current issues in higher education 2022

Don't miss tomorrow's Higher Education industry news

Let Higher Ed Dive's free newsletter keep you informed, straight from your inbox.

7 higher education trends to watch in 2022

Politics bleeding into college operations, new regulatory action, continued expansion of online ed and more are stories we’ll be following in 2022.

Colleges are entering a third calendar year defined by the pandemic.

They had some reason for optimism in 2021, with federal aid and the wide availability of the coronavirus vaccine helping to steady the sector. But the omicron variant threatens their budding stability, meaning some of the operational shifts that emerged early in the pandemic will remain, like campus coronavirus mandates and new admissions policies. Change is on the horizon, however, including possible increases in state support and the Biden administration racing on its regulatory agenda. 

We've identified several trends to watch for 2022, and we'll be keeping you updated on them throughout the year.

Efforts to reverse slumping enrollment

With grim enrollment numbers over the last two years, many colleges outside of competitive private institutions and big-name public schools are looking to fill seats. Undergraduate enrollment as a whole plunged, declining by about 3.5% in fall 2021 from the previous year, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. This figure only reflects about three-fourths of reporting institutions, but aligns with patterns throughout the pandemic.

Drawing students back to college will challenge many institutions. The country's economic wounds aren't healed, and two-year schools and some four-year access institutions will see fewer students who can afford college. The strong market for job seekers may also divert some prospective students from schools like community colleges, which have seen particularly devastating enrollment declines. 

For other universities, there is heightened competition for the traditional pool of high school graduates. The pandemic essentially sped up trends, including an anticipated drop off in traditional-age college students, that worries admissions professionals. Reenrolling stopped-out students will prove difficult.

Colleges may be able to build on graduate enrollment, which climbed by more than 2% in the fall. And while the pool of lucrative international students dried up and plummeted in the pandemic-rocked 2020-21 academic year, signs point to their numbers now rising . Higher ed leaders have called for a coordinated strategy from the federal government for improving international enrollment.

Can colleges avoid being drawn into a partisan fray?

Political fights are nothing new in higher ed, but 2022 looks to be a year when lawmakers step into colleges' operations to a rarely seen degree.

Diminishing trust in postsecondary education, particularly among the Republican Party, has GOP lawmakers hammering talking points that argue colleges indoctrinate students to liberal viewpoints and create repressive environments hostile toward conservatives. Policymakers and governing boards that have direct ties to the state leaders who appoint them have started to intervene more heavily.

Numerous examples have made national headlines. There was the tenure fight between Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And there was the inability of the University System of Georgia to secure a permanent chancellor in a search shaded by partisan overtones .

Public systems have been thrown into turmoil by controversial appointees with close ties to politicians, too.  Jim Malatras in December decided to resign as head of the State University of New York system following revelations he disparaged a woman who accused former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, of sexual harassment.

Colleges are gearing up for more of these partisan battles. Late in 2021, Republican lawmakers in South Carolina moved to end tenure systems in the state's public colleges. The University of Florida drew investigations from a congressional panel and its accreditor over allegations it suppresses faculty members' academic freedom following a struggle over whether its professors could testify in lawsuits against the state.

Where federal aid and state budgets go

Much of the federal coronavirus aid designated specifically for colleges has been distributed and is starting to dry up. But other pots of federal coronavirus relief funding could still help buoy higher ed. 

Local and state governments collected a share of the billions of dollars distributed throughout the U.S., and policymakers have fairly wide discretion of how to use this money. 

Higher ed has already benefited from the funding. The governor of South Carolina and the governor of Michigan set aside $17 million and $24 million, respectively, for tuition-free college programs. More recently, North Dakota gave $38 million to Bismarck State College , a public polytechnic school, to open a new learning facility.

Experts said colleges should expect to see similar investments in projects that may not have been possible in normal budget seasons.

And because state budgets are stronger, public institutions will likely be making more expansive funding requests. Alabama's higher ed commission recently asked for $2 billion from the state , which would be more than a 17% increase from the current fiscal year's budget. Louisiana's governing body made a similarly high request.

Biden administration plans

Despite not succeeding completely in his legislative priorities, President Joe Biden has progressed on his regulatory policies during his first year in office — although not always at a pace advocates wanted.

The administration started negotiated rulemaking on several policies dealing with the federal student loan system. It also warned for-profit institutions against making false claims to students.

More will come in 2022: The U.S. Department of Education in April plans to release a highly anticipated draft rule governing Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination and violence in educational settings. 

Advocates for sexual assault survivors have called for Biden to more quickly dissolve the current regulation issued by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, which they say gives license to colleges to ignore reports of sexual misconduct. 

Biden's Education Department will likely look to unravel some of the more controversial parts of the rule, including its mandate that colleges set up a judiciary-style proceeding for evaluating sexual violence cases allowing a survivor and accused student to cross-examine each other through an adviser. 

Further scrutiny of for-profit institutions may also come. Biden named James Kvaal to the top higher ed post in the Education Department. Kvaal was noted for helping guide the Obama administration's approach to tackling abuses by for-profit colleges.

How much will campuses need to scramble because of COVID-19?

With the omicron variant of the coronavirus on the rise at the end of the fall 2021 term, many institutions moved to remote operations again. They canceled in-person finals and end-of-the-term rituals, bringing back memories of the beginning of the pandemic.

In the next year, some colleges will face whatever the pandemic brings with limitations put in by policymakers.

Lawmakers and governing bodies in red states have curtailed mask and vaccine requirements. Institutions are pushing their students to get the shot and booster, but some cannot go beyond encouragement. Biden issued executive orders mandating shots for employees that covered colleges, but they quickly descended into a legal tangle of court decisions and injunctions. It's unclear how they'll fare in the legal system in 2022.

It all shows how unpredictable COVID-19 — and human reactions to it — can be. No matter what, it's highly likely institutions will need to be flexible.

Can ed tech providers build on their momentum?

The last two years have been a massive boon to MOOC platforms. The number of people registered on Coursera, one of the most well-known MOOC providers, swelled to around 92 million in September, up from 77 million in 2020 and 46 million the prior year. Likewise, demand for competitor Udemy surged during the pandemic.

Both companies took advantage of this momentum by going public in 2021. And edX, another high-profile MOOC provider, was recently acquired by ed tech company 2U for $800 million. 

Although some analysts are skeptical these companies' rapid growth trajectories will last, company executives are confident the heightened interest in online education and alternative credentials will continue beyond the pandemic. 

