shape the opinions of families and communities considering whether college is worth it.
The 43 Million: A Confidence Problem Institutions Created
Lumina tracks the stopped-out population through its Stronger Nation data tool, which institutional leaders and state policymakers can access to see attainment data disaggregated by credential type, demographics, and geography down to the state level. The national picture it shows is sobering: 43 million Americans started college and stopped without completing, and the number grows every year because more people are stopping out than are returning to finish.
Brown is direct about what that population represents: a system failure, not a student failure. The most common reasons for stopping out are not academic inability. They are structural: college colliding with work, with the need to pay rent, with childcare, with the care of other adults. Gallup data identifies stress as the leading reason students consider leaving.
When forced to choose between a paycheck and a class, the paycheck wins. That is not a failure of ambition. It is a rational response to circumstances institutions were not designed to accommodate.
The mistake many institutions make when trying to re-engage this population is offering them a return to exactly what did not work before — sometimes while those students still carry debt from their first attempt, and in some cases cannot even re-enroll because of unpaid administrative holds. Brown’s prescription is specific: automatically award credentials when requirements are met rather than requiring a separate graduation application, remove financial holds that block re-enrollment for otherwise eligible students, offer completion grants, build in far more scheduling flexibility, and make the connection between coursework and employment outcomes explicit and visible from the first point of contact.
For a deeper look at why this population stopped out and what it takes to bring them back, see our earlier conversation with Dr. Brown.
The Paradox Institutions Must Confront
The confidence collapse coexists with something that should be deeply clarifying for how institutions communicate their value. Seventy percent of adults without a degree view a bachelor’s degree as valuable. Fifty-five percent see an associate’s degree as valuable. Nearly 90 percent of adults believe that a college education will pay off within 10 years, and roughly 60 percent believe it will pay off within five years.
Degree holders earn three times more over their careers than those with only a high school diploma. They are healthier, more civically engaged, and more likely to find purpose in their work.
Current students know this. Ninety-three percent of students report confidence that they are learning the skills they need for the jobs they want. Seventy-five percent of graduates say their degree was critical to getting a job.
So the trust problem is not primarily that people believe higher education has no value. They believe it has value. Less than 20 percent, however, believe that four-year tuition pricing is fair, and $5,000 is already out of reach for learners who cannot put food on the table.
The paradox Brown identifies is this: people can simultaneously believe in the value of a credential and lack the means to access it. That is not a messaging problem. It is a structural one, and it requires institutions to take a hard look at their business models — not just their enrollment marketing.
Today’s Students Are Not a Niche. They Are the Market.
One of the most consequential reframing points in the conversation concerns who “today’s students” are. Brown pushes back on the “nontraditional student” label not as semantics but as a strategic distortion. The student who is over 25, financially independent, juggling a job and children, needing evening classes, online options, and services that do not require a 9-to-5 appointment is not a special population to be served around the edges of the institution. That student is the majority of today’s postsecondary market.
Institutions built around the 18-to-22-year-old residential model are, by design, poorly suited to serve the people they most need to enroll. Advising offices down dark hallways with appointment-only access, services that close before working parents can get there, restrictions on mixing online and in-person enrollment — these are not neutral operational decisions. They are structural signals that today’s students are not who the institution was built for.
That misalignment becomes existential in the context of the demographic cliff. Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce projects that by 2031, 70 percent of good jobs will require some form of postsecondary education. Meanwhile, the pipeline of 18-year-olds is shrinking. Institutions that do not redesign for adult learners, returning completers, and lifelong learners will compete for a declining pool of traditional students while the larger and growing market goes elsewhere.
Lumina’s New National Goal: Attainment Without Value Is Not Enough
In 2008, when Lumina set its first national attainment goal — 60 percent of working-age adults holding a degree or credential of value by 2025 — the U.S. rate was approximately 38 percent. Today it stands near 55 percent. That progress, achieved with 49 states adopting similar attainment goals and an entire ecosystem of institutions and nonprofits aligning around the target, is real. It is also no longer sufficient.
Lumina’s new goal, announced in 2025, is that by 2040, 75 percent of Americans in the labor force will hold a degree or credential that earns at least 15 percent above what a high school diploma alone produces. The current baseline is 43 percent — measured using the American Community Survey to compare educational attainment with wage outcomes. Cost, debt burden, and opportunity cost will be incorporated into the measurement framework as reliable data sources are developed. The Stronger Nation tool, which has tracked national and state-level attainment transparently for 15 years, will continue to serve as the accountability mechanism.
