December 16, 2025 · Episode 290
Strategic Insights from the 2025 AAC&U Employer Survey: What Employers Really Think About Higher Education
45 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
What the 2025 AAC&U Employer Survey reveals about employer confidence in higher education, civic skills, AI readiness, and institutional agility.
Employers are far more aligned with higher education than today’s public and political narratives suggest—and the 2025 AAC&U Employer Survey makes that disconnect impossible to ignore. In this episode of Changing Higher Ed, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Ashley Finley of the Association of American Colleges and Universities about her AAC&U’s 2025 Employer Survey, The Agility Imperative: How Employers View Preparation for an Uncertain Future, and what it reveals about the real-world employer views of college degrees, civic learning, AI readiness, and the skills that matter most for an uncertain future.
This conversation builds on nearly 20 years of longitudinal employer research and offers one of the clearest signals yet that employers continue to value higher education, often in ways that contradict prevailing public narratives. The findings challenge institutions to rethink how they communicate learning outcomes, how they integrate career readiness across the curriculum, and how they prepare students for a labor market defined less by fixed roles and more by adaptability, judgment, and purpose.
Higher Education’s Value Through the Employer Lens
One of the most striking throughlines of the 2025 survey is how strongly employers affirm the value of higher education itself. Despite persistent public debate around cost and return on investment, employers report high confidence in colleges and universities as engines of workforce preparation and civic development.
Employers do not frame college narrowly as job training. Instead, they place equal importance on two outcomes that institutions often treat as competing priorities: preparing a skilled and educated workforce and developing informed citizens. This alignment reinforces a core premise AAC&U has advanced for decades, that a liberal education rooted in broad learning, critical inquiry, and civic responsibility remains central to long-term career success.
The survey also reinforces that employers continue to value the bachelor’s degree as a meaningful signal of preparation, particularly when paired with experiences that demonstrate applied learning. This does not diminish the growing role of certificates and microcredentials. Employers increasingly see these credentials as additive signals of capability, especially when they make specific skills or experiences more visible. The survey makes clear that degrees and microcredentials are not competing currencies but complementary ones, a point addressed in greater detail later in this post. For institutional leaders, this matters because it directly counters the narrative that employers have broadly abandoned degrees in favor of short-term credentials alone. The issue is not whether degrees matter, but whether institutions are transparent about what students gain from them.
Employers Define Civic Skills as Core Workplace Competencies
A defining feature of the 2025 survey is the strength of employer support for civic learning and open inquiry. Employers overwhelmingly endorse campus environments where students are exposed to diverse perspectives and encouraged to engage with difficult topics.
For the first time, AAC&U asked employers directly about constructive disagreement as a skill. The response was unequivocal. Employers value graduates who can engage across differences, navigate disagreement productively, and work with people who hold competing views. These capacities are not seen as peripheral or political. They are viewed as essential for team-based work, leadership, and problem-solving in complex organizations.
Employers also report that they look more favorably on degrees from institutions known for respecting diverse viewpoints and protecting open discussion. This finding holds across political affiliations, with relatively little polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Where differences do emerge, they are driven primarily by respondents who identify as independent, who tend to express lower confidence across multiple measures.
For campus leaders navigating political pressure around curriculum and speech, these findings provide critical context. Employer expectations align far more closely with academic norms of open inquiry than with restrictive approaches to learning. Importantly, the survey shows that employers who identify as Republican largely share these views, underscoring a disconnect between employer sentiment and the more confrontational political rhetoric that often dominates public discourse about higher education.
Employers Treat Mindsets and Dispositions as Baseline Hiring Expectations
Beyond technical skills, the 2025 survey reinforces the rising importance of mindsets and dispositions. Employers consistently rate qualities such as motivation, initiative, resilience, persistence, and self-awareness as highly important for long-term success.
These are not viewed as soft or secondary attributes. They are increasingly treated as baseline expectations, particularly in environments characterized by rapid change and uncertainty. Employers recognize that job-specific skills will evolve, but the ability to adapt, recover from failure, and continue learning determines whether employees advance.
The challenge for higher education is not whether these capacities matter, but where and how they are developed. Too often, responsibility for mindset development is pushed entirely into student affairs or co-curricular programming. The survey suggests this separation no longer reflects how employers understand preparation for work.
Institutions that intentionally integrate mindset development into both curricular and co-curricular experiences are better positioned to help students articulate these capacities and demonstrate them to employers.
How Employers View AI Readiness Beyond Tool Proficiency
Artificial intelligence occupies a distinct place in the 2025 report. Employers overwhelmingly agree that graduates need AI-related competencies, and most express confidence that colleges and universities are beginning to meet this need.
Younger employers, executives, and those in technology sectors place especially high importance on AI literacy. However, the conversation goes beyond tool use. Employers are grappling with how AI reshapes existing skills such as writing, quantitative reasoning, creativity, and ethical judgment.
Rather than treating AI as a standalone technical skill, the discussion points toward a more integrated approach. AI changes how work is done, but it does not replace the need for human judgment, agency, and responsibility. Institutions face growing pressure to help students understand not just how to use AI tools, but how to apply them thoughtfully within professional and ethical contexts.
This reframing reinforces a central theme of the report: adaptability matters more than mastery of any single technology.
Which Student Experiences Employers Say Increase Hiring Likelihood
Employers consistently report that applied experiences significantly influence hiring decisions. Internships remain highly valued, but they are not the only pathway employers recognize.
