This year’s ASU+GSV Summit felt different. It was the most pragmatic one I’ve attended, focused on solutions and conversations that move the work forward, with a tone that felt more grounded than in previous years.

That tone carried into a panel I took part in, “Liberal Arts: An Essential Line of Defense for Critical Thinking in the AI Era.” I was joined by Marjorie Hass (President, Council of Independent Colleges), Frank Shushok Jr. (President, Roanoke College), and Jonathan Koppell (President, Montclair State University), with Eloy Ortiz Oakley (President and CEO, College Futures Foundation) moderating. The conversation was energizing, sometimes provocative, and I left with some important takeaways about where higher education continues to head.

The discussion kept returning to two challenges that no institution has fully solved yet.

• One challenge is leadership: Navigating leading from the front while also practicing servant leadership that brings faculty along.
• Another challenge is purpose: Preparing students for employment while also maintaining the foundation in liberal arts and civic participation.

A “Higher Ed Leaders Roundtable” hosted by Lemnis (with InsideTrack, Mainstay, and National University) echoed a similar message. The conversation consistently returned to competency-based learning and tighter links between learning and employment outcomes. It was clear that building programs around competencies that translate into work can’t be a side project; it has to be part of the core design and, as I’m hearing quite often, the translation layer between education and work.

GPA doesn’t capture leadership, resilience, or ethical judgment. Neither does a transcript that lists grades and course titles. These elements connote accomplishments yet are meaningless to employers’ Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), the system of record for hiring new candidates. Efforts like the Competency-Based Education Network (C‑BEN) and ETS’ Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) have been promoting a new transcript, but what exists for the majority of institutions today just does not meet the moment. We need dynamic, skills-based artifacts that translate learning into workforce-relevant language, integrate with hiring systems, and show what a student can do in real-life situations.

Futurenav Compass, ETS’s AI-powered career navigation platform is designed to address this gap. It assesses skills drawn from a student’s academic and life experiences, maps them to real-time labor market demand, and connects students to jobs and internships. We are working with American University to capture a career-aligned Civic Skills Transcript and will be working with Brandeis University on their journey to redesign liberal arts education and showing that academic rigor and career readiness can be self-reinforcing.

Concurrent with the ASU+GSV Summit, Hampshire College, which counts Ken Burns, Liev Schreiber, and Lupita Nyong’o as alumni, announced its closure, underscoring the pressure on the traditional liberal arts model. These headlines make it feel like the liberal arts are losing relevance, but the reality can be quite different. Witness Brandeis, where President Arthur Levine’s bold new plan to link liberal arts with careers has caused a spectacular 40% increase in applications to next year’s freshman class.

In the AI economy, the capabilities the liberal arts build should be more valuable. Google DeepMind hired its first philosopher, a Cambridge AI ethics researcher brought in to work on machine consciousness and AGI readiness. At Anthropic, a philosopher helped develop the core principles guiding how its AI models reason and behave. And in January 2026, McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels told Fortune his firm is actively pursuing liberal arts majors it had previously deprioritized because AI can take on more routine analytical work, and companies need creativity, judgment, and communication.

However, if we do not measure it, it will not matter. If colleges do not measure the skills that students earn and link them to careers that students want, then why should students expect to get the ROI they want? If colleges fail to capture those skills in a modern transcript that is used by employers, then how can we create the translation layer? And if leaders don’t lead from the front, if they don’t follow the path of California State President Mildred Garcia, who changed the strategic plan KPI from six-year graduation rate to first career job, then their pleas for relevance will be futile.

This year’s ASU+GSV Summit made one thing clear: the next era of higher education will be built by institutions bold enough to treat the liberal arts as the foundation for what comes next. The most encouraging shift I saw wasn’t just new ideas, it was urgency. We’re moving from talking about the problem to building real solutions, and that may be the most important trend in higher education right now.