The shift from the 2025 goal to the 2040 goal reflects a fundamental strategic evolution: attainment without economic value builds neither individual prosperity nor public confidence. A credential that does not produce a measurable earnings premium is not the solution to the trust crisis; it is another version of the same problem. Lumina built the new goal in consultation with state higher education executive officers across red, blue, and purple states. The response was consistent: the nation needs credentials that lead to something, and institutions need to be accountable for whether they do.
What This Means for Institutional Strategy
The implications for presidents and boards are not abstract. The data Brown presents form a coherent set of strategic imperatives:
Institutional credibility depends on transparency, not marketing. Publishing program-level outcomes: what graduates earn, what jobs they get, how much the credential costs in total, is the baseline for rebuilding public trust. Institutions that can show the data should show it. Those that cannot, should treat the gap as a strategic priority, not a communications problem.
Workforce alignment is a moving target that requires an ongoing relationship with employers, not a curriculum review every five years. The new Lumina/Gallup employer data is a starting point for that conversation, not a verdict. Institutions that engage employers as partners in understanding preparation gaps, rather than reacting defensively to criticism, will be better positioned to close those gaps before they become enrollment liabilities.
The report also flags AI as an accelerating pressure point. As AI reshapes job design and skill requirements, credentials will retain their labor-market value only if they reliably produce job-ready skills at the pace the economy now requires. That is not a future problem. It is a current one.
The business model question is unavoidable. Serving today’s students at scale, with the flexibility, support services, and completion infrastructure they need, requires a fundamentally different cost and delivery structure than the one most institutions currently operate. McNaughton points to innovators like Paul Quinn College, whose work-integrated learning model has freshmen and sophomores working for the institution to offset tuition costs and junior and senior students in employer externships earning salaries that do the same. That kind of structural creativity is what institutions need, and it is what academic realignment and organizational redesign make possible.
The stopped-out population is both a moral obligation and an enrollment opportunity. Removing administrative barriers to re-enrollment, building clear and flexible pathways to completion, and connecting returning learners to credentials of genuine economic value is not a side program. It is a central institutional responsibility.
The policy environment makes this more urgent, not less. The report specifically identifies Workforce Pell as a lever that could directly affect how quickly and equitably workers access job-relevant credentials, one your government relations and academic planning teams should be tracking closely right now.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
- Stop playing defense and lead with evidence. The data supporting higher education’s value exists and is more compelling than most institutions’ public messaging suggests. Transparency about outcomes, including where they fall short, builds credibility. Defensive posturing does not.
- Treat the skills gap as a question, not a verdict. When employers say graduates need more training, dig into what that means specifically. Distinguish genuine preparation failures from onboarding realities that exist in every organization. Then act on what the evidence actually shows.
- Redesign for the students who are enrolling, not the ones who were. Flexible scheduling, mental health support, childcare access, and advising that connects coursework to real employment outcomes are completion infrastructure, not amenities. Institutions that treat them as costs to minimize will continue to lose the students they most need to serve.
About Our Podcast Guest
Dr. Courtney Brown is Vice President of Impact and Planning at Lumina Foundation, the nation’s largest private foundation focused on increasing Americans’ postsecondary success. As the Foundation’s Chief Data and Research Officer, she oversees strategic planning, research, evaluation, and learning, and leads Lumina’s international engagement. Dr. Brown holds a B.A. from James Madison University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
Connect with Dr. Courtney Brown on LinkedIn →
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances.
Connect with Dr. Drumm McNaughton on LinkedIn →
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Courtney Brown
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
Transcript 304 – Courtney Brown
[00:00:31] Welcome and Introduction
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David, my guest today. I welcome back Dr. Courtney Brown, Vice President of Impact and planning for the Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation located in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. As Lumina’s Chief Data and Research Officer, Courtney oversees the foundation’s efforts in the areas of strategic planning, learning, impact, and effectiveness. She also leads Lumina’s international engagement. Courtney’s an expert in post-secondary strategy, student success, data-driven decision making, and evidence-based practice, and she joins me today to talk about the reality of higher education’s, loss of public confidence, not just what the media is saying in amplifying, but what employers, graduates, and students are saying about higher education.
We’ll also talk about the foundation’s national goal of 75% college and certificate attainment, something that’s critical for the public good of our nation and the world. Courtney, welcome back to the program.