These companies can be seen as competing with traditional higher education providers. But colleges are also working with platforms like edX and Coursera offer credentials, including degrees, at lower price points than they do otherwise.

Testing in admissions

Wide swaths of colleges are no longer requiring SAT or ACT scores in admissions, all but ensuring that test-optional policies will stick after the pandemic. 

More colleges will likely extend multiyear experiments they started during the pandemic, which closed testing sites and gave test-optional policies a big push.

Harvard University also extended a test-optional policy through the class enrolling in the fall of 2026. The University of California System scrapped entrance exams entirely in 2021. The California State University system may do the same in the coming months. 

A development to watch is whether colleges switch to test-free policies under which they decline to review exam scores at all. Far fewer colleges have tried test-free admissions, but they have still seen growth during the pandemic.

Advocates for restricted use of standardized exams say test-free policies truly provide the more equitable road in admissions that they are seeking. But excising the tests from other parts of higher education — course placement, advising and financial aid — will be trickier than not considering them on applications.

Natalie Schwartz contributed to this report.

Continue reading for free

YOU MUST AGREE TO OUR TERMS OF USE AND PRIVACY POLICY.

Already a subscriber? Sign in with your email above.

• By signing up to receive our newsletter, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . You can unsubscribe at anytime.

Higher Ed Dive news delivered to your inbox

Get the free daily newsletter read by industry experts

• Select user consent: By signing up to receive our newsletter, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . You can unsubscribe at anytime.

Editors' picks

Education Department unveils policy proposals for accreditation, state authorization

The proposed changes are intended to ensure accreditors and state agencies are adequately monitoring colleges under their purview, the department said.

Colleges that require DEI statements would lose federal funding under House bill

The proposal from Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, highlights the momentum behind efforts targeting diversity, equity and inclusion.

Keep up with the story. Subscribe to the Higher Ed Dive free daily newsletter

Company Announcements

U of Oklahoma said it’s being forced to eliminate its DEI offices. The ACLU disagrees.

An executive order mandated that public colleges review DEI roles and potentially eliminate those unnecessary for compliance and accreditation.

Jury orders Jefferson University to pay $15M after investigation allegedly ran afoul of Title IX

The plaintiff said he encountered gender bias during the investigation "as a male accused of sexual assault."

• Scathing GAO reports blame Education Department leaders for FAFSA mess By Laura Spitalniak
• Arizona State to add tuition surcharge, close 1 campus after state funding cuts By Ben Unglesbee
• Could a new Pell program eliminate racial disparities in student debt? By Laura Spitalniak
• University of California faces unfair labor charge alleging free speech supression By Laura Spitalniak

• Share full article

Advertisement

College Enrollment Drops, Even as the Pandemic’s Effects Ebb

A generation of students may be weighing the value of college versus its cost, questioning whether college is still the ticket to the middle class.

By Stephanie Saul

• May 26, 2022

The ongoing enrollment crisis at U.S. colleges and universities deepened in spring 2022, raising concerns that a fundamental shift is taking place in attitudes toward the value of a college degree — even as the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted operations for higher education.

The latest college enrollment figures released on Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center indicated that 662,000 fewer students enrolled in undergraduate programs in spring 2022 than a year earlier, a decline of 4.7 percent. Graduate and professional student enrollment, which had been a bright spot during the pandemic, also declined 1 percent from last year.

Doug Shapiro, the center’s executive director, noted small gains in first-year, first-time students. However, he suggested that the numbers and the breadth of the declines indicate an underlying change, as students question whether college is the ticket to the middle class and a good-paying job.

“That suggests it’s more than just the pandemic to me; it’s more than just low-income communities that are primarily served by community colleges,” Dr. Shapiro said during a conference call with reporters. “It suggests that there’s a broader question about the value of college and particularly concerns about student debt and paying for college and potential labor market returns.”

Prospective college students may be weighing the relative value of jobs that require or expect a college degree against equally attractive opportunities that do not, he said.

Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, a major industry association, urged caution in interpreting the data.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Top 10 IT Issues, 2022: The Higher Education We Deserve

The EDUCAUSE 2022 Top 10 IT Issues take an optimistic view of how technology can help make the higher education we deserve—through a shared transformational vision and strategy for the institution, a recognition of the need to place students' success at the center, and a sustainable business model that has redefined "the campus."

"There will never be a return to what we knew as normal," a university president stated during one of this year's IT Issues leadership interviews. Footnote 1 Here, as we begin another year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we all recognize that the higher education we knew will not return. The past two years have served as an inflection point at which the much-discussed and much-debated transformation of higher education has accelerated and proliferated.

Another leader, a chancellor, said: "The best opportunity is to redefine education right now. What does higher education look like in a post-COVID world?" The leaders we interviewed are not reflexively reacting to the changes in the world and simply watching their institutions adapt in response. Instead, they are redefining the value proposition of higher education by reshaping institutional business models and culture to anticipate and serve the current and emerging needs of learners, communities, and employers. Rather than working to restore the higher education we had, they are creating the higher education we deserve.

What is the higher education we deserve? One leader emphasized transformed teaching and learning: "I believe that we have the opportunity to reconceptualize how it is that we are no longer going to be in front of the classroom but, instead, we're going to be facilitators of knowledge."

Another leader described a more "customer"-focused institution: "Universities are going to have to become increasingly commercially-minded and agile and adjust much more to what students want and to what employers and governments are asking from higher education as well. The successful institutions will be the learning institutions that are able to respond more dynamically and be more agile in terms of their response, compared with those universities that are less reflective, less able to change."

Another president emphasized the need for colleges and universities to differentiate themselves. "One of the criticisms of higher education is that it is excessively homogenous. There is substantially less choice for people who want to engage with higher education than you might expect. We need to start carving out areas of very distinctive expertise and advantage and then plug those, in a modular way, into much bigger programs of work. I think the biggest transformation will be the move away from the cookie-cutter institutions that attempt to be all things to all people toward players who really carve out and dominate more spaces. And I think that's going to be a tricky journey."

Each leader defined the new higher education a bit differently, but all recognized that the higher education we deserve cannot be created without technology. In fact, for the first time ever, most leaders spoke of technology not as a separate set of issues but as a driver and enabler of, and occasional risk to, their strategic agenda.

