Tag: Zone

  • Flood the Zone

    Flood the Zone

    As the Class of 2026 prepares to enter the workforce this summer, they—like last year’s graduates and those already in the job market—are facing what economists now call a “low hire, low fire” economy. Whether this is driven by AI or other economic factors remains hotly debated, but the causes are beside the point for new grads looking for jobs postgraduation in an economy marked by a pullback in early-career hiring.

    While higher education cannot unilaterally fix the current job market, we can pull out all the stops to help prepare our students for the reality they now face.

    “The Agility Imperative,” a 2025 survey of 1,030 employers published by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, reinforces what higher ed thought leaders already understand—that students increasingly need diverse experiential opportunities to be competitive in today’s rapidly evolving labor market.

    While the report’s numbers are encouraging, there remains a gap between employers’ belief in the importance of key skills versus their confidence that higher education institutions have adequately prepared students to apply them. For example, 95 percent of surveyed employers agreed that it was somewhat or very important for college students to emerge with the ability to apply their knowledge to the real world. However, only 78 percent felt that students are already somewhat or very well prepared to do so. A smaller but still notable gap occurred regarding teamwork, with 95 percent of employers believing it to be somewhat or very important and 82 percent believing that students were prepared to apply it in real-life settings.

    The good news is that, despite the many clickbait headlines to the contrary, employers continue to say that colleges are doing a good job building these important skills. But we still have more work to do in closing the preparation gaps in these key skill sets that employers highly value. The question is: How do we provide all students with the opportunity to develop these in-demand skills?

    Many students face significant barriers that make the traditional internship experience inaccessible. Some struggle to afford the housing or transportation needed to participate in on-site internships, particularly in expensive metro areas, while others are unable to find time for in-person commitments among packed athletic, academic and extracurricular schedules.

    And, to make matters worse, the number of available internships has been dropping 10 to 20 percent per year since 2022. Each posted internship on the most widely used platform now receives between 100 and 300 applications. We can’t keep putting all our eggs in this one (shrinking) basket.

    At UVA, we set out to tackle this challenge. Our strategy calls for flooding the zone—that is, providing students with an expanded set of flexible, accessible, options for career-connected learning beyond just the traditional summer internship experience.

    For example, UVA’s Career Academies offer an accessible, no-cost option for students seeking to explore a range of careers and build relevant career experience that fits into their busy schedules. These experiences pair virtual, asynchronous employer projects with free access to Google Career Certificates over scheduled academic breaks, ensuring students emerge with both practical knowledge and direct experience. While open to all, these experiences prove particularly valuable to student athletes and club leaders, whose schedules during term are often constrained by their commitments to their respective programs.

    Tristen Davin, a third-year data science student and student athlete, discovered Career Academies through his athletic adviser. As a swimmer with a rigorous summer training schedule, Davin was unable to commit to an in-person internship. However, his experience in Career Academies enabled him not only to tackle real-world applications of his data science skills, but to work with other students—including fellow student athletes—toward a common deliverable. “Doing this has made me realize that everyone has different schedules, everyone does different things, and just finding a time to put aside to actually do a project can turn out really well,” Davin reflected. The career academy, he said “is low stress, and also, you get a lot out of it.”

    UVA’s Career Academies also provide students with direct employer interaction, allowing them to gain a profound understanding of company operations and culture without having to travel to an office. Third-year computer science major Amrit Kaur, who serves as the mentorship chair of UVA’s Women in Computing Sciences club, enjoyed learning directly from a CEO as part of a data modeling project. “Working with an employer was cool because we had scheduled calls and I got a feel of what it’s like in the real world when you’re really working with these teams,” remarked Kaur.

    As in traditional internships, the significance of these interactions extends far beyond the internship period. Kayla Kim, a third-year data science major, later sourced an internship with her Career Academy employer, El Locale, after an offer from a government agency was rescinded during a hiring freeze. In addition to providing relevant career experience, the flexibility of her extended internship with El Locale provided her the opportunity to upskill without disrupting her academic schedule.

    UVA’s Career Academies don’t just provide an opportunity to build practical, lifelong skills—they also help students build résumé-worthy experiences that make them more competitive in their job searches. The Agility Imperative report reminds us that employers continue to place a high value on hands-on, applied experiences across a range of relevant workplace settings. Further, employers are increasingly viewing microcredentials such as Google Career Certificates as indicators of a student’s commitment to lifelong learning and continuous upskilling. In response to exploding demand from both students and employers, this summer we are offering a new Career Academy called AI4VA focusing specifically on applying AI skills in workplace settings.

    The age-old advice about not putting all your eggs in one basket holds just as true today. As the availability and quality of traditional internships declines, we owe it to our students to provide new options to explore their career interests and develop the kinds of in-demand skills and experience that employers are seeking.

    We must flood the zone with multiple options for experiential enrichment, meeting students where they are, on their own time and with a range of offerings that fit in with their schedule, constraints and priorities.