Leadership roles, campus employment, community-based projects, mentoring, and working across differences all carry substantial weight. These findings matter because internships are difficult to scale equitably, while many other high-impact experiences already exist within institutional structures.
The opportunity for higher education lies in making these experiences visible, intentional, and connected to learning outcomes. When students can articulate what they gained from leadership, service, or campus work, employers are more likely to view them as workforce-ready.
Microcredentials and Credibility
The 2025 survey also examines employer perceptions of microcredentials. A large majority of employers report that digital badges and certificates positively influence hiring decisions.
Credibility, however, matters. Employers express the greatest confidence in microcredentials issued by colleges or universities, particularly when developed in partnership with industry leaders. This finding reinforces the role institutions can play in shaping a more coherent credentialing ecosystem rather than ceding that space entirely to external providers.
For presidents and boards, this has strategic implications. Microcredentials are not replacements for degrees but complements that can make learning more legible and responsive to emerging needs.
Generational Shifts in Employer Expectations
One of the most consistent patterns across AAC&U employer surveys is the generational divide. Employers under 40 place a higher value on civic engagement, community-based learning, and global awareness. They also express greater confidence in graduates’ preparation.
As these employers move into senior leadership and C-suite roles, their expectations will increasingly shape hiring practices and organizational culture. This trend suggests that investments in civic learning and integrated education align with where employer demand is heading, not where it has been.
What the 2025 Employer Survey Signals for Presidents and Boards
For presidents and boards, the 2025 Employer Survey offers both reassurance and challenge. Employers continue to value higher education, but they expect institutions to be clearer, more integrated, and more agile in how they prepare students.
Career readiness cannot be siloed into career services alone. Faculty engagement, curricular design, and co-curricular alignment all play critical roles. Institutions that treat learning outcomes, civic engagement, and workforce preparation as interconnected rather than competing priorities are better positioned to thrive.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
1. Transparency must extend beyond skills to mindsets and dispositions.
Employers are clear that institutions need to do a better job helping students understand not just what skills they are acquiring, but how those skills connect to who they are becoming as professionals. Confidence, self-awareness, motivation, and the ability to articulate learning matter as much as technical preparation. Institutions that make these outcomes explicit give graduates a stronger foundation for navigating early career transitions.
2. Career-relevant experiences extend well beyond internships.
While internships remain important, employers also place high value on leadership roles, campus-based employment, and other applied experiences. These opportunities are often easier to scale and more equitable than internships alone. The work ahead is helping institutions recognize, structure, and communicate the career relevance of experiences students are already having.
3. Institutions must actively support agility rather than fear change.
Employers value adaptability because work itself is changing. Higher education cannot promote agility in students while remaining institutionally rigid. Supporting faculty and staff through change, experimenting with new models, and aligning structures to evolving needs are now central leadership responsibilities.
Bonus Takeaway from Dr. McNaughton
Employers continue to value higher education, and that message is being lost.
Beyond individual skills or credentials, the survey reinforces that employers believe in the overall value of higher education and the bachelor’s degree. Cost concerns and political narratives have obscured this reality, but employer confidence remains strong. Institutions should lean into this finding as they communicate value and engage employers as partners.
Final Reflections
A final theme running through the conversation is the disconnect between public rhetoric and employer reality. While debates about cost and value dominate headlines, employers continue to affirm the importance of higher education. The challenge ahead is not proving that college matters, but clearly articulating how learning translates into capability, purpose, and adaptability over time.
For higher education leaders, the 2025 AAC&U Employer Survey provides a grounded, evidence-based foundation for reframing the narrative and guiding strategic decisions in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Quick Overview
- Employers continue to express strong confidence in higher education, a reality that contrasts sharply with dominant public narratives about cost and value discussed in the conversation.
- The 2025 employer data reinforces that preparing an educated workforce and developing informed citizens are not competing goals but mutually reinforcing outcomes.
- Employers explicitly frame civic capacities, including engaging across disagreement and navigating diverse perspectives, as practical workplace skills rather than abstract ideals.
- Mindsets and dispositions such as motivation, resilience, initiative, and self-awareness are now treated by employers as baseline expectations for long-term success, not secondary attributes.
- AI readiness is less about tool proficiency and more about how institutions help students apply judgment, ethics, communication, and agency in AI-enabled environments.
- Employers signal that hiring advantage comes from applied experiences that demonstrate responsibility and leadership, including campus employment and leadership roles, not internships alone.
- Microcredentials and certificates matter most when they clarify learning and are issued or endorsed by credible institutions, positioning them as complements to degrees rather than replacements.
- Younger employers place especially high value on civic learning and community engagement, suggesting future hiring norms will increasingly reward these experiences.
- Institutions risk losing credibility if they ask students to be adaptable while remaining structurally resistant to change themselves.
- The core leadership challenge highlighted in the discussion is not proving higher education’s relevance but communicating learning outcomes with clarity and confidence to students and employers alike.
About the Podcast Guest
Dr. Ashley Finley is the Vice President for Research and Senior Advisor to the President for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). She oversees AAC&U’s Office of Public Purpose and Opportunity which develops integrative approaches to linking students’ career preparation, civic engagement, and well-being. Through research, campus-based projects, and partnerships, this work advances higher education’s commitments to supporting economic, community, and individual thriving. Her publications include: The Career-Ready Graduate: What Employers Say About the Difference College Makes; A Comprehensive Approach to Assessment of High-Impact Practices; and The Effects of Community-Based and Civic Engagement in Higher Education. She also currently serves as a commissioner for the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC).