The 2022 Top 10 IT Issues describe the way technology is helping to make the higher education we deserve. Footnote 2 Making the higher education we deserve begins with developing a shared transformational vision and strategy that guides the digital transformation (Dx) work of the institution. The ultimate aim is an institution with a technology-enabled, sustainable business model that has redefined "the campus," operates efficiently, and anticipates and addresses major new risks. Successfully moving along the path from vision to sustainability involves recognizing that no institution can be successful and sustainable without placing students' success at the center, which includes understanding how and why to equitably incorporate technology into learning and the student experience.

2022 Top 10 IT Issues

• #1. Cyber Everywhere! Are We Prepared?: Developing processes and controls, institutional infrastructure, and institutional workforce skills to protect and secure data and supply-chain integrity
• #2. Evolve or Become Extinct : Accelerating digital transformation to improve operational efficiency, agility, and institutional workforce development
• #3. Digital Faculty for a Digital Future : Ensuring faculty have the digital fluency to provide creative, equitable, and innovative engagement for students
• #4. Learning from COVID-19 to Build a Better Future : Using digitization and digital transformation to produce technology systems that are more student-centric and equity-minded
• #5. The Digital versus Brick-and-Mortar Balancing Game : Creating a blended campus to provide digital and physical work and learning spaces
• #6. From Digital Scarcity to Digital Abundance : Achieving full, equitable digital access for students by investing in connectivity, tools, and skills

#7. The Shrinking World of Higher Education or an Expanded Opportunity? Developing a technology-enhanced post-pandemic institutional vision and value proposition

• #8. Weathering the Shift to the Cloud : Creating a cloud and SaaS strategy that reduces costs and maintains control

#9. Can We Learn from a Crisis? Creating an actionable disaster-preparation plan to capitalize on pandemic-related cultural change and investments

• #10. Radical Creativity : Helping students prepare for the future by giving them tools and learning spaces that foster creative practices and collaborations

Shared Vision, Shared Strategy

To help create the higher education we deserve, institutional departments and divisions must have a shared vision and be willing and able to plan and act collaboratively. Otherwise, they will always be operating at cross-purposes in which the success of individual areas takes precedence over organization-wide success. Digital transformation is helping institutions retire old ways of thinking and working in order to harness technology to transform institutional outcomes. Institutions need to build the foundations of digital transformation through shifts in their culture, workforce, and technology. Footnote 3 Institutions will focus on three shifts in 2022: operational efficiency, agility, and workforce development (Issue #2).

But the foundation work alone is insufficient. Shifts in culture, workforce, and technology need to be focused on a particular outcome. Institutions will be developing a vision and corresponding value proposition for their institution that takes them beyond the pandemic, and they will be harnessing technology to attain that vision (Issue #7).

#2. Evolve or Become Extinct Accelerating digital transformation to improve operational efficiency, agility, and institutional workforce development

Student Success as Institutional Success

The higher education we deserve is one in which institutions embrace students as their primary customers. No longer can institutions dictate the terms and conditions of students' educational experiences and outcomes. Institutions will be optimizing their offerings to meet students' needs. That includes treating access as an institutional, rather than learner, responsibility (Issue #6), developing services that are designed with the student in mind (Issue #4), designing equitable teaching and learning that works for all individuals, not just those in the "mainstream" (Issues #3, #4, and #6), and focusing on creativity and innovation in teaching as well as learning (Issues #3 and #10).

#3. Digital Faculty for a Digital Future Ensuring faculty have the digital fluency to provide creative, equitable, and innovative engagement for students

#4. Learning from COVID-19 to Build a Better Future Using digitization and digital transformation to produce technology systems that are more student-centric and equity-minded

#6. From Digital Scarcity to Digital Abundance Achieving full, equitable digital access for students by investing in connectivity, tools, and skills

#10. Radical Creativity Helping students prepare for the future by giving them tools and learning spaces that foster creative practices and collaborations

The Sustainable Business Model

The higher education we deserve needs to be able to operate efficiently and manage risks effectively. It needs to be sustainable. Done well, technology can help organizations control and reduce costs, as well as scale beyond their size (Issues #5 and #8).

In the 21st century, we are surrounded by all kinds of risks, and we need to be able to anticipate, prepare for, and manage them. Technology can help mitigate risks to place-based learning and work, and all the pivots that occurred during the pandemic have reduced institutional dependence on the physical campus (Issue #9). Yet technology in the form of data security is also among the top risks in higher education (Issue #1). As long as that remains true, cybersecurity management will remain high on the EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues list.

#1. Cyber Everywhere! Are We Prepared? Developing processes and controls, institutional infrastructure, and institutional workforce skills to protect and secure data and supply-chain integrity

#5. The Digital versus Brick-and-Mortar Balancing Game Creating a blended campus to provide digital and physical work and learning spaces

#8. Weathering the Shift to the Cloud Creating a cloud and SaaS strategy that reduces costs and maintains control

What is the higher education we deserve? It is the higher education that our learners deserve. How do we get there? By beginning with a shared vision and strategy to achieve a sustainable business model that places students' success at the center of it all.

Additional Resources on the EDUCAUSE 2022 Top 10 IT Issues Website

A video summary of the 2022 Top 10 IT Issues

An infographic about the 2022 Top 10 IT Issues

International perspectives on the 2022 Top 10 IT Issues

Corporate perspectives on the 2022 Top 10 IT Issues

The 2022 Top 10 IT Issues presentation at the EDUCAUSE 2021 Annual Conference

2022 Higher Education Trend Watch  

2021–2022 EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel Members

Issue #1: Cyber Everywhere! Are We Prepared?

Developing processes and controls, institutional infrastructure, and institutional workforce skills to protect and secure data and supply-chain integrity

Michelle Rakoczy, Nina Reignier-Tayar, Thomas Trappler, and Gina White

"What risk level are we willing to assume as institutions to best meet our mission? We're struggling with trying to create the right kind of technical environments to be able to share data and to access it. I'm going to want more information, I'm going to have more people who have it, and the security folks are going to be more concerned because people are getting more clever about getting access to the data, and the risk of us inadvertently sharing data in ways that we shouldn't is very real and significant."

—Ron Anderson, President, Senior Vice Chancellor, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities

Cybersecurity threats and incidents are increasing globally and becoming more difficult for users to recognize and for cybersecurity programs to detect. One incident can cause loss of reputation and loss of educational opportunities for students, as well as financial and reputational issues for both the campus and the individuals impacted.

As technology provides more of the foundation on which higher education institutions conduct their core operations, building processes, controls and training that ensure continuity of access and ongoing integrity of those underlying IT products becomes business-critical. Without this, the ability of an institution to function could come to a grinding halt.