Courtney Brown: It’s great to be here with you.
Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to our conversation as always. It’s been, what, about four or five months since we’ve chatted. What have you guys been up to?
Courtney Brown: We’ve been up to quite a bit.
[00:01:52] The 2040 Attainment Goal
Courtney Brown: So last year, in the spring of last year, we announced a new goal for the nation, and that goal for the nation is by 2040, 75% of Americans in the labor force will have a degree or other credential that leads to economic prosperity.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow, that’s big. And where is everybody right now?
Courtney Brown: So we’re at about 43% right now as a nation.
[00:02:17] Stronger Nation Dashboard
Courtney Brown: We have something called Stronger Nation. Your audience is free to Google it. Look up Stronger Nation, Lumina Foundation, and you can see the data. We’re really transparent about it. We hold ourselves accountable to the goal using that tool, Stronger Nation.
So in there you can see the nation’s at about 43%, but you can also look at every state, desegregated by credential type and a host of other things. It’s really fun and you can’t break it, so go play.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s neat.
[00:02:41] Courtney’s Career Path
Drumm McNaughton: We’re going to get into that a lot deeper, but before we really get into it, give the listeners just a little bit about your background. I’ve always find it fascinating to see what the guests have done to get in this position, and your story is equally as fascinating.
Courtney Brown: I don’t know about fascinating, maybe scattered it’s more like it, actually. I have an undergraduate degree actually in Spanish and International Affairs. And then I went on to get—
Drumm McNaughton: Habla espanol?
Courtney Brown: Not so much anymore. It’s been quite some time. I got a, actually got a master’s in linguistics. I studied Native American, Indian languages, which was really fascinating and so it seems odd where I am now. Then I move and to get a PhD in research and evaluation, pulling all these things together. And what I like to think about is linguistics and other things are really a puzzle, trying to pull things together and make sense of them. And that’s where I see my current role at Lumina is really pulling together research and data, learning, and try to decide where we go, what we don’t do, and how we get there.
Drumm McNaughton: And it’s so critical for what your role is and frankly, for all of higher education to better understand what is the truth of the matter. Instead of just saying, public perception of higher education is low, it’s like, is that really true? And if so, why?
Courtney Brown: Yes, absolutely. Unpack it. Keep asking questions. The best answers lead to more questions.
Drumm McNaughton: I couldn’t have put it better.
[00:04:09] Data Over Noise
Drumm McNaughton: We were watching an episode of the West Wing and one of them was Lies Damn Lies and Statisticians. And of course with us being in higher ed for as long as we have, we hear that all the time, but there’s some truth to it. You can make stats do nearly anything you want it to do if you’re looking at the right thing. \Your role is to make sure the statistics and the polling is accurate so we can make good data-driven decisions.
Courtney Brown: Absolutely, and try to break through the noise a little bit and make it applicable to what’s going on.
Drumm McNaughton: You’re saying that there’s noise right now in higher ed. Really?
Courtney Brown: You know what? There’s a lot of noise, but there’s always been noise. But right now I would say there’s a little bit of noise going on. Yes.
Drumm McNaughton: So that’s your background. Tell us about Lumina. You guys do some amazing stuff.
[00:05:01] What Lumina Does
Courtney Brown: Yes, so Lumina Foundation, we’re an independent foundation, national foundation, and we’re focused on expanding opportunities for learning beyond high school. I mentioned the goal that we focus on, but we’re really looking for sustainable change to improve American’s lives, to ensure that they have good jobs and good lives moving forward.
So for Lumina, it’s not about having more people get a degree for a degree sake. It’s about increasing the number of Americans who have high quality credentials. We want that to lead to economic mobility, civic engagement, and long-term opportunity. And so we focus all of our efforts on that.
Drumm McNaughton: And it’s very much in line with, rather than the attainment of the degree, is what’s the value of that degree in the marketplace and to the individuals.
Courtney Brown: Absolutely.
[00:05:49] From Attainment to Value
Courtney Brown: So for the last 15 years, Lumina has really been focused on increasing attainment, which is still very important. We have to continue to do that. And when we set the goal for the nation in 2009, about 38% of Americans had a degree. Today about 55% of Americans have a degree or other, so then they have made incredible progress.
And that’s nationally, every state was on board and really worked on this. And so that’s important, but it’s no longer sufficient just to have that degree. As I said, we want to make sure it’s valuable and it’s leading to something for people.