Dr. Finley was previously the senior director of assessment and research at AAC&U and also national evaluator for Bringing Theory to Practice. She also served as the Associate Vice President for Academic affairs and Dean of the Dominican Experience at Dominican University of California, where she implemented a comprehensive framework for student learning and success centered around high-impact practices. Dr. Finley began her career as a faculty member at Dickinson College. She received a BA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MA and PhD, both in sociology, from the University of Iowa.
Connect with Dr. Ashley Finley 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 key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 290 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Ashley Finley – AAC&U 2025 Employer Survey
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.
[00:00:31] Introduction and Guest Introduction
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Dr. Ashley Finley, Vice President of Research and Senior Advisor to the President for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Ashley has had a long career in higher ed, including at AAC&U where she was the national evaluator for Bringing Theory to Practice Project (BT2P), Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Deans at Dominican University of California and at Dickinson College.
AAC&U just published its 2025 employer survey, the first survey in two years, and Ashley as author and principal investigator joins me today to discuss its implications on higher education. What employers really think about a college degree. Hint. Very good. And for the first time ever, breaking demographics down by political affiliation with surprising revelations.
Ashley, welcome back to the program. It feels like old home week for me.
Ashley Finley: I know it’s great to see you, Drumm. Thanks for making time to have this conversation. I appreciate it.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, thank you.
[00:01:37] Overview of AAC&U and Its Mission
Drumm McNaughton: You guys just released your 2025 report on employers and what they want. I was blown away when I read it. It’s just fabulous stuff.
But before we get into that, please tell my listeners what I already know, what a great person you are in this role, and give us a little bit of your background.
Ashley Finley: Oh, thanks. I am privileged to be in this role. I am the Vice President of Research and Senior Advisor to the President at AAC&U, the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Well, with regard to me, I’m a sociologist by training. Actually my background as a sociologist was in work and occupation, so I just kind of dig this stuff.
It’s just my jam. I’m like, work is cool and work is interesting and why people do work and how people end up and the kind of work they’re seeking is very much always something that I’ve been very interested in. So it’s a great pleasure to be able to do this research and for AAC&U, which I think adds a particular lens on the way that we tell this story and we actually think about what the employer narrative is around the skills that matter, the skills and experiences that matter for students. We are a membership association. We’ve been around for over a hundred years, 110 years actually.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow. Wow.
Ashley Finley: One of the oldest, and I always like to say that one of the reasons that AAC&U stands out or is a little bit different in the landscape of higher ed associations, nonprofit associations, is that we are an association united by an idea. Rather than a single stakeholder type or a single sector of college or university. So we serve all stakeholders. We do tend to work mostly on the academic affairs side within the curriculum, but technically we serve all stakeholders that are invested in higher education and all sectors.
And that is because our membership is united by an idea, and that is that all students should have access to an education that frees the mind. And that is by definition a liberal education, but it’s from the Latin root Liber which is “to free”. And so that is an education that allows students to expand their thinking, free their mind, and think for themselves.
Drumm McNaughton: I wish I could remember all that. It’s just— I have always admired AAC&U for the work that you’ve done. I was first exposed to it with your rubrics.
Ashley Finley: Yeah. Yeah. The value rubrics. Mm-hmm.
Drumm McNaughton: But then as you and I have met and you’ve educated me on all the different things that AAC&U does, it’s an incredible organization. 110 years?
Ashley Finley: Thank you.
[00:04:26] The Evolution of AAC&U
Ashley Finley: Yes, yes, and I think for the relevance of our conversation today, right? Like it’s a very old association and so we have a long view on how learning has changed. For example, we started out as AAC it was the Association of American Colleges. And in the nineties we added the U to acknowledge the expansion of the kinds of institutions we were working with that we needed to expand and work with universities.
And then, in around 2020 or so, we changed to the American Association of Colleges and Universities rather than the Association of American Colleges and Universities. And that was an acknowledgement that we have global partners. So we were never constraining our membership to only focus on just those within the United States.
So in our own even naming evolution as an association, we’ve always had to acknowledge those kinds of changes.
[00:05:20] Employer Studies and Changing Skill Demands
Ashley Finley: And I think along with that, we’ve been doing employer studies for almost 20 years, for just about 20 years. And in just in that time, we have seen an amazing change in how we think about the skills that we’re asking about, the experiences we’re asking about, we’re asking about AI now, it might grow credentials.
These are things that absolutely did not appear in the 2007 employer report.
Drumm McNaughton: Oh for sure. And, you know, who would’ve even dreamed of a micro-credential back then? It was like, get your college degree. Get your college degree.
[00:05:54] The Value of College Degrees and Microcredentials
Drumm McNaughton: And now there is such a public outcry for the cost of that degree. But when I read your study, it’s like the employers want that degree. Somehow that narrative is missing from the public discussion.
Ashley Finley: Agreed. Agreed. And I would add, because I hope that I can say just enough in this conversation that people actually go and maybe read the report, at least look at the pretty graphs. And then take, get some, take home messages—
Drumm McNaughton: Pictures always work.
Ashley Finley: There’s always the— Hey we got to work in visuals and accessibility in all kinds of ways.
But one of the things I hope people think about when they get to that section on Microcredentials, what does it mean to have a badge or certificate? I am old enough to be able to say that when I was an undergraduate, I got a certificate in women’s studies. So it’s not like certificates themselves are new. This was in the early to mid nineties and—
Drumm McNaughton: Oh you were 14 back then, weren’t you?