To succeed, institutions should not treat cybersecurity as a technical subject. It should be an institutional priority. Cybersecurity is a team sport inside an institution, as well as across the higher education sector in countries, regions, and the world. All of us in our sector need to work together to safeguard our universities.

Challenges in 2022

The pandemic and changing technology architectures are complicating the ability of institutions to provision and secure the supply chain on which institutional infrastructure is so dependent. Additionally, global supply-chain disruptions can have far-reaching effects. For example, computer shipping shortages impact the availability of computing devices, consumer goods, automobiles, cloud computing, and more. Both cloud suppliers and institutions are struggling to obtain newly limited resources.

According to many studies, teleworking and online/hybrid courses will continue to exist after the Covid-19 crisis. Footnote 4 This means that the institutionally provisioned or personally owned devices that staff and students use for working and learning may also be used by family members or for personal purposes. Both cases are challenges that can lead to a security breach.

What were once clear distinctions among hardware, software, cloud, and services and between primary and secondary suppliers continue to blur and overlap to the point where they're no longer distinguishable as separate categories. That raises questions and challenges about identifying the perimeter—or, where institutionally owned and managed technology infrastructure ends. Additionally, the integration between technology run in-house and that run by an external supplier continues to blur boundaries between consumers' responsibilities and suppliers' responsibilities. That, in turn, creates the challenge of clarifying which technology and data components can and should be secured by institutions versus by suppliers versus by end users and, thus, where security risk factors and responsibilities reside. Sometimes suppliers' security and privacy controls may not be as tight as institutions require or realize.

If institutional leaders have not already addressed these risks during the pandemic, they will have to extend cybersecurity policies, processes, training, and other protections to these use cases. Tools like the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit,  developed for use across the entire higher education sector, can help clarify institutional security requirements and suppliers' ability to meet them.

Impacts on Culture

Both mindsets and behaviors need to change. All faculty, staff, and students at an institution need to understand their cybersecurity responsibilities and adapt to (often legally mandated) institutional controls and processes that may very well introduce new restrictions and access.

Recent events—including the Colonial Pipeline and higher education ransomware attacks and the Accellion and SolarWinds security breaches—indicate the urgent need for additional due diligence in addressing IT supply-chain integrity. In this new environment, a breach of availability, integrity, or confidentiality at any point within this complex ecosystem may have significant unexpected repercussions on other points. Footnote 5 Institutional leadership will need to acknowledge and support the need for strong collaborative partnerships among procurement, IT, cybersecurity, and legal units to effectively mitigate these IT supply-chain risks.

Culture clashes between data preservationists and leaders managing institutional risk and legal exposure may intensify as higher education institutions introduce more conservative records-retention policies and processes. Institutions that can frame data security and privacy protection as partnerships among various stakeholders may see fewer of these and other culture clashes.

Helping the Institutional Workforce Succeed

Finding and funding cybersecurity staff has gotten harder, as the pre-pandemic shortage of cybersecurity professionals continues and as pandemic-related budget cuts challenge institutions to afford qualified staff. The burden falls on existing staff, who are burned out and overworked. Some cybersecurity tasks can be outsourced, however, to extend staff and/or acquire specialized skills. For example, institutions can hire consultants to perform an information systems security audit, identify gaps, and work with existing staff to develop a plan to prioritize and address the gaps.

Even better, if the entire institutional workforce possesses an up-to-date understanding of how incidents happen and what can be done to prevent them, all staff can collectively reduce the operational burden on cybersecurity staff, as well as better safeguard data and privacy. Footnote 6

Needed Technologies and IT Capabilities

Technologies for patch management, endpoint detection and response (EDR), Footnote 7 data loss prevention (DLP), and security information and event management (SIEM) are all useful. Setting up security operations centers is even more important than the tools, though, as is having qualified staff with access to the proper tools and monitoring.

Once institutions have invested in cloud solutions, what institutional leaders think of as "their" IT infrastructure now extends globally and introduces new dependencies and risks. An attack on a supplier can endanger and disable institutional services and data. Another capability that institutions need is business continuity to help anticipate and prepare for such issues.

Transforming Higher Education

Cybersecurity is expensive and challenging and becoming only more of both. Institutions that collaborate to manage cybersecurity can share costs and expertise, both reducing the burden on individual institutions and increasing the level and effectiveness of cybersecurity at institutions of all sizes. We are already seeing promising steps in this direction. The University System of North Dakota is partnering across its institutions and with the state of North Dakota to work collectively with supplier partners and to introduce programs that benefit all. Australasia is partnering regionally, with higher education institutions and the Australian and New Zealand governments, to deliver cybersecurity awareness training and to share the costs of a security operations center (SOC).  Institutions in the University of California system are working together to identify and establish agreements with best-in-class IT security tools suppliers.

A second desired transformation would be for institutions to better recognize and prioritize students as primary stakeholders in cybersecurity. When students don't understand how their institution uses personal data, their trust in that use and their confidence in how their institution protects personal data erodes. Footnote 8 They hold institutions accountable for the security of their data. Institutional leaders and cybersecurity professionals need to focus on individuals, in addition to the institution, and never lose sight of the potential financial, reputational, and mental health consequences that data breaches can have on any student whose data or privacy is breached.

Issue #2: Evolve or Become Extinct

Accelerating digital transformation to improve operational efficiency, agility, and institutional workforce development

Bella Abrams, Jeremy Anderson, Tiffni Deeb, and Thomas Trappler

"I see a very substantial role for technological transformation. We have to develop processes that we can automate or at least filter using AI, robotics, and things of that nature. There are good examples of processes that are super mission critical, like university admissions, which I think will radically transform in the next five years through use of technology. And if we fail, what we're going to fall on is that our speed to market and our cost of doing business are basically going to be threats to us."

—Tyrone Carlin, Vice Chancellor and President, Southern Cross University, Australia

Technological transformation happens, whether we like it or not, and at an increasingly rapid pace. Effectively managing the complex underlying collection of IT goods and services, and associated integrations, can transform institutional operations, enabling greater efficiency and innovation. Accomplishing this requires a high level of coordination and planning by institutional leadership, including the need to integrate technology and its procurement into the associated strategic planning processes. An impediment to digital transformation in higher education is that processes, services, and use of data often have not been designed but have evolved, without structured thinking about efficiency, effectiveness, and outcomes. Digital transformation entails optimizing and transforming institutional operations, strategic directions, and value proposition through deep and coordinated shifts in culture, workforce, and technology. Dx initiatives begin with a strategic outcome and entail holistic, coordinated efforts. Rather than improving operational efficiency, introducing data governance and integration, or implementing technical solutions as separate, unrelated projects, Dx initiatives may address them collectively to achieve a particular outcome. Many of today's Dx efforts focus on student outcomes and experiences.