Drumm McNaughton: And when leading to something, it’s not only for economic attainment or economic benefit for the individuals, but there’s also a public good piece of that as well.
Courtney Brown: Absolutely. It’s for the public good, it’s for our economy, for our society. Increasing education helps with all of those things.
[00:06:43]
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:44] Education as Public Good
Drumm McNaughton: And that’s something that’s always fascinating to me because we have shifted over from a public good, what I call the Old Clark Care Model from California, where education is both for the higher good of the nation and the public as well as for the individuals. It’s become much more focused on the individual and what we call WIIFM “what’s in it for me”.
Courtney Brown: And I think that’s a fair point because people invest a lot of time and energy and so they want to make sure they’re going to get something out on the other end. And when we think about our goal, the goal that we’ve set for the nation, it is at that individual level. We are looking at economic prosperity for individuals. Because the more that individuals are prosperous, then the more likely they will contribute to their communities. They’ll vote, they’ll participate, they’re healthier, all of those things which lead to stronger communities, stronger states, and a stronger nation.
Drumm McNaughton: And with that, it’s that old adage, a rising tide floats all boats. If you have a good economy, if you have educated people within that economy, it’s going to lift pretty much everybody up. Is it not?
Courtney Brown: It definitely helps. We need to focus on a lot of people are not being served or served well, and so we need to make sure we’re focusing efforts on all people. But absolutely we’re focused on that 75% of Americans.
Drumm McNaughton: So the transition from attainment to value, your old goal, it was about 17% or somewhere in there of people increasing with degrees.
[00:08:18] Measuring Quality Credentials
Drumm McNaughton: Now you’ve got Stronger Nation, and how are you measuring that goal?
Courtney Brown: Right. So our new goal, we are still using Stronger Nation, so we’ve been reporting transparently all the data in Stronger Nation for the last 15 years. So the measure for the new goal is that it counts as a quality credential if somebody has one of these credentials, a degree, a certificate, workforce certification. But they also have to be making at least 15% over what a high school degree averages alone. And so we are looking for that economic bump, that ROI, if you will, from participating in getting that degree or that credential to the workforce.
Drumm McNaughton: How difficult is that to measure?
Courtney Brown: We are starting with that because we can measure that. We use the American Community Survey. We’re able to look at education level and what wages somebody is making. But it’s not sufficient. We’re starting with that because we can measure that. There are other things that we are really interested in, but we can’t measure them yet.
[00:09:18] Cost and Debt Metrics
Courtney Brown: Like, Cost. What is the cost of getting a credential or a degree? What is the debt that somebody’s taking on and those sort of things and we’re really working on trying to find better ways to measure that. And as soon as we can, we’ll incorporate that measure into Stronger Nation, into our measurement also.
Drumm McNaughton: Well that makes a lot of sense because there’s not only the upfront cost, but there’s the opportunity cost as well.
Courtney Brown: Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:09:44] Why Partner With Gallup
Drumm McNaughton: And so we didn’t mention earlier, and that’s on me, you have a partnership with Gallup where they’re doing a lot of the research. Tell us about that and how it impacts what you’re doing right now.
Courtney Brown: Yes. So we’ve been working with Gallup for a number of years because I noticed that a lot of people in the field try to guess what students are going to do or what students think, and, and that hasn’t worked so well for us. And so instead of just guessing, we actually ask students, we ask current students, we ask people who stopped out, who were a student and stopped out without completing.
We ask people who have never touched higher ed. We ask alumni, we ask the general public. So we ask lots of different groups of people what their perceptions are, what their experience is with higher education.
[00:10:33] Confidence in Higher Ed Drops
Courtney Brown: And one of the things that I took particular interest in is Gallup for many years has asked how confident the public is in a variety of different types of institutions around the country.
That could be small businesses, the police, congress, you can imagine how well they do.
So all these different institutions. But one of the things I noticed a couple years ago was people’s confidence in higher education had taken a sharp nose dive.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Courtney Brown: Well, about 10 years ago, roughly 60% of Americans had a great deal of confidence in higher ed.
Just 10 years ago, 60%. And 10 years later, only about a third of people had a great deal of confidence in higher ed. Worse, a third of people had no confidence in higher education. So I thought that’s a really interesting data point, and this goes back to what does the data tell you? Ask more questions.
So my question was, why? Why are people, why are they lacking confidence? And again, I probably could have guessed, you could have guessed all of those things, but we thought, let’s ask the public. So we asked them why do you not have confidence in higher ed? Or why do you? Or, what are the different reasons?
