When cultural foundations get shaky, people reach for the pillars that have stood the longest.
With 13 years under my belt at Carnegie Mellon, I’ve witnessed these seismic events several times over. As a professor, I see who shows up in my classroom, and why. As a startup founder in higher ed, I see what institutions do with the attention they receive. The convergence that interests me right now is that an enormous number of adults, feeling listless in their career paths, are turning their attention back to formal education.
Of course, part of that is about developing new skills, grabbing that degree they need to break the glass ceiling, or solidifying their real-world experience with certifications. But it’s also about taking refuge in long-standing American institutions to weather trending economic and technological storms. Ignore the toxic fearmongering headlines about “the death of higher ed”, and you’ll see the sentiment is there: Gallup's surveying shows confidence in higher education rising from its 2023 low, up seven points to 40% among adults without a four-year degree. That’s more than a 20% jump in positive perception during the 3-year span that AI tools have exploded.
The Adult Learner Pipeline Opportunity
New research from the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and CollegeAPP puts real numbers to the intent: roughly 27% of adults 25–64 plan to enroll in education or training within the next two years, representing 41.7 million people. Extended to all adults 18 and up, that figure exceeds 65 million.
As CAEL President Earl Buford put it, intent to enroll is prevalent, but also divergent. The old habit of filing every adult learner under "nontraditional" and running the same playbook is no longer effective.
The Wave Is Uncertainty, Not Unemployment
There’s an inclination to read this as a classic recession story, but again: I’ve seen those events play out. This time, it’s not just about the economy.
The more accurate read is that workers are no longer confident today's skills will carry into tomorrow's labor force. ManpowerGroup's 2026 Global Talent Barometer found 43% fear automation may replace their job within just two years.
ETS's Human Progress Report, now three years into tracking the same question, describes what workers are doing about it. Skills have moved from advantage to infrastructure. Workers increasingly define job security not by tenure or title but by their ability to adapt; and they expect credentials to function as durable, portable proof that travels with them as roles change. ETS is blunt about the emotional mechanics: when that proof is missing, anxiety rises. When it’s present, confidence follows.
This is the part I want fellow higher education leaders to take to heart.
These adults are not primarily shopping for AI training. ETS finds that AI literacy is the largest gap in their data, high in perceived importance and low in confidence. But the demand underneath it is broader and older than that. People want their experience validated. They want a well-rounded education to count for something legible. They want proof that they are adaptable, and they want an institution with a name on it to say so.
Universities are exceptionally good at this; arguably, it’s what they’re best at. The mistake would be to hear "AI is changing work" and conclude the answer is a certificate in prompt engineering. No, the answer is becoming more well-rounded and adaptable to change, which just so happens to align seamlessly with a tech environment that is churning out a new way to complete a task every few weeks.
Where Skilly Nurtures Success With Adult Learners
We built skilly around the conviction that most higher ed institutions don’t have an attention problem, but a conversation-to-conversion problem. And nowhere is this more apparent than in dealing with the adult learner population, because their questions are unique, conditional, and can’t be answered with a blanket statement on a website. What transfers? What did my old credits earn me? What does my prior certification count toward? Does my employer's tuition benefit apply? Every one of those requires drawing on the institution's full knowledge base and reasoning across policy, program requirements, and financial aid rules. Historically, that’s meant a scarce human expert and a two-week email thread. If you’re of the opinion that your job is at risk over the next 2 years… 2 weeks is a lifetime to wait.
A skilly guide is a governed system, not a chatbot. It runs on the institution's own knowledge, voice, and guardrails, which is what makes it useful for exactly the conditional questions above. It draws on the full knowledge base an institution has already built, so a returning learner asking about transfer credit or financial aid eligibility gets a grounded answer instead of a phone tree. It operates continuously, which matters when 72% of your prospective returners are working full-time and inquiring after hours. It supports 400+ languages, which matters in a national online market. And it’s deployable across the surfaces where people actually show up, so an institution's guidance can meet prospective students where they are.
Skilly does not replace advisors. It handles the first layer, moves students to the next consideration phase, escalates when the moment calls for a human, and shows the institution which questions it has been failing to answer. Human engagement is the scarce resource here; skilly exists to preserve and nourish it.