While Dx initiatives help attain strategic outcomes, they also increase institutional capabilities, resulting in greater agility, operational efficiency, and staff knowledge and skills. The institution is thus better positioned for even deeper transformations.

The increasingly diverse range of different technologies and IT services, and the need to integrate, will continue to present challenges. Additionally challenging is accomplishing the above while also effectively implementing new hybrid learning and work environments stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Institutions may lack the resources to fund transformative efforts. The coming demographic cliff—a steep drop-off in potential first-time full-time freshmen projected to arrive in 2025 due to the decline in birth rate in the 2008 recession—may further erode enrollment income at US institutions. As the pandemic drags on, its impact on staff members' health compounds the problem. Staff – including leaders – may run out of the ability to reimagine, reinvent, and retool.

While the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in many ways, some approaches and responses have been necessarily rushed and tactical, resulting in fixes that may not scale or have applicability beyond the pandemic. Institutional leaders will need to create a comprehensive strategic plan with elements that can be prioritized and addressed incrementally to balance limited energy and resources with lasting, meaningful outcomes.

Technology changes rapidly, often offering opportunities to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Institutional leaders will have to dismantle siloed work in order to achieve institutional excellence. Siloes reflect organizational structure rather than strategic outcomes such as student success or financial health. Processes, guidelines, tools and technologies, and data are often siloed. Shared, strategic outcomes can inspire stakeholders to understand the greater good and the need for establishing common solutions that are equitable, inclusive, and more affordable.

Such adjustments involve change. Change decisions can't be made behind closed doors. They will require dialogue across staff groups and student groups to help all stakeholders understand and agree on goals and feel that they have a hand in choices and timing. Institutional leaders will need to become increasingly comfortable with, and effective at, change agility while also maintaining focus on strategic goals.

Digital transformation requires a new set of skills and competencies across the institutional community. New, needed technology-related skills include strategic sourcing, contract management, supplier relationship management, user experience and design thinking, product management, and enterprise architecture. The entire workforce will need deeper data skills and greater ability to collaborate and partner. Human resources staff and workforce managers will need to become more effective at workforce planning and talent management. If the institution continues to function as a hybrid office-based and work-from-home organization, all staff will also need to gain skills in managing, communicating, collaborating, and working productively in this hybrid work environment.

While digital transformation depends on technologies and IT capabilities, success arguably depends more on how technologies are chosen and adopted than on which technologies are chosen and adopted. Technology choices should proceed from, not precede, shared agreement on outcomes and functionality. Academic and administrative leaders understand what they want to achieve, but the most effective technology decisions take an institution-wide, rather than department-specific, perspective. Leaders must invite varied staff to the table: technologists to advise on accessibility, interoperability, security, and sustainability; equity experts to assess fairness and impartiality; and IT strategic sourcing experts to effectively manage competitive selection processes and negotiate the most favorable terms.

Digital transformation may enable institutions to break the classic "iron triangle" rule that says it is possible to maximize only two of the three desirable outcomes: cost, speed, and quality. Dx efforts often involve systems and data integrations, which can lead to both lower costs and better services and experiences. They will provide a holistic view of students, alumni, employees, resources, and more in ways that can result in beneficial outcomes. New architectures increase access to data and resources, which can offer better insights about institutional products and services and enable faster, more accurate decisions.

These changes lay the groundwork to provide students with a more affordable education as well as the skills and credentialing they need to have the work and employment that they desire and to do so at a time that fits their lives.

Issue #3: Digital Faculty for a Digital Future

Ensuring faculty have the digital fluency to provide creative, equitable, and innovative engagement for students

Orlando Leon, Dolores Marek, John Murphy, and Shana Sumpter

"COVID has kind of pushed us in this direction of online teaching. Even faculty who are resistant were forced into an environment where they had to use the technology. And I've heard from some faculty that they had no idea how innovative they could be with some of this technology in their classrooms."

—Nathan Brostrom, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, University of California Office of the President

Students expect their higher education institutions to provide a certain level of digital sophistication in delivering learning and services. For many students, the digital medium is their default way to learn, interact, and get things done. Although the pandemic has required even the most technology-averse faculty to adopt digital instruction, they will need help and encouragement to continue to develop their skills in using innovative instructional technologies.

Instructional and pedagogical technologists understand that technology choices need to be made part of the curriculum-development process, not just layered on at the end. Now is an ideal time for faculty to step back and reevaluate their courses and programs through the lenses of delivery mode and technology integration. That takes time. Teaching and learning support center staff can shoulder some of the burden for faculty.

Institutional leaders need to invest more in training, instructional design support, and spaces where faculty can experiment with innovative teaching technologies.

Gaining buy-in from some faculty is one challenge. But the greater problem today is that many faculty are overwhelmed by the intense ongoing demands of the pandemic. Not all faculty who started remote instruction during the pandemic enjoyed it, and some want to revert entirely and permanently to face-to-face teaching.

Faculty aren't the only ones who are burned out. Instructional and pedagogical designers and technologists have been among the technology staff most overworked during the pandemic, Footnote 9 and now they are being asked to support and help integrate remote and in-person instructional methods. Those staff are a flight risk too, as competition for a very limited pool of such professionals intensifies.

The uncertainty of the pandemic, plus institutional and governmental approaches to managing it, will also generate ongoing disruption and churn. That's likely to exacerbate burn-out among faculty, staff, and students.

Moving toward a digital future with digital faculty requires infusing digital strategy into the pillars of the institutional strategy and missions. Higher education institutions will need to add digital dimensions to governance structures and processes, which of course should involve faculty and incorporate students' perspectives. Including digitally-savvy faculty on academic leadership teams can help—and so can finding ways to integrate core technology requirements into the tenure and promotion process.

Leaders need to encourage collaboration and partnerships across academic departments and among pedagogical experts, technologists, and faculty. Using collaborative technologies like Slack or Microsoft Teams can foster dialogue and community around how faculty are using technology in their teaching, how they are teaching, and how they are changing the curriculum. Partnerships with businesses can also provide exciting and well-funded opportunities to experiment with teaching and technology.