[00:11:45] Top Reasons for Distrust
Courtney Brown: And some of these we, we maybe could have guessed, but the number one reason people don’t have confidence in higher education was politicization. They felt like it’s too political, that students were getting indoctrinated. That was the number one. Yes. The second reason was they cited lack of job relevant skills.
They didn’t feel like higher ed was training people for the workplace. And this is really about a four year degree is when people were disaggregated the data. The third reason is probably what most people would put is the number one reason. And that’s cost. It’s just not affordable. People aren’t confident that they’re going to spend all this money and get something out of it.
So that was really interesting to me and given that we’re at this moment that higher eds being questioned, not just by policymakers but by families. If you’re an organization like Lumina, committed to increasing attainment, you don’t take that seriously.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. And so I’d like to go through each of those a little bit more because politicalization makes perfect sense. If you disaggregate the data, can you see meaningful results with that?
Courtney Brown: We disaggregated that data that was from the general public, and again, we saw that people were really talking more about a four-year institution than a two-year institution. They have higher confidence, not a lot of confidence, but still higher confidence in two-year institutions, community colleges than they do four-year.
They don’t think they’re as political. They think they’re more connected to the workforce. They’re not as costly.
[00:13:20] Students and Alumni Reality Check
Courtney Brown: But the other thing we did was we looked at what current students are actually saying. So in our annual survey with current students and alumni, we asked them these same questions, because the confidence question really was from the general public. And what we saw from students was really a different thing than what we are seeing from the public.
We saw that 93% of students are confident that they’re learning the skills they need for the jobs they want. The vast majority are confident their degree is going to help them get a job, and 75% of graduates say their degree was critical to getting a job. So when people are questioning that it’s not aligned with the workforce, current students and alumni are saying, actually, I got a job. I do believe I’m learning the right things. So that was just something interesting that we saw where there’s just a difference between what the public perception is and the experience students and alumni ask.
[00:14:18] What Employers Really Want
Drumm McNaughton: With that, what do the employers say?
Courtney Brown: So that’s really interesting. So we have a new study that’s just come out about employers. So we actually asked employers, triangulate your data as current students ask alumni, what are employers, what do they need? And that’s where the story becomes even more complex and really interesting.
So about half of employers, about 48%, say jobs at their organization require a college degree. And three quarters of employers say the degree is going to be as important or more important in five years. And three quarters of employers prefer candidates with a degree that’s an associates or bachelor’s, even when it’s not required.
So we hear a lot in the media about degrees not being required or people are not hiring people with degrees, but that’s not what we’re seeing from these data, from employers. Now, that’s in one bucket, but we also hear employers saying that only about a half of colleges are graduating students with skills their organization needs.
And most of the recent graduates require some or some moderate training for the jobs they need. And about half of them are having a lot of difficulty hiring candidates with the right skills.
Drumm McNaughton: Interesting.
Courtney Brown: Yes, so employers, we see that they still value degrees and they’re signaling that they’ll value them in the future, but they’re clearly telling us that there’s some alignment and readiness problems.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Well it’s also too interesting be because AAC&U did a similar survey about what employers feel higher ed is doing, and I can’t remember if it was 70 or 80% of employers said that higher ed is providing the skills that they need.
Courtney Brown: Yes. Yes. And one of the things, again, back to my comment that data and results always have you ask more questions. It makes me curious about what that additional training, we hear that about 70% say that graduates require moderate or significant additional training.
But I wonder for any new job, you need training to understand that location. So is it that they want colleges to teach at all and that somebody would come out and not need any additional training, or is everybody requires some training because you need to learn the ins and outs of that particular organization.
I’m not sure. So it’s definitely something that I’m interested in exploring further.
Drumm McNaughton: And I think you should.
[00:16:52] The 43 Million Stopouts
Drumm McNaughton: I want to go revert back just a little bit because the politicalization and the quote general public, I am wondering right now I think when we spoke a couple days ago, you had told me there’s 43 million folks out there who have some credits or no credits. They’ve essentially dropped out.
This is one of the big areas that higher ed is trying to recruit back to get them their degree. But how much does this large swath of folks who have dropped out of college, how much is that affecting the public perception?
Courtney Brown: That’s a really interesting point. So Yes, as you said, there are 43 million. 43 million that’s a lot of people. People who started collage and for whatever reason had to stop out. So they accumulated some or a lot of credits and have stopped out with nothing to show for it. And oftentimes I would say the system failed them.
