From the Publisher: Following the resignation of the JAE Editorial Board in March 2025, the ACSA Board of Directors has engaged interim editorial teams to lead the publication of JAE 79:2 and 80:1-2. In summer 2025, ACSA commissioned an external assessment of JAE policies and decision making, and the organization is continuing to work through a committee to revise the policies that govern our scholarly programs. Following this process, the organization will work to appoint a new Executive Editor and Editorial Board.

This double issue of the Journal of Architectural Education will celebrate the core mission of the JAE: advancing architectural education through thoughtful analysis, critique, and reflection. We are calling for papers, projects, and articles that address the future of architectural education. This comes at a critical moment. Higher education faces many challenges, including declining domestic and international student enrollments, eroding public support, rising economic uncertainty, and increasing student debt. At the same time, architectural education confronts a number of related concerns, such as reduced student demand, challenges to equity and sustainability efforts, expanded support for alternative paths to licensure, shifting expectations on the part of students, and rapid advances in disruptive technologies affecting the profession and the building industry. 

We are eager to hear how you and your colleagues are defining and meeting these challenges and your ideas about how to convert them to into opportunities. Here are some questions to consider in shaping your contribution to JAE:

• What are the core values of architectural education, or what should they be? What can we learn from history or from educators in other professions?  What might architectural education, design methods, or design thinking offer to higher education broadly?
• What values, visions, and goals do you see in your students? How are you addressing broader societal challenges in your courses, in your approach to teaching, or in the focus of your research and scholarship?
•  What do these societal changes portend for the future of architectural education and what changes do you see coming?
• How do you see these challenges affecting architecture and the built environment more broadly and how might the discipline and the profession respond? 

We welcome contributions that look at how architectural education got to this point and at where it is likely to go in the future. We also invite design submissions that address some aspect of the above challenges, narratives that lay out the potential for the future of architectural education, and visual storytelling that make a critical comment about any one of the many challenges we face. 

Submissions will be accepted for the JAE’s existing manuscript categories: Essay, Design, Narrative, Image. The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is March 23, 2026.  Accepted articles will be published in issue 80:1-2 (Fall 2026). For author instructions, please consult the author guide.

Photo Credit: bauhaus1000