Faculty need training, of course. Those staff who are leading digital faculty initiatives might design training around a digital competency framework. Training will need to be ongoing to keep up with the speed with which digital tools change.

The mindsets of both faculty and staff will need to shift. To help encourage those shifts, organizational leaders will have to introduce supports such as change management and collaboration incentives for faculty, pedagogical and instructional technologists, and other technology staff.

Many people are feeling depleted now, so as leaders introduce and advocate for change, they should try to find ways of helping faculty and staff attain and maintain emotional equilibrium and well-being.

Leaders will also have to introduce new expectations for digital fluency among faculty in the context of continued adaptations to the changing pandemic situation. This may be an ideal time to change expectations, because many faculty are trying to recalibrate their teaching methods and materials to the pandemic situation and to what they've learned about digital instruction.

Technologies and capabilities are needed at all layers. A digital teaching and learning future demands robust, equitably delivered infrastructure that has the capacity to move and store digitized datasets, images, music, and videos and that is designed to accommodate remote locations and devices. Policies can help democratize and standardize resources and resource levels across have- and have-not departments to provide students with consistent experiences and to provide faculty with equitable resources and support. Standardizing learning space management can help simplify faculty's use of learning spaces.

Learning analytics can help faculty adapt their teaching to identify and support students quickly and efficiently. Assessment technologies, although often controversial, are maturing, and with the help of learning and assessment advocates, these technologies can become more valid and better safeguard privacy. New consumer-focused artificial intelligence products may appear in the next year or two also. All these technologies will demand careful processes and policies to ensure that they are being used ethically and equitably. Perhaps the most exciting and fun possibilities exist with gaming and extended reality applications.

In all these cases, new technologies will introduce new costs, support requirements, and training needs. Academic leaders will be better off introducing only new technologies that they can fully support. Innovation and exploration can be encouraged at the grassroots level, and then when small pilots are successful, those technologies can be moved to a supported service catalog.

For institutions that are already adopting digital learning, the transformation is underway. More interesting, perhaps, is to speculate on how higher education institutions that are committed to a campus-based experience will define and develop "digital" faculty. Students will have the greatest influence over the incorporation of digital experiences and learning opportunities into courses and curricula. Will anytime, anywhere learning become an expectation of all students, even those who attend campus-based institutions? If so, when will this happen? Will new generations of faculty be so digitally adept that this issue will lose its relevance?

Most important is to have a digital faculty strategy that is tied to important outcomes. Student success—whether defined as completion, retention, affordability, employability, learning, or all five—is one outcome on which to align a digital faculty strategy. Equity and accessibility must also be incorporated into both outcomes and digital learning strategy. The process of increasing digital fluency will help institutional leaders focus on outcomes, so faculty digital fluency should be addressed in the context of good pedagogical design and measurable learning outcomes.

Issue #4: Learning from COVID-19 to Build a Better Future

Using digitization and digital transformation to produce technology systems that are more student-centric and equity-minded

Wendy Athens, Jared Evans, Dan Mincheff, and Michelle Rakoczy

"We talk about being student ready, so how do we help students become technology ready? Because that's going to be a part of how they're going to receive their education. I think it will put a stronger emphasis on our digital presence. Going back to the ease of use of our website, our student portals, our LMS, all of those things that we're going to lean more heavily on in the future. That will become as important as the brick and mortar. So this definitely is transforming higher education."

— Dan Mincheff, Chief Information Officer, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted almost all facets of higher education. It amplified strengths, demonstrating that effective processes and people can work in a wide variety of situations and scenarios, and it exposed gaps that have long needed to be filled. The pandemic required institutions to focus on core needs and services, strengthening the ones that worked and reinventing the ones that did not. It jump-started digital transformation at many institutions.

During the pandemic institutions returned to first principles and to their primary customers: students. Institutional leaders and faculty learned just how many students lack broadband and devices other than a smartphone. The quick fixes during the pandemic need to give way to comprehensive efforts to ensure that students have sufficient and equitable access to educational resources and opportunities. Technologies like Zoom gave faculty a platform for digital instruction, but faculty need more help truly integrating technology into distance, hybrid, and classroom education. That help needs to take many forms, including pedagogical design, learning space design, and courseware and other instructional technologies.

Students also need more effective technology-mediated advising and support services. As institutional leaders begin to better understand the many extra-academic factors that contribute to students' success, they are introducing and expanding student services ranging from financial aid to mental health services to transportation, child care, and food services. Technology can offer students conveniences such as online scheduling for services, online progress reports and updates, and virtual appointments/meetings.

We have all learned a lot. Institutional leaders need to use their new learnings, processes, and capabilities to permanently change the way they are going to conduct campus business moving forward.

We have entered a new, more complicated phase of the pandemic. Higher education institutions and individuals are trying to achieve something resembling pre-pandemic life while remaining in the midst of a pandemic. This swing back to previous service levels and the ongoing lack of consensus among state and federal leaders effectively prohibit institutional leaders from mandating anything. As a result, two sets of expectations have been established: (1) those established during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., distance learning, remote work, and loosened controls), and (2) the more traditional, pre-pandemic campus-based learning and work. Students, faculty, and staff want to be able to choose among all these options and have a seamless customer experience.

Trying to expand digital services is particularly difficult at this time, however. Reliable planning and provisioning is a challenge as supply-chain irregularities continue, While digital literacy has improved during the pandemic, staff and students need to further develop digital skills to work and learn productively. Yet faculty, staff, and students are tired, stressed, and overwhelmed.

In the first phases of the pandemic, institutions made great progress toward anytime, anywhere working and learning. Now everybody—including students who don't want to leave their homes or dorm rooms to go to class and staff members who want to work at home or want flexible schedules—expects greater adaptability and flexibility. If digital transformation is to be successful, institutional leaders need to step back and reflect on what's been learned and gained, align on desired outcomes, and decide how to move forward with intentionality.

Instructional support and IT staff must provide more training for faculty and staff, to keep them up-to-date and to ensure that they have the skills needed to teach and work securely and effectively beyond the traditional campus. Strong relationships and ongoing communication among IT leaders, staff, faculty, and administrative leaders are essential for technologists to design and deliver great services and for institutions to use technology to its maximal strategic value.

With so many more faculty teaching online, teaching and learning managers and IT support centers may struggle to maintain sufficient staffing levels. The Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provides only point-in-time funding. New strategies to sustain service levels will be needed, such as appointing digital instruction leaders in each academic department to liaise with the support unit and serve as a communication mechanism to get information out and to support conversations about using technology in the classroom.