So they probably don’t have a great feeling about higher ed because they tried the system. Some people are probably still paying for that. They took on debt and they have nothing to show for it. So I think it’s definitely something we need to focus on. And I’ve been talking about this population for a number of years because they’re a population that haunts me.
How many people that we have failed. But the number continues to go up year after year. And that’s problematic. So while some people are coming back and some states and institutions are figuring out a way to get these students to, or these individuals to come back and complete something.
Most of them are not. And more people are stopping out than are actually coming back and completing. Which makes this number increase every year.
[00:18:35] Why Today’s Students Stop Out
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and there’s some specific reasons around why they generally drop out. Is there not.
Courtney Brown: Yes, they’re not stopping out because they can’t handle it academically. This isn’t a monolith, first of all. There’s all kinds of reasons for all of these people. I think oftentimes the general public just assumes, oh, they couldn’t cut it. It was too hard. And that’s generally not the reason. They stop out because college collides with work, collides with needing to make money, it collides with life. And so when they’re forced between school and a paycheck’s going to win almost every time, especially when you have children to feed or adults to take care of.
So it’s really hard to balance the two and it just feels overwhelming. And we hear in the Gallup survey that the number one reason people consider stopping out is stress. It’s not surprising if you’ve got to work, you have children of your own, you have people to take care of.
There’s just a lot going on.
Drumm McNaughton: Sure. And schools nowadays, some of them are changing. Arizona State’s a good example of this. But there’s many schools out there who are organized around what people will call trad students, the traditional 18 to 24-year-old where you can stop your life and go to school. We’ve got far more non-trads right now than we do trads, and the number of trads is dropping because of demographic cliff.
Courtney Brown: Yes, and that’s language I don’t usually use because they are today’s students. These are today’s students. They are over 45 years old. A lot of them have children of their own. They’re financially independent. So the picture of the college student leaving high school and going to live in a brick building for four years that their parents are paying for, doesn’t exist for vast majority of Americans.
They are today’s students, and so we really have to design a higher education system to meet those students where they are, and that’s where we do a pretty crummy job.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. I would agree. There needs to be better ways to reach out to these students, different types of support for them. Just going back to those three reasons, stress, mental health, childcare, and costs. These older students will, instead of non-traditional, we’ll call them older, that could be kind of pejorative when I think about myself as being old.
Courtney Brown: I mean 22, you could be 22 and have children to take care of and have to have a full-time job. So it’s not even an age thing, it’s just the reality of today.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And so with that, there needs to be different support mechanisms put in place. And many colleges don’t even stop and think about those kind of things because it would be cost prohibitive for them, completely out of their business model, et cetera.
Courtney Brown: Absolutely. Yes. We think very traditionally that services are available from nine to five and you have to make an appointment, or that assumes that people even know where to find the counseling office, which is often down like a dark hallway somewhere. And it’s not that accessible.
To people, especially if you know you have to go to daycare, drop your child off at daycare, go to your work, and then try to find an office and it’s, closed.
[00:21:56] Designing for Today’s Students
Drumm McNaughton: Courtney, there are these challenges with these, what I call the non-traditional students, which you call, older students or—,
Courtney Brown: I call ’em today’s students.
Drumm McNaughton: Today’s students thank you. That “CRS” gets me all the time. What can I say? So with today’s students, what are some of the things that colleges need to do to make these students feel welcome, successful, and get them to complete their degrees?
Courtney Brown: Yes. I think that we need to do two things. First of all, we need to help the 43 million come back and get a credential of value. And, I think the mistake we made is many institutions reach out to them and offer them to come back exactly to what they were doing before. Clearly that didn’t work and, the students may still owe money to that institution.
They may have unpaid parking debts that don’t even allow them to enroll. So the institution needs to think about what’s going to make it easier to get students to come back, especially those that are close to finishing. Remove some of those administrative barriers, automatically award credentials when you know they’ve met some of these requirements.
Some just forgot to apply for graduation. You actually have to apply. Even if you’ve made all those credits, it’ll just sit there if you haven’t applied.
Offer more flexible scheduling, more, completion grants for some of these students. And at the same time, make sure this doesn’t happen, that we continue to increase these numbers.
So this should be available to all current students. More advising, connect programs clearly to jobs, treat advising and mental health support as core completion strategies, not these extras that are in dark hallways.
