The Academy — Mar 10, 2026

The federal government proclaimed its love for career and technical education last month, then left 19 CTE programs without the funding they'd already been promised — and this week we got the school-by-school receipts. Meanwhile, the Coursera-Udemy merger just filed its joint proxy with the SEC, which means the two biggest names in online learning are now officially in the regulatory pipeline toward becoming one very large name. And a new report on skills-based hiring found that most companies doing it are doing it wrong: removing degree requirements barely moves the needle if your applicant tracking system can't read a microcredential. The theme this week is the distance between announcement and execution — and who's actually closing it.

The Coursera-Udemy merger was announced in December 2025. This week it became real: the joint proxy statement/prospectus hit the SEC on March 6, 2026, with a valuation pegged to Coursera's closing price that day. Shareholder votes are expected in the second half of 2026.

The combined entity would serve over 270 million registered learners and nearly 19,000 enterprise customers, with projected annual revenue north of $1.5 billion and anticipated cost synergies of $115 million within two years. "Synergies" is Wall Street shorthand for cuts, and in edtech that usually means content rationalization and platform consolidation — not expanded offerings on day one.

The strategic pitch is straightforward: pair Udemy's marketplace of 85,000+ independent instructors with Coursera's university partnerships and credential infrastructure, then sell the whole thing to corporate L&D budgets as an AI-first skills platform. JPMorgan upgraded Coursera to "Overweight" on exactly that thesis. Enterprise revenue — not consumer enrollments — is where investors expect the upside.

But the independent financial picture is less rosy than the press releases suggest. The two companies generated $7.2 billion in combined revenue since 2020; their combined market capitalization declined by about $8 billion over that period. Since the announcement, Coursera's stock has slid; as of March 6, 2026 the implied combined market value was roughly $1.8 billion. And the less-covered angle: what happens to the $440 million flowing to instructors and university partners in 2025. With proprietary content and Udemy's playbook now under the same roof, pressure on partner payouts will only grow. For universities and independent creators relying on these platforms as distribution channels, that's not a footnote — it's a business model question.

The deal also effectively introduced "Preview Mode," locking nearly all course content after Module 1. One longtime observer called it the day MOOCs truly died. Whether one platform with 270 million learners produces better outcomes than two competing ones — specifically, whether it can convert short AI-skills courses into recognized, stackable credentials with measured career impact — remains an open question, not an answered one.

The Trump administration proclaimed February "National Career and Technical Education Month." It also left 19 CTE programs without funding they'd already been promised — and this week, Education Week published the on-the-ground reporting that shows what that looks like in practice.

All 19 projects initially funded through the federal Career-Connected High Schools program had their grants discontinued because the department said they were "not in the best interest of the federal government." Collectively, those grantees lost $48.6 million they'd expected to receive in 2025 and 2026. Schools in Newark, New Jersey, and four other East Coast cities are now scaling back programming and reneging on financial support for students.

The politics are genuinely strange. The program was created during the first Trump administration under Perkins V — the formula funding law that supports career-and-technical education nationwide. The grants the current administration canceled were built on a framework the previous Trump team designed.

Meanwhile, the official White House posture is expansion: Workforce Pell Grants, a new "America's Talent Strategy" initiative, and more coordination between education and industry. The gap between the rhetoric and the grant cancellation record is now documented at the program level, school by school. CTE enrollment is rising nationally — which makes cuts to innovation grants that much harder to square.

Watch whether states backfill the lost CCHS funding from their own Perkins formula allocations — or whether these programs quietly disappear.

If your company dropped degree requirements and called it a day, you probably didn't change much. New research from OneTen and the Burning Glass Institute, published March 3, 2026, analyzed hiring patterns across more than 1,000 large U.S. employers and found that removing degree requirements alone was associated with only a two-percentage-point increase in non-degree hires on average across the study period. There's almost no correlation between advertising credentials and actually hiring for them.

The report introduces the concept of "credential fluency" — the organizational ability to identify and validate credentials beyond degrees as reliable signals of job-relevant skills. A small subset of firms is pulling ahead by building the operational infrastructure: linking specific credentials to business-critical skills, incorporating them into applicant tracking systems (the software that screens resumes), and training recruiters to recognize which programs signal real readiness.

A complementary survey from the University of Phoenix Career Institute highlights the gap: 82% of employers say they're moving toward skills-based hiring (as of March 2, 2026), yet more than half lack standardized tools to evaluate skills. And the scale of the problem is structural: Credential Engine counts more than 1.85 million distinct credentials from 134,491 U.S. providers. Meanwhile, industry data shows 96% of employers say microcredentials strengthen applications, but only 12% of workers report that one actually helped them land a job (as of 2025 industry data).

For edtech founders and credential providers: your certificate only has value if the employer's intake systems can read it. For CLOs: this report is an audit checklist.

Accreditation is the mechanism most Americans have never heard of that controls whether a college can access federal student aid — Pell Grants, student loans, the works. Lose accreditation, and an institution essentially can't operate. It's one of the most powerful levers in education, and it's about to get a significant overhaul.

The Education Department launched a negotiated rulemaking process — a formal procedure that brings stakeholders to the table before regulations are finalized — through its new Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) Committee. Sessions are scheduled for April and May 2026. The department intends to make it easier for new accreditors to gain recognition, refocus quality assurance on data-driven student outcomes, and — more controversially — curb diversity, equity, and inclusion standards in accreditor reviews.

There's genuine cross-partisan support for the outcomes-focused angle. Traditional accreditation has emphasized inputs and process compliance; reformers want more attention to completion rates, debt, earnings, and job placement. But the political dimension complicates things. An April 2025 executive order pressed the system toward "viewpoint diversity" and academic freedom, and seven southern states — Florida, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana — have announced plans to create an entirely new accrediting body for their public institutions.

Whether this rulemaking produces genuine accountability reform or becomes a vehicle for ideological pressure on institutions is the defining question for higher education policy in 2026. These are proposals at the negotiating stage, not final rules — but the April 2026 sessions will tell us a great deal.

Most countries talk about aligning education and employment. Singapore is literally merging the agencies. In last week's Committee of Supply debates, officials announced that SkillsFuture Singapore (which funds adult learning) and Workforce Singapore (which runs employment and career services) will combine into a single body charged with connecting skills development directly to job outcomes.

Alongside the structural merger: a new S$400 million Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package that lets companies access multiple workforce-transformation schemes through a single channel, enhanced subsidies for job redesign, and revamped credits to offset training costs in real time. SkillsFuture also hit 1 million unique learners this month, with a 35% year-over-year uptick in AI and green tech enrollments.

The most interesting design choice: from the second half of 2026, Singaporeans completing selected AI-related courses will receive six months of free premium AI tool subscriptions, bundling software access with training. Instead of treating a course as a one-off event, it turns learning into a period of assisted experimentation — workers can immediately try automating parts of their actual jobs using the same tools they used in class. It also lowers a very real barrier for lower-income adults who can manage time but not another subscription fee.

For corporate L&D leaders globally: Singapore is running the experiment everyone talks about. Watch whether the merged agency publishes integrated outcomes dashboards tying specific courses to wage growth — that would set a very high bar for transparency anywhere.