2025 Higher Ed Winners & Losers: Microcredentials, Funding, Enrollment | Bow Tie Tuesday | CampusIQ
Aaron: [00:00:00] Welcome to 2026. As we begin this year, uh, I love thinking about what happened last year. Right. Where are all the things, especially in higher ed? And so what I've done is come up with a couple different categories and awards to give about big trends or big things that happen in 2025. So I'll go over some consider ease that I had and ultimately my winners would love to know what you agree with, disagree with but let's get to it.
So for the first one, the biggest winner of 2025. Biggest winner of 2025 in higher ed. A couple considerations. Uh, I think AI integration overall in higher ed had to be considered, uh, several different reports of, you know, 86% of students using AI globally. Within their studies, about 90% of US college students are using it academically.
We also saw, uh, online and hybrid learning models really accelerate in this [00:01:00] past year. Enrollment increased about 3.2% in these programs. But my biggest winner for 2025 is Microcredentials and Career Aligned Programs. So in short, uh, this global market hit over $3.5 billion with 96 of employers valuing the actual credentials that they're getting and using them to hire.
So a couple stats, uh, that I was able to pull together. Some of these are from Coursera and Lumina data is 90% who take this are, are of employers are ready to pay somewhere between 10 and 15% more for those occu occupations. Once they have one of these microcredentials, um, the US alone saw 1.85 million unique students gain a microcredential that is up from 1.08 million in 2022. So a massive increase in microcredentials career [00:02:00] aligned programs this last year, and certainly over, over the last few, couple years. So biggest winner, Microcredentials Clear Career Aligned Programs now, biggest winner. What's the Biggest Loser?
These are always interesting to think about and talk about. Definitely had some different considerations. Uh, one of my biggest predictions I think for this year was that small colleges would get hit. I think we saw that again this year. Uh, we saw 15 different nonprofits actually close throughout this year.
It's about 80 since 2020 or so. So it was a continual increase of small universities, small colleges who especially have lots of either deferred maintenance or programs overhead or closing or merging in with other institutions. DEI programs and, and all those initiatives. Obviously that was a major topic within 2025 and, and that disruption.
But my biggest loser in 2025 was federal research funding in [00:03:00] all the targeted fields. Obviously a huge impact from a lot of the Trump administration and what they've been deploying. But we saw about $5 billion, uh, that were frozen across 600 universities with a proposed $18 billion NIH cut, uh, several different areas that were deemed to woke, uh, like climate research.
We're either cut or totally paused. A massive disruptor to us higher education and what, what all it does within research. Most disruptive AI advancements, of course, maybe could fit into this category, uh, the enrollment cliff and demographic shifts, but we kinda, you know, knew some of these things were coming.
Uh, I think there's one clear winner here, and it's the Trump administration policies unequivocally were the most disruptive to us higher ed today. I talked a little bit about that in terms of, um, some of those research dollars, but of course also consider all of the visas that were either revoked or paused for [00:04:00] students coming in all the DEI programs or like initiatives that all of a sudden universities had to cut, switch.
Uh, look at differently lots of universities under investigation or being sued. With all of that in mind, so the most disruptive was the Trump administration policies from 2025. On a different note, most surprising, right? What was the most surprising thing that I think happened, uh, in US higher ed in 2025?
There were a couple really interesting aspects of this, uh, that I was considering. One was actually student mental mental health. Couple really interesting, uh, pieces of research that came out of the Healthy Mind study. Surveyed, uh, I wanna say it was 55,000 students. I don't think I have that number up, but saw large decreases right from depression, from going from about 23%, to 18% suicidal, uh, inclinations also dropped. So there's clearly some good work that us higher ed is doing in here that [00:05:00] in a great way right, is surprising. We're taking care of our students better this last year than we did in previous years. Another one, um, again, was kind of that, that micro-credential surge, right?
Certainly a, a large increase in this, not only in the US but really across the world. But my biggest winner for most surprising was the unexpected enrollment recovery. We hear so much about the enrollment cliff and what that's doing and how much the disruption it's going to cause. Yet total post-secondary saw a 3.2% increase of students from 2025, which was totally unexpected. Uh, uh, schools like community colleges saw the highest increase, right? A 5.4% increase. Or again, students are seeking other career aligned micro-credentials. Other ways of how do we continue to provide education and additional learning so that students everywhere can learn and upgrade themselves in their careers.
And. And the [00:06:00] like. So that's my list across those four categories of, uh, biggest winner, loser, most disruptive and most surprising. Let me know if you disagree or if you think, uh, somebody else should have been a winner in any of these. Uh, I'll do an episode or, Bow Tie Tuesday on m y predictions for 2026 and I might have to bring in a colleague or two to have a little fun with this. So I hope everybody's new year is kicking off great, uh, that was trying to recap 2025 and looking forward to a fantastic 2026. This is another Bow Tie Tuesday, and I'll catch you next week.
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