Drumm McNaughton: And it’s also interesting because you talk about scheduling and faculty have a big say on the scheduling of class. Also students want preference. There’s a number of institutions out there who I’ve heard complain well, the students are doing online courses from their dorm rooms. It’s like, why not? Who cares?
Courtney Brown: Right, I think finding multiple ways, but I also don’t want to assume that every student who is working doesn’t want to come on campus and take classes in person. I find a mix, what we see in the research, a mix really works well, make sure that students have the opportunity to have some online classes. And then also that opportunity to be in person, if possible.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, I’ve known multiple universities who, if you are a, you know, quote traditional student, that you’re not permitted to take online classes and face-to-face classes at the same time, which to me is crazy.
Courtney Brown: Yes. These days, this is why we have to really rethink our higher education system to better serve today’s students.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. So with this busting myths, we’ve talked about politicalization, we’ve talked about job ready skills, and we peripherally talked about cost as part of the reasons why the 43 million have dropped out.
[00:24:56] Affordability and New Models
Drumm McNaughton: But let’s focus a little bit more on cost. Obviously getting a degree is very expensive. But the return on degree over a lifetime is normally three times. I can understand completely if you’re looking at, if your parents are making 20, 30,000 a year or even more, and your tuition, room and board, fees, et cetera, are going to come to 70 or 80,000, that’s twice what your parents make in a year.
Courtney Brown: Right. And keep in mind, many students are financially independent from their parents, so they’re having to foot this bill. And I would say that, $5,000 is a lot of money. So it’s not even the 60,000, the 80,000, it’s $5,000 when you don’t even have that, that to put food on the table.
So I think there’s some nuance there. I also think, or know from what we see, that students believe in higher education. They believe in the value. They believe it is going to lead to a good job and a good life. They’re less confident in the pricing. They’re less confident that it’s affordable or that colleges charge bare prices.
You can believe in the value of something and still not have the means to actually get there. And I think that’s a tension most students are facing nowadays.
Drumm McNaughton: How do we get past that?
Courtney Brown: We’ve gotta take on affordability, head on. It is out of reach, college is outta reach for far too many people and we have to find ways to make it more affordable.
Drumm McNaughton: The biggest driver of costs for university is people, salaries, and you’ve got tenured faculty who, lifetime employment earners, et cetera. How do we cut back on these type of things? How do we reduce the costs?
Courtney Brown: I think taking a close look at some of the business models is really important. Running a college is not cheap. You don’t want to do the cheap version where you don’t get some of this knowledge and different, support systems like mental health support and these other things we’ve been talking about.
But I also think that colleges, if they focused on what today’s students need and what you know, and students and the credentials that are going to be needed, and who even today’s students are. They might think more about their business model and about adults, about returning adults, about adults who’ve never touched school, about lifelong learning, and begin to open their business model.
So not just thinking about the 18 to 21-year-old who’s going to live on campus, but how do they think bigger? Especially with the demographic cliff, we have fewer and fewer 18 year olds that are going to walk on campus. So they have to rethink who they’re serving and how they’re serving them, if they’re going to survive.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s very true. And for example, if there’s someone who’s preferring to take online classes, do you need as many dorm rooms? No, you don’t. Real estate is a huge cost. You normally get donors to pay for new buildings, et cetera, but there’s also the deferred maintenance that goes into the whole picture.
Courtney Brown: Yes, I think, each institution needs to really look at who they’re serving, who they’re not serving, who do they want to serve in the future, and is there sufficient individuals there? And really think about what they do with that and probably redesign some of their systems.
Drumm McNaughton: I love the model that Paul Quinn College is doing. They’ve got freshman and sophomore year students actually work for the college in jobs. And it helps defer part of their tuition. In junior and senior year, they have externships, internships where they’re actually working for some of the university partners.
They’re earning a salary and that helps defer part of the tuition as well. It’s a win for everybody involved. That to me, that’s a very innovative business model.
Courtney Brown: Yes, that’s an impressive one and others are really thinking through this. I would say that Hired is trying new models, trying different things. So I applaud their efforts and that’s really important. The other thing is, and to bring it back to the top when you start talking about the public good, education is a public good. Talent is a public good for our country.
And we continue to disinvest in that. And so how do we think about at the state level, at the national level, making more investments in higher ed, more investments in our population so that they can get that talent. So institutions need to make some changes. But so are policies are state and federal policies to really think about this being a public good and how do we help more people get there.