    Kemi Jona is the vice provost for Online Education and Digital Innovation at the University of Virginia, where he advances the university’s digital education strategy, helping to shape UVA’s vision for online education in alignment with UVA’s position as one of the nation’s leading public research universities.

    Jaden Bernard is the strategic initiatives coordinator for UVA Online Education and Digital Innovation. She leads OEDI’s communications efforts and has spearheaded numerous digital and AI innovation pilots for UVA students, faculty and staff.

    Source link

  • The Gray Zone

    The Gray Zone

    This academic year marks year seven—our last, if all goes well—of paying college tuition for our kids. (TB’s senior year and TG’s first year were the same year.) My brother has just joined the ranks of tuition payers, with his oldest arriving at college a few days ago. We’ve both found ourselves in the increasingly common spot of making too much to get much aid, but too little to reasonably afford tuition without significant aid.

    We’re not alone. That gray zone of “theoretically affordable, but not really” has become normal.

    If anything, it seems to be expanding. We’re lucky enough that for us, it’s annoying rather than prohibitive. That’s not true for everybody.

    People land in the gray zone in any number of ways. Sometimes the FAFSA calculation is simply unrealistic, whether because of fluctuating income, multiple siblings, divorce or the actual cost of living. Need-based aid is usually based on the FAFSA (or the CSS) or income tax return data, each of which is based on formulas that reflect political compromises rather than the cost of living. “Need” is a judgment, and judgments at scale tend to be blunt instruments at best. In practical terms, they pretty much have to be. Sometimes, though, the issue is even worse than the quirks of the FAFSA calculation. To save money, many colleges engage in “gapping,” or offering less aid than even the FAFSA recommends. That makes the gray zone even bigger.

    And that’s under the relatively rosy scenario of having two-parent families in which both are citizens, both are employed and nobody has a disability requiring massive economic support. People with disabilities are often subject to unrealistically low savings thresholds before they lose Medicaid coverage; ABLE accounts help, but they go only so far, and relatively few eligible people know that they exist. Undocumented parents may be increasingly unwilling or unable to submit financial information, even if their children are citizens. And divorced and/or mixed families introduce variables that no algorithm will anticipate. (I had personal experience of that in my student days. It wasn’t pretty.) Include any of those in the picture, and the shortfalls of the current system become more dramatic.

    I had hoped that the free community college movement would make many of these issues moot. But it fizzled at the federal level, as did most student loan forgiveness. Some states adopted versions of free community college, which is great, but states don’t have the fiscal flexibility that the federal government does. Most states aren’t allowed to run deficits, and public college enrollments are usually countercyclical to the economy, which means demand for college goes up at the same time that state tax revenues go down. Without a mechanism to offset the imbalance, public scholarship programs tend to get shorted when they’re most needed. Worse, even when they’re funded, state programs often include means-testing phase-outs that create gray zones of their own.

    With all of those ways into the gray zone, it’s unsurprising that so many people are there. But as an industry, I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to how people on the ground experience it.

    It comes across as insulting. Being told that aid is for other people, but you have to pay what seems like an unreasonable amount, leaves a bad taste.

    I’ve had conversations with parents who can’t believe that they’re judged too rich to help. They aren’t happy, and there isn’t much to say to make them happy. I can’t help but think that part of the reason the public hasn’t rallied to our side in response to recent political attacks is that after years of being directly and personally insulted, as they see it, they don’t mind seeing some payback. We can offer structural explanations, but structural explanations don’t help when you’re facing a tuition bill higher than you expected and the institution essentially tells you to suck it up. Heck, when UVA had the gall to raise TB’s tuition for a fully remote year, I was personally offended. Years later, I still grumble at the memory. The causes may be long-term and structural, but the offense is direct and personal.

    Answers to the gray zone exist, in big and small ways.

    The best big answer, of course, is recognizing the social benefit of education generally and supporting it with enough public funding that tuition becomes an afterthought. Public libraries don’t have the gray zone because they don’t charge for access to books. That’s an excellent model, and it has ample precedent. The challenge there is political.

    A small but institutionally actionable answer involves strategic philanthropy. We recently had a donor who specifically wanted to aim scholarship money at students in the gray zone, to ensure that they can finish their programs and get started in their careers. It struck me as a fantastic idea. Yes, it’s hard to scale, and yes, it leaves existing systems intact. But until we can get to a saner political moment, it can make a genuinely positive difference for untold numbers of students. It may even serve as a proof of concept for a larger change.

    The main challenge now is to acknowledge the existence of the gray zone and to incorporate that knowledge into policy. The gray zone isn’t just a regrettable imperfection; it’s a direct threat to higher education’s continued existence. It corrodes public support and plays into narratives that make us the bad guys. Every single time a policy includes means-testing, sliding scales, income cutoffs or gapping, we create enemies. We’ve focused so much on immediate economic cost that we’ve lost sight of long-term political cost. I’m much less worried about some scion of the upper middle class getting a free education than I am about folks in the vast middle deciding they’ve had enough and voting for people who will channel their anger at the wrong targets. The cost of that is much higher than simply getting it right in the first place.