Ashley Finley: I was so young. I was such a prodigy. And I was exactly that age. And it’s not like that idea of how we bundle learning is different. It’s, here’s what I think the difference is, Drumm. I think it’s the ability to formalize it.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, I agree.
Ashley Finley: The ability to formalize it, the ability to make it a digital credential that can be posted on LinkedIn, because now that kind of a platform exists, that is the game changer.
So in many ways, some of the concepts are not so new. AI, in many ways has been around for a very long time, but the ways in which it’s used, the ways in which it’s infiltrated, the ways in which it gets formalized, the ways it gets embedded, these are the ways in which we are grappling anew with some of these concepts.
Drumm McNaughton: Lets just jump right into the report because you guys have been doing this for almost 20 years. I think I heard you just say 2007 was your first.
Ashley Finley: Yes. Yes. Around 2005, 2007. Yes.
Drumm McNaughton: And we’ve talked about the 2020 report. We talked about the 2023 report. That one focused a lot on those intangible skills, the abilities to work in teams, critical thinking, analyzing data, et cetera. Your 2025 report is a bit different. You’ve taken it in some new directions.
Ashley Finley: Exactly. Exactly. Well, we’ve added pieces that I—
Drumm McNaughton: “Added” that’s better way put it. Yeah,
Ashley Finley: Yeah. That I think and I hope continue to reflect our ability to look at what learning means in, I feel strange to say the 21st century, because we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century. So it feels sort of old now. Say like the 21st century. Yeah, 25 years ago.
But I hope that what we continue to do are in our reports. And I think what excites us about doing each new report is the ability to take a look at what that learning environment means now and how it’s represented.
[00:08:56] Civic Skills as Professional Skills
Ashley Finley: So we have, over the last two reports, 2023 into 2025, I think we are able to make our strongest case ever that civic skills are professional skills.
There is a false binary, that this is a false binary, between who students are in their communities and who they are in the workplace. That we can actually connect the dots, and really probably ought to be connecting the dots, in ways that make that the learning environment one in which students can increasingly see the alignment between their civic self and their professional self. It is those capacities and these are asking questions of employers very specifically around civic skills, civility, the ability to engage in constructive disagreement, the ability to engage in topics in which there are diverse views, and they need to come to some kind of a mutual acknowledgement of difference in those views.
In this study for the first time one of, I think, the really critical soundbites is we asked employers what effectively, what they thought the purpose of college is. And the top two that were basically the same was to have a skilled and educated workforce—
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Ashley Finley: —and to equip informed citizens.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow.
Ashley Finley: Those were the top two. They were right in tandem with each
Drumm McNaughton: That goes right back to the Clark Care Model of higher education for the public good.
Ashley Finley: Sure. Absolutely. Yes. Yes.
Drumm McNaughton: And there’s so much talk about, in higher ed right now, you have to have a return on investment. You’re putting X number of dollars. It goes way beyond ROI, or at least it should.
Ashley Finley: Or it helps reframe what that ROI means.
Drumm McNaughton: Good point.
Ashley Finley: Right? I started our conversation by talking a little bit about my work and occupations. My background in that really, I’m biased, but really fascinating literature about why people enjoy what they do.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Ashley Finley: And for anybody that enjoys what they do, salary is part of it, but it’s by no means all of it.
So we have known for a very long time that the idea that students and people in general, can derive a sense of purpose from whatever it is they do is meaningful. So the way in which we can connect public purpose, civic identity, contributing to communities, being part of a larger equation, being part of a social network solving social problems.
I’m not going to suggest that students don’t want money and don’t want a decent or living wage, right? But we can’t, we shouldn’t underestimate, and I think we consistently do underestimate the sense of purpose of how meaningful it is to have a sense of purpose in the work that you do.
Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. It really, in a lot of respects, my dissertation, one of the folks I relied on was a sociology researcher.
Ashley Finley: Okay.
Drumm McNaughton: And we had many conversations around this type of thing. It’s not all about the money. It goes into Maslow’s Hierarchy. How do you get to that self-actualization?
It’s not working a job. You may be making, $300, $400, $500,000 a year, but if you’re not happy doing what you do, the money is not going to be the substitute for happiness. That’s got to come from within.
Ashley Finley: Exactly. We could spend a whole podcast talking on this topic, but I will just mention if people are really interested in this probably the organization that knows this best is the Gallup organization. The Gallup organization has been studying wellbeing for decades.
They have a five part model. And the five different dimensions of what wellbeing is and the dimension of career, or what they call purpose wellbeing, is actually the most important of all five of the dimensions. So it is one’s rating or measurement on that career purpose wellbeing that will have the greatest impact on their overall wellbeing. Goes back directly to this point.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s neat.
Ashley Finley: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: So freedom to learn.
That’s what we’re talking about. In many respects, it’s the exposure to multiple different points of view. It’s civic engagement, being able to have open and diverse conversations. People had strong opinions of this.
Ashley Finley: They do. So a credit to David Tritelli [https://www.aacu.org/people/david-tritelli] who is a good friend and deeply smart person who’s our vice president of communications at AAC&U back in 2022. When we were putting together what would become the ’23 report. David said, you know, we’re in a really interesting time about how topics can be discussed on campus. The degree to which there is open dialogue, the reach which there can be open dialogue. So we asked a series of questions that appear in our 2023 report [https://www.aacu.org/research/the-career-ready-graduate-what-employers-say-about-the-difference-college-makes] way at the end. And they were questions around— and had never asked these anything, ever even thought to ask these of if employers— do employers have an opinion about the kind of learning environment students come from?