Drumm McNaughton: The biggest drivers of economic growth and efficiency productivity are technology and education. Those are your two biggest things. Why are we not thinking of it in those terms? Instead of having to cut back state, federal budgets that fund higher ed.
Courtney Brown: Yes. A lot to think about.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. Any further thoughts?
[00:30:07] Politicization Nuance and Takeaways
Courtney Brown: Yes, I would say the only thing that we didn’t really touch on was that first one about politicization, which is a really interesting piece to me. Because what I said at the top where the American public is losing confidence in higher ed because they think it’s too political.
And an interesting thing when we ask students about this, they reported experiences much more balanced and actually bipartisan than many assume. And, when we looked at the data about confidence, more Republicans had lost confidence in higher ed because they say it’s too political than the Democrats.
Democrats are more focused on the affordability. Republicans were more concerned about that indoctrination piece, that political piece. But when we ask students, current students, regardless of political affiliation, they had more balanced, more positive experiences and felt like they belonged on their canvases more than what the general public is saying.
So I think that’s a really important thing to pay attention to also.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s not surprising for me having been on campuses for a good portion of my working career. But it doesn’t surprise me in that, we see so many cuts in higher education and politicians have to have a reason for justifying these cuts. Oh, you’re too woke, that’s a big one we see out of Florida and there’s a stacking of the boards of right wing.
What they’re doing is, to me, it’s to make a political point instead of trying to provide a great education that really looks at both sides of the coin.
Courtney Brown: Yes, I think it’s important to look at both sides and talk to students. I also think in all of this there’s a glimmer of truth also. So, none of this is perfect and there are definitely students who feel silenced. It wasn’t a hundred percent said everything is going great here.
Drumm McNaughton: Really? People feel, they, it’s not a hundred percent. I’m shocked.
Courtney Brown: Like when we think, like it’s a chance to say, okay, what isn’t working here? Who did not feel like they belong? And what can we do about that to make sure that when we admit students here and we want to increase access, we want to have more people to have this opportunity. We want to make sure that they can succeed here.
That means that they listen to, they can share their opinions, they can hear other opinions, that they feel like they belong. They feel like they are respected by staff, by faculty, by their fellow students. And I think every institution should take a look at what’s going on in their schools and think about how they can make it better.
Drumm McNaughton: When I look at higher ed, I look at three purposes. There’s obviously the individual, the economic, the growth from that perspective, the learning. There’s the public good, but there’s also a huge transformation piece, especially with younger students. They’re going away from home, possibly for the first time, or commuting.
They’re making decisions on their own. This is a critical piece in their transformation. This is a critical piece in their growth. And I think people are forgetting that it is economic, it is public good, and it’s individual transformation.
Courtney Brown: Absolutely.
Drumm McNaughton: So as always, Courtney, it’s a pleasure to see you and have you back on the show. As we always do, three takeaways, university presidents and boards. What do they need to be doing right now?
Courtney Brown: So I would say stop playing defense. Lead with the evidence. People are questioning whether students are getting value. Just show the data and be transparent about it. And where you’re failing, work on it, improve that. So lead with evidence.
The second one I would say is you need to close that skills perception gap. So if students employers say grads need more training, question that, what other training? Are there other things we can do to make sure that our students are workforce ready, that they can get a good job out of school.
And then, it goes back to today’s students, to the modern learner. Redesign for the modern learner. Think about flexibility, mental health support, childcare support. Things are going to help the current students, today’s students, really thrive and succeed.
Drumm McNaughton: Those are three great takeaways, especially for students nowadays. Thank you.
What’s next for you? What’s next for Lumina?
Courtney Brown: As I mentioned at the top, we announced this new goal earlier in 2025. And so really talking about that new goal, making sure that we have good measures and we really focus on cutting through the noise and focusing on ensuring that we’re building the talent in the US for today and tomorrow.
Drumm McNaughton: Please keep doing what you’re doing. It’s so critical to our whole industry, and frankly our way of life. Thank you.
Courtney Brown: Thanks so much for having me.
Drumm McNaughton: Our pleasure. I look forward to the next time. Hopefully it will be, maybe next week or two. No, I’m just kidding. Maybe just in a few months when you have more research to talk about.
Courtney Brown: I look forward to it.
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you.
Courtney Brown: Thank you.
Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Courtney Brown. Courtney, it’s always a pleasure having you on the show. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk about these important issues.
To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.