    Source link

  • A Twilight Zone Warning for the Trump Era and the Age of AI

    A Twilight Zone Warning for the Trump Era and the Age of AI

    Rod Serling’s classic 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Obsolete Man,” offers a timeless meditation on authoritarianism, conformity, and the erasure of humanity. In it, a quiet librarian, Romney Wordsworth (played by Burgess Meredith), is deemed “obsolete” by a dystopian state for believing in books and God—symbols of individual thought and spiritual meaning. Condemned by a totalitarian chancellor and scheduled for execution, Wordsworth calmly exposes the cruelty and contradictions of the regime, ultimately reclaiming his dignity by refusing to bow to tyranny.

    Over 60 years later, “The Obsolete Man” feels less like fiction and more like a documentary. The Trump era, supercharged by the rise of artificial intelligence and a war on truth, has brought Serling’s chilling parable into sharper focus.

    The Authoritarian Impulse

    President Donald Trump’s presidency—and his ongoing influence—has been marked by a deep antagonism toward democratic institutions, intellectual life, and perceived “elites.” Journalists were labeled “enemies of the people.” Scientists and educators were dismissed or silenced. Books were banned in schools and libraries, and curricula were stripped of “controversial” topics like systemic racism or gender identity.

    Like the chancellor in The Obsolete Man, Trump and his allies seek not just to discredit dissenters but to erase their very legitimacy. In this worldview, librarians, teachers, and independent thinkers are expendable. What matters is loyalty to the regime, conformity to its ideology, and performance of power.

    Wordsworth’s crime—being a librarian and a believer—is mirrored in real-life purges of professionals deemed out of step with a hardline political agenda. Public educators and college faculty who challenge reactionary narratives have been targeted by state legislatures, right-wing activists, and billionaire-backed think tanks. In higher education, departments of the humanities are being defunded or eliminated entirely. Faculty governance is undermined. The university, once a space for critical inquiry, is increasingly treated as an instrument for ideological control—or as a business to be stripped for parts.

    The Age of AI and the Erasure of the Human

    While authoritarianism silences the human spirit, artificial intelligence threatens to replace it. AI tools, now embedded in everything from hiring algorithms to classroom assessments, are reshaping how knowledge is produced, disseminated, and controlled. In the rush to adopt these technologies, questions about ethics, bias, and human purpose are often sidelined.

    AI systems do not “believe” in anything. They do not feel awe, doubt, or moral anguish. They calculate, replicate, and optimize. In the hands of authoritarian regimes or profit-driven institutions, AI becomes a tool not of liberation, but of surveillance, censorship, and disposability. Workers are replaced. Students are reduced to data points. Librarians—like Wordsworth—are no longer needed in a world where books are digitized and curated by opaque algorithms.

    This is not merely a future problem. It’s here. Algorithms already determine who gets hired, who receives financial aid, and which students are flagged as “at risk.” Predictive policing, automated grading, and AI-generated textbooks are not the stuff of science fiction. They are reality. And those who question their fairness or legitimacy risk being labeled as backwards, inefficient—obsolete.

    A Culture of Disposability

    At the heart of “The Obsolete Man” is a question about value: Who decides what is worth keeping? In Trump’s America and in the AI-driven economy, people are judged by their utility to the system. If you’re not producing profit, performing loyalty, or conforming to power, you can be cast aside.

    This is especially true for the working class, contingent academics, and the so-called “educated underclass”—a growing population of debt-laden degree holders trapped in precarious jobs or no jobs at all. Their degrees are now questioned, their labor devalued, and their futures uncertain. They are told that if they can’t “pivot” or “reskill” for the next technological shift, they too may be obsolete.

    The echoes of The Twilight Zone are deafening.

    Resistance and Redemption

    Yet, as Wordsworth demonstrates in his final moments, resistance is possible. Dignity lies in refusing to surrender the soul to the machine—or the regime. In his quiet defiance, Wordsworth forces the chancellor to confront his own cowardice, exposing the hollow cruelty of the system.

    In our time, that resistance takes many forms: educators who continue to teach truth despite political pressure; librarians who fight book bans; whistleblowers who challenge surveillance technologies; and students who organize for justice. These acts of courage and conscience remind us that obsolescence is not a matter of utility—it’s a judgment imposed by those in power, and it can be rejected.

    Rod Serling ended his episode with a reminder: “Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is obsolete.”

    The question now is whether we will heed the warning. In an age where authoritarianism and AI threaten to render us all obsolete, will we remember what it means to be human?

    The Higher Education Inquirer welcomes responses and reflections on how pop culture can illuminate our present crises. Contact us with your thoughts or your own essay proposals.

    Source link