And so we asked questions like, and I can share with you, for example, “all topics should be open for discussion on college campuses.” Another question was, ” as an employer, I would look more favorably upon a degree from an institution known for respecting diverse perspectives.” And another question, “I would look more favorably upon a degree from an institution that was not subject to government restrictions on what students learn and discuss.”
What we found in 2023 was that there was zero ambiguity in the idea that employers value these things highly. They do want topics to be discussed. They would look more favorably on those types of institutions. So we re-ask those questions two years later, found even higher scores. So to the magnitude of just about half, so 51% said that they strongly support, strongly agree with statements that students should have access to be able to talk about all topics. Nearly half of all employers strongly agree. Now, if you put the somewhat agree with it, it shoots way up to like four out of five employers are saying this close to 90%. Super high. But just strongly agree, almost half of employers say that they would look more favorably on those types of institutions.
And then we have some differences across the political spectrum there. But on the whole, we have employers that are just endorsing the fact that students should have the ability to engage, I think we would say our difficult conversations, our disagreements across perspectives.
[00:15:57] The Importance of Constructive Disagreement
Ashley Finley: And this, in 2025, was the first time we asked about a constructive disagreement, that as a skill. And when we asked employers about that, do you value the ability for students to engage in constructive disagreement during their time in college as a skill or an experience that they’re having?
And employers, absolutely resoundingly said, yes, that is valuable.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s not like everybody agrees with you in the workplace or anywhere else. The image comes to mind, shortly after Trump was elected for his first term and families across the Thanksgiving table didn’t know how to discuss him because, you were either pro MAGA or you were vehemently opposed.
And that’s just continuation from back in the nineties and even earlier, it’s all of that on steroids. But you’ve got to be able to discuss it constructively and be able to say, I understand your point. I’m sorry, I don’t agree with it.
Ashley Finley: Exactly. So that was clear indicator of, again, the idea that employers care deeply about who, how students are able to interact in teams. And one thing that we have found really consistently over our employer studies over the years is the high value on teamwork. In actuality, and I always talk about this when I present on just the data and the longitudinal nature of that particular finding around teamwork, I always hasten to add that the prompt isn’t just teamwork, it’s actually the ability for students to work in diverse teams.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Ashley Finley: And then that always gave me the opportunity to say, well, employers really value the ability to disagree. And I think what we finally found in 2025, because we really asked about it, was yes, that it’s not just the teamwork, it is the ability to engage in topics and matters in which you don’t agree with people.
And how will you move through that? How will you find a place of understanding and common problem solving?
[00:18:06] Political Affiliation and Employer Preferences
Drumm McNaughton: And one of the things that really impressed me this time with your survey is you started breaking down political affiliation with some of your questions. And at least some of the things that I read, there wasn’t that much of a difference between political affiliation and the way folks answered questions.
Ashley Finley: I appreciate that Drumm. I agree. I’m always mindful as somebody who’s been a quantitative researcher for vast majority of my career. It’s really mostly the methodology I was trained in. And I have an appreciation for how statistics can be read. So it’s always validating when somebody else kind of it way you do.
Drumm McNaughton: Damn liars and statisticians. Yeah.
Ashley Finley: Fantastic Mark Twain quote, there’s always a really great Mark Twain quote Always. for everything. But I agree. And this actually, I thought the other piece was one that we didn’t see. And this actually happened in the questions I just was reading you around employers preference, around topics being discussed on campuses.
Again, in the 2023 report, we did not find much difference in political party. Not anything significant.
[00:19:16] Independents and Their Unique Perspectives
Ashley Finley: This time around we found the same, like there just wasn’t a lot of difference except for independence.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, I saw that.
Ashley Finley: Independence were actually the ones who ended up being substantially lower. And, sorry, I don’t mean to laugh at that, but it does speak to a kind of shift in how we think about and acknowledge probably dissatisfaction on both sides of the equation, right? Dissatisfaction on either end of the political spectrum and the growing influence of independence. But they mostly, they were mostly the significant difference. When we found political party differences, it was because of the independence.
It wasn’t the polarized split between Democrats and Republicans. It was actually, it was the independents who were lower on everything, lower levels of agreement, lower levels of confidence in preparation or value of certain experiences. That’s really what we found.
Drumm McNaughton: You see in the political polls, it’s usually the independence that sway things one way or another. But it’s unusual. It surprises me that they were as low as they were in these particular categories.
Ashley Finley: I agree. I agree. It stood out. They were probably the smallest group, were the smallest group among them. It could have been, these are can be the idiosyncrasies of a sample, but it was an interesting finding from our study.
Drumm McNaughton: Moving on, you know, there were four main areas that we chatted about.
[00:20:43] Diving into AI and Future Skills
Drumm McNaughton: AI, do we want to go into AI? Do we want to go into mindset and dispositions first? You tell me.
Ashley Finley: Either way. You know, part of in asking a specific question, I’m going to respond with a broader thing, which is, it was interesting to kinda think of where to position AI. I thought, and it appears in kind of a funny place in the report, I’ll just admit that, we go through a list of skills and abilities and mindsets that have been consistently important. And I kind of isolated, I made this decision to sort of isolate how we talk about AI. because it really is its own topic. It’s kind of, it’s this zeitgeist moment. It’s very much in the line sight of just about everyone. \ But it is interesting to think about where it fits in as a skill, as a literacy.
The questions we asked about it were really, how do employers view the importance of students’ ability to use AI tools effectively to build their AI literacy, and the degree to which they think students are prepared. And we broke that out by employers under the age of 40, those in the tech industry and also by executives versus hiring managers.