Institutions will need technologies that enable access and services, from wherever employees or students are, to support hybrid working and learning. Services need to work just as well for students with limited access to technology or special accessibility requirements. Many institutions are also still searching for a flexible but feasible solution for hybrid learning.

Technology can introduce play into learning. Technologies that support more immersive, interactive, and fun learning—such as extended reality solutions—may offer an online, asynchronous learning experience to augment a completely in-person class. Technologies that can help students build community and connectedness are also important in these often isolating times.

Of course, the infrastructure that supports flexible, fun learning and socializing needs to be just as well-managed and secure as the rest of the institutional digital infrastructure. Disaster recovery and business continuity are part of good management, as is effective supplier relationship management.

During the pandemic, higher education became an enormous incubator for digital transformation. New possibilities—and expectations—have emerged. As a result, academic leaders and faculty may introduce novel ways to deliver the curriculum and showcase new and exciting ways for students to learn. Flexibility is going to be key moving forward. Faculty have shown students they can switch modes if and as needed. How do they now simplify the process to leverage flexibility as an advantage?

These transformations will put a stronger emphasis on the digital presence of higher education institutions. The digital campus will become as important as the brick-and-mortar campus. The two models will coexist at many institutions, forcing leaders to consider what can be done only on campus and what can be done virtually. The shift of funding to support hybrid campus operations and planning will be as disruptive as the shift, spurred by cloud computing, from capital to operational funding. Many US state funding models are based on physical space and uses of it. That's not going to work under the new paradigm. Finding the right balance between physical and virtual presence for all members of the campus community will be imperative for a successful future.

Issue #5: The Digital versus Brick-and-Mortar Balancing Game

Creating a blended campus to provide digital and physical work and learning spaces

Jon Bartelson, LeRoy Butler, Scott Erardi, and Paul Harness

"If we're flexing large-scale lectures and exploring ways to 'flip the classroom' by creating online opportunities that extend and enrich our face-to-face teaching, what does that mean for all the lecture theaters that we have, and what other forms of flexible teaching and student engagement space will we need? And equally, if we're starting to think about change to more blended working practices, what does that mean about the office accommodations and meeting spaces we have on campus? And if we start working differently and release some of that space, what does that afford us in terms of opportunities for repurposing space and thereby reducing the carbon intensity of capital programs on campus?"

—Simon Guy, Professor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Global (International, Digital, Sustainability, Development), Lancaster University, United Kingdom

During the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education leaders, faculty, and staff have learned many things about how to provide a quality educational experience for students. As they have begun to transition back to campus-based activities, many leaders are viewing this as an opportunity to reimagine what the "campus" is and how it works.

For many institutions, such reinvention is imperative because enrollments have declined and likely will continue to decline due to both the pandemic and broader demographic changes. Commuting to or living on campus does not often fit the lives of students when they're balancing family, community, and career commitments with the desire to further their education. Administratively, many institutional teams have gained productivity by working remotely or in hybrid ways.

Options for reimagining the campus include (1) redesigning campus physical spaces to support hybrid learning and work, (2) addressing space crunches by encouraging administrative groups to work remotely and then converting administrative spaces to academic spaces that support learning, research, and scholarship that is better conducted on campus, and/or (3) lowering costs by reducing the physical campus space.

Transforming a campus wisely and well is not a rapid process. As the pandemic drags on, leaders are struggling simply to plan for the next week. But leaders need to begin anticipating the post-pandemic future of their institutions, even as the pandemic continues. Many of them lack reliable information about how many of their current and prospective students will want campus-only, hybrid, or fully online educational experiences. Powerful anecdotes can dominate data, which may lead institutions to overcorrect in one direction or the other.

As a result of the pandemic, students want and expect more opportunities outside of the normal, traditional hours that institutions typically offer. They want weekend, evening, and holiday hours for everything from classes to student services to the library. Many institutional leaders are considering whether to make big bets on technology to change the game at their campuses. Those big bets will have major impacts on institutional culture and the very nature of how constituents get work done. Having fewer students on campus may reduce students' interest in and attendance at campus events and activities. Many faculty want the flexibility of being able to work in a more hybrid way, but they want to do so on their terms, such as retaining their campus offices. Staff may be more willing to adapt to new working spaces and arrangements, but they are anxious about the details and personal impact. For example, many staff expect institutions to fully equip their home working spaces while also keeping their institutional working spaces. Few institutions will be able to afford that level of "both and." So while the possibility of flexibility and saved time from commuting is appealing, leaders will have to listen, prepare, and communicate carefully.

Becoming a fully blended campus will change the way all institutional constituents work and form community. People will need help and training to adapt to and gain mastery with new tools and ways of working and collaborating. Physical and digital space and service planners will need to design physical and virtual spaces and ways of working and teaching in partnership with, and getting significant ongoing input from, students, faculty, and staff.

Human resource leaders should consider new programs to incentivize digitally-savvy job applicants to join the institutional workforce, to help design and also model ways to digitally transform work, instruction, and research. Fully remote work arrangements could be used to further attract these applicants to roles that fit the needs of both the future employee and the institution.

The biggest challenge may be finding ways of successfully working and learning in a hybrid mode. Meetings, teaching, and other synchronous group activities work best when everyone is online or when everyone is in the same room. Technologists are investing in various technologies that support "dual mode" instruction or meetings; these technologies include additional cameras, screens, audio, and collaboration technologies. Not every effort will work, so technologists often frame the technologies as experiments or pilots and encourage faculty and staff to test various options. Yet the solution is not only a technical one; equally important is re-engineering academic and work processes to enable people to conduct their work in a seamless way regardless of the modality.

Technologies supporting anytime, anywhere access are also in demand. Since the pandemic began, faculty have become more eager to use cloud-based services for research and teaching. Many institutions have greatly expanded wireless capabilities on campus to support the increased number of institutional services and applications that have been digitized and made mobile-friendly.

The physical campus is unlikely to disappear at most institutions. Rather, the digital campus can offer flexibility in, and alternatives to, how students learn, how faculty teach and engage in research and scholarship, how staff work, and how all constituents form enduring and engaging relationships and communities. As students, faculty, and staff adjust to hybrid learning and work, they will make choices that change the way physical space is used, creating, for example, less need for dormitories or increased demand for fully online classes (and thus reduced demand for physical classrooms). The transformation of higher education may be more evolution than sudden disruption—an evolution shaped by all stakeholders.

