Higher education is one of the most powerful investments a person can make. Beyond the classroom, college develops critical thinking, cultivates creativity, and builds the habits of inquiry and collaboration that fuel innovation. On the financial side, the payoff has been well-documented: degree holders typically earn more over their lifetimes, experience lower unemployment, and have greater upward mobility than those without a degree. For generations, higher education has been the pathway to stability, leadership, and opportunity.

But today, higher education is in crisis, and the warning signs are everywhere. Tuition continues to climb, yet ever-larger discounts and scholarships leave many institutions financially strained. A recent CNN poll found that fewer than 40 percent of Americans now believe a college degree is desirable. Headlines constantly reinforce the notion that “you don’t need a degree” to succeed—an irony, given that nearly everyone making those claims in the media holds one themselves. At the same time, artificial intelligence is transforming learning in real time, yet many universities are either ignoring its potential or fumbling its integration. Into this volatile mix step leaders who are too often disconnected from the classroom. Tonerheads, to borrow Steve Jobs’s phrase, are running many universities, leaders who understand budgets, branding, and bureaucracy, but who struggle to recognize, let alone nurture, the very innovation their institutions most desperately need.

In one of his most famous interviews, Steve Jobs explained what happens when companies lose sight of their own product. He contrasted PepsiCo, where “a new product was like a new size bottle,” with technology giants like IBM and Xerox. At Pepsi, it made sense for sales and marketing people to dominate leadership. But in companies where innovation was the product, sidelining engineers and designers was fatal.

Jobs described how Xerox executives, derisively called “tonerheads” by the researchers at Xerox PARC, had no idea what they were looking at when shown revolutionary technologies like the graphical user interface. These leaders understood copier toner but not computing. The result was tragic: Xerox, with the original patents and talent to win and own the personal computing industry, squandered its opportunity. Jobs’s warning was clear. When the product people are pushed out of decision-making, organizations forget what it means to make great products.

Higher education today is in danger of repeating Xerox’s mistake. Universities are filled with people who know the product intimately. Faculty design and deliver classes, advise students, create research, and push discovery forward. Staff support students in advising centers, counseling offices, and libraries. They are the product people of higher education. Yet their voices are often absent from the places where the most consequential decisions are made.

The “product” of higher education is not branding campaigns, fundraising drives, or strategic plans. The product is learning. It is the student in the lab discovering how to run an experiment, the student in the classroom learning to frame an argument, or the student in the studio creating something entirely new. Faculty and staff labor over the details of this craft every day. They know what works and what does not, because they live with the consequences in real time.

In many universities, however, the decision-making power increasingly rests in cabinets filled with administrators who are not educators. They may be skilled in finance, law, compliance, or development, but they have little direct contact with the classroom. Like Xerox’s tonerheads, they often lack the ability to distinguish what actually makes a great learning experience. When budgets are tight, programs are cut by spreadsheet rather than by thoughtful evaluation of student learning or impact on society. When universities tout innovation, the emphasis is often on marketing slogans rather than pedagogical advances.

Jobs warned that once sales and marketing dominate, companies lose their product sensibility. The same dynamic plays out when cabinets are detached from the classroom. Universities risk forgetting what it means to educate well. They may remain solvent or even grow in enrollment, but they will be hollow at the core if they allow the product to fade from focus. That is the danger of becoming a tonerhead university.

One way to restore balance would be simple and radical: require every cabinet member to teach. Not a full load or tenure-track obligations, but at least one course every year or two. The vice president for finance should face a classroom of first-year students. The provost should grade essays and navigate office hours. The chief diversity officer should experience the daily challenges of leading discussions across difference.

Teaching would not be symbolic busywork. It would tether decision-makers to the product. It would remind them that higher education is not about abstract management goals but about students learning in real time. Budgets and policies would be made with firsthand understanding of how they shape the daily work of teaching and learning. Just as Jobs believed that great products require leaders who care deeply about craftsmanship, great universities require leaders who remember the texture of the classroom.