So we tried to get some nuance going and how we were thinking about it. Because everybody’s saying employers think it’s important.
[00:21:58] AI’s Impact on Skills and Communication
Ashley Finley: I think we found that too, for sure. But it seems to be even more important for employers under the age of 40, executives, so those are those C-suite executives, and then also those in the tech industry, found some significant difference in all of those \ dualities of either side of the spectrum there.
But how it will influence, and think about, , I write this in the report, how should we think about AI as its own skill? How will we think about AI too, and the way that it influences other skills.
Drumm McNaughton: Good point.
Ashley Finley: So how does AI change the way we think about written communication? How does AI change the way we think about creativity?
How does AI change the way we think about quantitative literacy? You know, in some ways the ways that the calculator change the way we think about what it means to establish and improve quantitative literacy. So I think we get to ask… continue to ask questions about the way in which AI is viewed as its own skill building and the way it is have a massive effect just on the way we understand existing skills that we have always known are important.
That feels to me like a thorny bit to chew on, and I don’t think we have any answers. I don’t think anybody’s got any answers on this. But I hope we can continue to contribute again to the conversation in ways that help faculty, student affairs professionals, really all educators on a campus, really think about how are they helping students to engage with this?
And this kind of goes, this is where I was going with this the whole time, is then when we talk about it, how do we talk about mindsets, like what it means to be an ethical person. Morality. What does it mean to motivation, agency? Does the student have the same level of agency if they put something in AI? Or maybe it’s just their ability to get motivated to have a really good AI prompt.
I am continued to be really fascinated by how we think about what this means.
[00:23:59] AI and the Future of Work
Drumm McNaughton: Well, from an AI perspective, to me, and this is just a neophile, because I can spell chatGPT, I’m real proud of being able to spell it. But, I do use it from time to time, for certain things. My team uses it far more than I do. But when I think about how it’s going to change things, I look at it like the PC.
When the PC came, there was the killer app of Lotus 1-2-3. Initially there were huge mainframes. We had this small computer on our, well, it wasn’t so small back then, but we had this computer on our desk and people were going, “what do we use this for?” And all of a sudden with Lotus 1-2-3, that quote killer app, it got people and managers saying, I can do my budget on this, I can do spreadsheets, whatever.
And everybody wanted one. With AI, it’s completely changing the way we approach things. I think at five years we’re not going to have people writing code anymore. AI will be able to do it better than we can. In some cases they can do that now. So it’s changing the roles and higher ed is going to have to change how they train people, which is why I love what you guys do at AAC&U because you’re looking at what are the skills that employers need.
AI’s going to be able to do a lot of the knowledge. They’re not going to be able to do the human, the resilience, the adaptability, that type of thing. The mindset, the dispositions.
Ashley Finley: Yes. Yes.
[00:25:38] AAC&U 2025 Report-The Agility Imperative: How Employers View Preperation for an Uncertain Future
Ashley Finley: Well, and I think these are, well, if anything is underscoring all of this, it’s the title of the report. The title of the report is the Agility Imperative: How Employers View Preparation for an Uncertain Future [So it’s, at the end of the day, it is. What are the kinds of skills and abilities, personal capacities, that I do believe are built in higher education settings, that will keep students agile, nimble, adaptable, right? So that it isn’t about the job that exists now. It is in dispensed many times, but it’s truer now than ever. It’s about the job that doesn’t yet exist. In part because the problems of the future and the problems of our communities and the problems of our global world, our global workplace, don’t yet exist.
It may even be emerging in some ways, but we cannot fathom the ways that all of them will emerge and what exactly the shape of the jobs that are created to solve the problems and solve the needs of those future communities, what they will be. So the ability to think about the balance between technical skills and broad skills, something AAC&U has been preaching for a very long time, feels more relevant than ever. And I would hasten add, and we don’t do, there’s not a specific kind of question on this in the report, but that will take all disciplines, that will take the thinking and content and inquiry of all of the disciplines, the liberal arts, the professions, all of them.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely.
[00:27:14] Interdisciplinary Approaches to Problem Solving
Drumm McNaughton: It makes me think back to one of my original podcast guests. I think she was on a podcast number in the teens (podcast number 15), and, she put together biotech up at UC Davis, Professor Emerita.
Ashley Finley: Mm-hmm.
Drumm McNaughton: In tackling the problems there, they had specialist in biology in chemistry, in physics, multiple disciplines. And we’re all talking PhD level brain power. But that was the type of problems that they were attacking. That’s the same thing here. There’s so much unknown. It’s not that you’re going in to guess, but you have to get the most informed minds you can to try to at least figure out where it might be going.
I don’t think anybody’s got a really good idea. Maybe we should just ask AI where it’s going, I don’t know.
Ashley Finley: Yes. There you go. There you go.
Drumm McNaughton: So, and the role of education becomes even more critical in something like this because you’re teaching skills, but more importantly you’re teaching thinking, how to think about issues, and you’re teaching motivation.
