Education links, 7/9/2026

Nils Gilman on AI and the university; Austin Scholar on status as a motivator; Howard Husock and Tao Tan on foundation money; Gad Levanon on the job recession in higher ed

Nils Gilman writes,

professors must reconceive of themselves as interlocutors, serving as performative models of how to calibrate uncertainty and revise frames in real time. The classroom experience should focus on helping students to understand how to constitute a goal rather than generate a text in response to a prompt provided by the professor.

This is something closer to the Oxbridge tutorial system, the clinical ward round, or the seminars of many small liberal arts colleges in the United States. These pedagogies were once defended on grounds of tradition or prestige. The post-AI argument is structural: they are the delivery mechanisms for exactly the cognitive capacities that the architecture of AI cannot replicate, because those capacities are developed only by being exercised, not described. Interestingly, this means that the coming of AI is going to mean there will be demand for more professors, rather than fewer.

None of this implies that faculty should pretend AI does not exist, or that the tutorial and seminar should be conducted in proud ignorance of a tool students will be spending the rest of their professional lives using. The opposite is true. Faculty should integrate LLMs directly and deliberately into their instruction as tools that need to be used correctly in order to not be harmful.

This articulates what I was trying to do intuitively at UATX. Otherwise, though, I think that Gilman is too optimistic that universities will evolve in this direction.

Austin Scholar writes,

from roughly age 10 onward, anything that gets coded as a route to status and respect inside your kid’s actual social world becomes massively motivating, and anything that doesn’t gets tuned out. This is why “because it’s good for you” doesn’t land for a 13-year-old. The kid doesn’t need a better lecture about long-term outcomes. She needs a route to look impressive in front of the people whose opinions she actually cares about.

…In a friend group where being well-read is high status, your kid will read; in one where caring about school is cringe, she really, really won’t.

Howard Husock and Tao Tan write,

Of the 57,339 foundations that give to higher education, just 165 supply half the dollars. The receiving end mirrors the concentration: Of 5,270 institutions in the data set, 54 capture half the money, led by Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins Universities. The 526 community colleges in the data set received $1.3 billion combined, less than any one of those three.

…the biggest foundations intend to last forever: They are legally permitted perpetual existence, they are funded by their own endowments, their trustees appoint their own successors and they answer to neither an electorate nor the market. Entire disciplines now take their cues, indefinitely, from the preferences of a few self-perpetuating, self-funded institutions.

Gad Levanon writes,

Private colleges & universities covers every private degree-granting institution. Together: 4.4 million jobs.
Both are now shrinking. The combined total peaked in January 2025 and has fallen 95,000 since — public down 55,000, private down 40,000. Meanwhile K‑12 employment (dashed line) keeps drifting up, and overall hiring has firmed. This is specific to higher ed.
The timing tells you why. The turn came precisely with the federal research funding cuts of early 2025, followed by hiring freezes across dozens of universities and a 17% drop in new international enrollment — students who disproportionately pay full tuition.

The DSA presumably will reverse this when it comes to power.

substacks referenced above: @

Job Recession in Higher Education

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Austin Scholar #222: The three things that actually make a kid love learning

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The Multiversity Is Finished