Jobs’s metaphor is especially urgent today as higher education grapples with artificial intelligence. AI is already changing classrooms in profound ways. Students use it to brainstorm, to summarize readings, to practice languages, and sometimes to avoid doing their own work. Faculty experiment with AI to design assignments, to create simulations, and to offer new accessibility tools. The stakes are enormous.

AI can enhance learning, personalize instruction, and extend access. It can also corrode critical thinking, encourage plagiarism, and widen inequities. The key is not whether AI will reshape higher education, but how it will be integrated and by whom. If cabinets lead this integration without product sensibility, the outcome will mirror Xerox. Leaders out of touch with classrooms will either clamp down with blanket bans that ignore AI’s potential or buy flashy vendor solutions that look impressive on a website but fail in practice. The people who will feel the consequences are students and faculty, not the executives.

By contrast, if product people lead AI adoption, the results could be transformative. Faculty and staff understand the nuance of how students learn. They know when AI can scaffold understanding and when it short-circuits thought. They see how AI might expand access for students with disabilities or language barriers. They are already experimenting with the craft of integrating these tools. Universities must recognize that AI is not a peripheral technology issue. It is central to the product of education. Only product people can make sure it is used wisely.

Jobs’s critique was not that marketers or managers are unnecessary. Pepsi needed them. Xerox needed them too, but not at the expense of its engineers. Similarly, universities need fundraising, compliance, and strategic planning. But these cannot replace the centrality of teaching and learning. When cabinets are stacked with non-educators, when faculty are treated as cost centers rather than creative engines, higher education drifts toward a tonerhead future.

The remedy is cultural as well as structural. Cabinets should teach. Faculty should be integrated into decision-making in meaningful ways, not through symbolic committees but through genuine governance. Staff who work directly with students should have channels to shape institutional policy. AI adoption should be led from classrooms outward, not from boardrooms downward. Restoring product sensibility will not solve every challenge, but it will align leadership with the essence of higher education. It will keep the focus on what actually matters: students learning, growing, and preparing to contribute to a rapidly changing world.

Xerox could have been the Microsoft of the 1990s, Jobs said, but it missed its chance because its leaders could not see the value of their own innovations. Higher education faces a similar risk. Universities are filled with talented faculty and staff who are experimenting with pedagogy, technology, and new approaches to student support. They are the ones who know what great education looks like. But if executives ignore them, if non-educators dominate, the potential will be squandered.

The cost would not just be financial. It would be measured in students unprepared for the future, in faculty burned out from disinvestment, and in institutions’ degrees that lose credibility because they cannot demonstrate genuine educational value. Jobs’s warning is a call to action for universities. Do not let tonerheads run the show. Do not let the people farthest from the classroom define the institution. Restore product sensibility. Put faculty and staff at the center. And when it comes to AI and other innovations, let the product people lead.

Higher education must choose which path to follow. Will it become Pepsi, where branding trumps substance? Will it become Xerox, blind to its own breakthroughs? Or will it remember that its product is transformative learning and put product people back at the center? The answer will determine whether universities squander their history and potential or seize the future. Faculty and staff must not be pushed to the margins. They are the ones who know what makes a great education. They are the ones who can shape AI into a tool for learning rather than a threat to it. They are the ones who carry the product sensibility that higher education cannot survive without. If universities heed Jobs’s warning, they can avoid becoming tonerhead institutions. If they ignore it, they risk forfeiting their role as engines of knowledge and opportunity.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a nationally recognized education leader, scholar, and advocate for equity whose career spans seven senior leadership roles in higher education, including dean and provost. Known for driving innovation and measurable results, he has led institutional transformations that strengthened academic programs, advanced diversity and inclusion, expanded community partnerships, and elevated national rankings. His leadership is grounded in the belief that true progress requires both bold vision and fearless action.