Ashley Finley: Exactly. Exactly. I think even the kinds of skills that we’ve asked about the 2023 we really lean, and certainly in 2025, we’ve really leaned into this idea of mindsets and dispositions are not just the fluffy things on the side. These are rapidly becoming the non-negotiables, that these are every bit as important that when we say, “what are employers looking for? ” They’re looking for critical thinking. They’re looking for communication skills. Right? They’re looking for teamwork. We’ve covered all of this. We know from our studies in 2021 and 2023, and specifically in 2023, we’ve asked many more around this, we see, for example, motivation and initiative. 95% of the employers that we survey close to a thousand employers said that this was either very or somewhat important. Two thirds says motivation and initiative were very important. Resilience and persistence, right under that. Self-awareness, right under that. And I think our next challenge in higher ed is how do we make the building of those skills and capacities as clear to students in their journey, as they’re working through the curriculum and the co-curriculum, this is a great place for those things to be working hand in hand of how are the experiences students are having inside and outside the classroom contributing to those things? Contributing to their motivation and initiative, contributing to their sense of resilience. Really thinking about the ways that students persist through failure. That is, if anything’s going to define the workplace, the coming workplace is going to be a persistence through failure. These are problems that many of us will not have encountered before, not have encountered in quite the same way. So that spirit of trial and error and failure is going to be important.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. It’s so true.
[00:30:21] The Role of Microcredentials
Drumm McNaughton: Last topic, because learning is changing.
Ashley Finley: Mm-hmm.
Drumm McNaughton: The role of microcredentials, you guys explored that very nicely this time.
Ashley Finley: Thank you. Well we picked this up in our 2023 report as well because this is such a growing interest to employers, to colleges and universities, certainly to students. I think it’s also a really interesting bridge point between secondary education and post-secondary. Right? This kind of K through 12 pipeline of how are students really building and bundling, I think that’s the important word to use here, how are they bundling their learning in ways that can be made more formal, can be actualized in different ways that are more and more relevant. Right?
We are living in a time when students can actually post a credential to LinkedIn. So they can go beyond the transcript of what it means to hold their credential, to make those credentials visible. So when you do that, you begin to open up a space where, short form if you will, for lack of a better term, short form credentials can really exist in a way that is innovative, that is stackable, I’m not using language that’s any way new here, the idea of stackable credentials has been around for a while. But we just have a different way of thinking about their relevance. But at the same time, we know that they’re highly accessible and maybe in a way that makes them, and I’ve heard this phrase time and time again, sort of like the Wild West of Microcredentials, that there’s just very little understanding about what does it take to verify these things? Does it matter who’s issuing them? How do we validate them, et cetera?
So this time around, we asked for example, what employers believe who has the most credibility? On the issuing of credentials. We hadn’t asked something like that before and they, we had just about neck and neck of a college or university in partnership with an industry leader.
This is different than an employer. We used the language of industry, we used both actually, but we used industry leader and employer. Industry leader was far higher than just say, a local employer, for example. And then a college or university or sorry, an industry leader on their own was second, just right below that.
So I, I think if anything it, it begins to point to, we still have some things to learn about where the credibility lies with these. But I think we’re very happy that college and university is in the mix on that and very high on the list of where that would be.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. And you’re seeing more and more creditors getting into the business of accrediting credentials like this. I know HLC, Melanie Booth headed up a big project for them Netchi is doing, and I believe WASC is moving in northwest, moving in that direction as well.
Ashley Finley: Yes. It’s absolutely something I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I am a WASC commissioner and it’s absolutely something that in the larger accreditation space we have to be thinking about because we know colleges and universities are thinking about them too.
Drumm McNaughton: What else surprised you about the report this time?
[00:33:31] Employer Perspectives on Civic Skills
Ashley Finley: Definitely the way in which employers really enforced the idea that the civic skills are relevant and important. We continued to find that there’s a strong age gap difference. We first discovered this in 2021. We found it in 2023. And it is a strong trend line of employers under the age of 40, valuing civic and community-based skills and experiences at far higher rates than employers over the age of 50.
They’re also have more confidence. They think students are better prepared. If I was going to say it morely succinctly, Drumm, they’re kind of our fan base.
[00:34:08] Generational Differences in Employer Expectations
Ashley Finley: I have long suspected there’s a generational gap going on. That’s what I hypothesized in 2021. And then in 2023, I just, I think we’re there now. I think we really have a generational difference in how employers view what is important, what is relevant, what carries the workplace.
And frankly, it is great news for higher education. It’s great news for the programs that we run. If anything, it reinforces this idea that career centers need to be working with civic engagement centers. That we need to, if ever there was a time to really confront the ways that we are bifurcating and separating, compartmentalizing student learning in different boundaries and sectors and quadrants of the university or the campus that they’re at, that just—
Drumm McNaughton: It doesn’t work.
Ashley Finley: It doesn’t work anymore. So we have an opportunity to think about how we’re aligning resources and aligning our human capital on campuses for sure.
Drumm McNaughton: So what do Presidents take away from this report? How can it inform them to make better decisions about their campuses?
[00:35:20] Career Services and Faculty Engagement
Ashley Finley: Well, I think for sure, thinking about the ROI on career services. I’ve heard time and time again the woeful under investment in career services on campuses, and I don’t think I’m advocating for giant career centers, career services centers. I don’t think that’s the answer. I don’t think that’s literally what the vast majority of campuses can do. But we could be thinking far more robustly about how we engage faculty and embedding career readiness into courses and curricula.
How we think about, how we help faculty to understand the purpose equation on what they’re doing for students when they do that. That they’re not just training students. This isn’t vocational training, so to speak. This is really about building students’ sense of understanding of the skills they’re attaining, their sense of purpose, their sense of aspiration, their sense of meaning.
All of these things have been well baked into disciplinary fields for a very long time. But there’s an opportunity here to draw those out in different ways. So the ways in which campus leaders, presidents in particular, will think about what those communication strategies look like, how they will rethink what it means to invite faculty into these conversations.
Hugely consequential.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, I think. Yes, I agree with that. And I remember years ago, one of our kids went to a magnet school and instead of teaching math, English, whatever they taught them in streams, they would talk, you had a six week stream about environment, or you had a six week stream about whatever, and all the subject went into that particular thing.
The mathematics was geared toward environmental science, et cetera. It showed kids that what they’re learning wasn’t just, two plus two equals four is really important. They show, yeah, when you have two and two, it comes to four and this is what it means.
Ashley Finley: Right.
Drumm McNaughton: So that’s critical.
Ashley Finley: Exactly. Exactly.
Drumm McNaughton: This has been fascinating.
I, I always enjoy our conversations. You allow me to be the geek that I really love doing is like, let’s get into the data. Let’s get into all this stuff.
Ashley Finley: Happy to do that. Happy to do that.
Three Takeaways for Higher Education Presidents and Boards
Drumm McNaughton: So as we always do, my friend, three takeaways for presidents and boards. What are the main things that they really need to understand that your survey tells them?
Ashley Finley: Transparency and communication around the skills are that students are gaining. But that has to extend the mindsets and dispositions. We have to do a better job of helping students to understand who they are, how they’re approaching the skills that they’re acquiring, to give them the confidence to express those skills. That remains as critical and ever and even more so.
What we haven’t talked a lot about are actual experiences that employers value. We always think, well the coin of the realm for employers is internships. That’s true. I’m not saying it’s not true. We find that time and time again, but it’s important to look at the second one. It’s really important to look at what’s underneath that experience.
In our 2023 report, we saw that jobs on campus work, campus-based employment, was equally important. In this report, we found that leadership positions were highly valued. By employers as a key experience that would make them more likely to hire students. So how can we think more robustly? Because internships are notoriously so hard to scale. How do we think more robustly about the other kinds of experiences that students are gaining that we can turn those into work and career readiness kinds of experiences? That feels really important to me.
[00:39:17] Supporting Agility and Change in Higher Education
Ashley Finley: And I drop in this note around, in part around AI, there is an opportunity on our campuses to talk about fear of change.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Ashley Finley: Everybody’s saying it. We live in a rapidly evolving, changing economy and workforce with rapidly evolving, changing skills. We have to be agile, we have to be nimble. But there is a layer, if we’re really talking about institutional change and transformation, where we need to confront fear of change.
Drumm McNaughton: Oh yeah.
Ashley Finley: And building systems that can change and supporting our faculty and our staff to change.
And I think if anything, what we are learning from our students is they, and I think from the employers that will eventually hire them, is that they value that agility. They need that nimbleness. So we can’t, as institutions of higher learning, then be afraid to change and to not be nimble. We need to model that.
We need to ourselves be that agile. So what I hope, if there is a bigger, the final point, on the biggest take home message, it is supporting that agility.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, I’m going to add one more to it. I typically don’t do this. But from the report, the big takeaway I saw besides the breakdown political parties, et cetera, was that employers really value higher education. That message is being lost in the marketplace because of cost, political differences, et cetera.
Employers value higher ed. They value that four year degree along with a lot of other things.
Ashley Finley: I appreciate that. Thank you very much. It is really, that is our lead finding in the report. It’s what you’re going to encounter a few pages in. And it is worth nuancing because there’s such a powerful public narrative around return on investment. But at the very least, questioning it, if not being pretty negative on it.
And what we find consistently is that employers really value the work that we do. And leaning into that and thinking about how do we engage employers as partners to understand what we can do better?
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And that’s, I think, the key is as I said earlier, it’s easier to change the course of history than a history course, but we need to apply change management to ourselves.
Ashley Finley: Exactly.
Drumm McNaughton: And make sure that we are willing to change in a way that we’re asking our students. The traditional student comes to us in a huge time of change in their own lives.
We need to be willing to change in our lives to make sure that we can help them.
Ashley Finley: Agreed. Agreed.
[00:42:07] Final Thoughts and Future Directions
Drumm McNaughton: So what’s next for you, my friend?
Ashley Finley: Oh my goodness. We will actually, one of the things I hope that we’re able to do from this report, because even though it is a robust and full report, there’s actually even more that we can be doing. Or more that we can spotlight in the kinds of findings that we have. More breakouts that we didn’t even put in this.
I am actually hoping that we’re going to try to do some more supplemental reports. Something I’ve long wanted to do and just trying to find the capacity to do it is something that’s on our radar. And give a shout out to my friends at Campus Compact.
We’re working on a exciting project called The Higher Education Democracy Exchange. That includes civic microcredentials as part of a platform for how we advance democratic principles in higher education, how we do that collectively. A shout out to my friends and partners there.
We were very excited about that work too.
Drumm McNaughton: Well. Very good. Ashley, it’s always a pleasure to have you on the show. You know, all you need to do is pick up the phone or telegraph me mentally, and you’re here, baby.
Ashley Finley: I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Oh, I want to speak in one last thing, which is we will be rerunning our Curriculum to Career Institute at AAC&U in May, 2026. So if people are listening and they’re interested in how they can think about some ways of embedding career readiness into the curriculum, please check that out.
We always have a lot of fun at that.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. Well, again, thank you my friend, for being on the show. It’s always great to see you and I look forward to the next time.
Ashley Finley: Appreciate it. Thank you, Drumm.
Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Ashley Finley. Ashley, it’s always a pleasure having you on the show. I look forward to the next time when I can have you back and talk about some more very deep and relevant topics.
To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.