Reimagined and transformed ways of working and learning will prepare institutions to serve current and future generations of students, including growing numbers of lifelong learners looking to upskill, reskill, or simply satisfy their curiosity.

Issue #6: From Digital Scarcity to Digital Abundance

Achieving full, equitable digital access for students by investing in connectivity, tools, and skills

Steve Burrell and Trina Marmarelli

"Technology is about so much more than just the devices. It's also about the environment in which our students can or cannot access technology."

—Judy Miner, Chancellor, Foothill-DeAnza Community College District

The pandemic made it painfully clear that in the United States, digital voids in both rural and urban areas most adversely affect Black, Latino/Latina, and indigenous people, as well as people with disabilities and people experiencing poverty. The digital divide is about more than access to reliable high-speed internet. Students also need equitable access to devices, software, and the skills required to be successful students and, later, to thrive in the workplace.

The same thinking that got us here won't get us there. Higher education leaders must act on a holistic strategy for equitable digital access and must invest in sustainable ways to provide access in order to avoid inadvertently widening the digital divide. Institutional leaders have a pivotal role to play in reimagining what equity means. Leaders will need to make difficult choices; in some cases, return-on-investment may not be the measure of success.

The flood of funding around infrastructure and the COVID-19 pandemic has created tremendous swirl and confusion about broadband initiatives. Ultimately, this situation will sort itself out, but until then, knowing who is investing what and where can be difficult to determine. In higher education, we need to be careful that we're investing money in areas and people where there is real need even if not necessarily a sustaining market with predictable return on investment.

Another difficulty is the ongoing uncertainty about the course of the pandemic and its impact on institutional operations and on how to ensure that students have the access they need when they need it. As the pandemic has settled in and claimed another academic year, institutional leaders find themselves having to prepare for a much wider range of circumstances than in the initial phases of the pandemic.

Broadening and sustaining access requires software as well as hardware. Software is increasingly licensed annually using operational funding. Additional funding will be needed to bolster operational budgets during a period of increasingly limited resources. Hard decisions and careful fiscal planning are needed to create sustainable digital abundance. Worse than not addressing this issue may be the need to abandon investments later, leaving stakeholders disenfranchised.

Progress on achieving full digital access for students will be held back by existing biases and attitudes about organizational and personal productivity. The idea of working anytime, anywhere has widespread appeal and value, but not all institutional leaders are prepared to adopt it. Similarly, many faculty and academic leaders are entrenched around the idea that certain modalities of teaching and learning are intrinsically better or more effective than others. That must change to serve the "everywhere" learner (and the "anywhere" faculty).

The academic culture of high levels of autonomy for faculty over how they teach their courses, present their information, and engage with their students is in many ways a wonderful thing. But it can also impede achieving fully equitable digital access for students. When faculty are choosing their own technology platforms without considering the broader institutional context, students often have to navigate a convoluted landscape of technology platforms and tools. A shift in the institutional culture toward presenting students with a more streamlined technology toolkit, without compromising pedagogy, could go a long way toward achieving more seamless access for students.

Additional investments are needed in campus network infrastructure and the highly skilled technical staff to support it. Beyond bandwidth, technologies such as virtual desktops and access to education applications and information independent of place are now a necessity.

Institutions will need IT staff who are able to engage with students to provide them with the technology training and skills that they'll need to be successful.

Technologies such as adaptive learning and augmented reality can remove barriers to learning and open new opportunities for learning, discovery, and experiences. Investments in these technological tools must be matched with investments in people and with rethought processes. Faculty will need to learn about and adapt or adopt new heutagogical methods to make the best use of these technologies. They must be well supported by IT staff who understand not just the technology but also the concepts behind its application to teaching and learning. Collaboration between faculty and staff is also necessary to ensure that digital accessibility is taken into consideration when evaluating and selecting technological tools, so that removing barriers for some students does not inadvertently create new barriers for others.

Implicitly or explicitly, focusing on digital abundance for students puts students, rather than the institution or faculty, at the center of the institution. For that to happen, leaders must focus on creating a student experience that's well thought out, equitable, and cohesive.

Both faculty and staff will need to become more flexible and adaptive in order to respond rapidly to changing circumstances and students' needs. Faculty will need to become adept at remote teaching, learning, collaboration, and advising so that they can confidently revise and improvise in the moment.

The biggest transformation that institutional stakeholders are seeing now is a much broader collaboration between teaching faculty and the staff who support the curriculum, including academic technologists, instructional designers, and librarians. The most equitable level of access for all happens when faculty and staff are working together to improve the learning experience for students. As a result of this collaboration, faculty understand what other staff at the institution bring to the table, and staff become more involved in the classroom experience, physical or remote, and better understand what that experience is like for students and for faculty.

Increasing access and digital abundance for all students could help differentiate institutions in ways that could increase enrollments. The institutions that can achieve full and equitable digital access for students, often by forging new partnerships and taking prudent risks, will be more likely to survive—and succeed.

Issue #7: The Shrinking World of Higher Education or an Expanded Opportunity?

Developing a technology-enhanced post-pandemic institutional vision and value proposition

Steve Burrell, Joanne Kossuth, Joseph Moreau, and Nela Petkovic

"It matters what our students and our alumni do after they leave us. And it matters how they have the experiences that continue to give them the value—and not just in the networks and the conversations and ongoing learning opportunities, but to be able to really contribute, to help solve the problems we have as a society and as a world going forward using the skills we provide them with."

—Joanne Kossuth, Chief Innovation Officer, Mitchell College

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the changes that were already happening in higher education and pushed institutions faster and in new directions. Institutional leaders learned that they could deliver remote teaching and learning to their current students, and now many are ready to serve students across regions, countries, and the world.

Leaders at institutions ready to seize new opportunities are challenging themselves to expand access and increase students' outcomes by leveraging the experience they gained during the pandemic. Technology can help realize these ambitions more quickly and less expensively.

These leaders are also expanding their approaches to digital equity to encompass not only equitable access to connectivity and devices but also equitable access to learning spaces.

The institutions that are able to reassess their mission and strategies, embrace diverse thinking, create partnerships, accelerate their planning cycles, efficiently execute on their plans, and accurately measure the impact will thrive. Institutions that return to the status quo or slacken their pace will quickly fall behind.

We are living in the in-between now. The pandemic continues, and the camaraderie and shared commitment that characterized the initial months of the pandemic has given way to an exhausted slog for many in higher education. For those who simply want to return to the way things were, the talk of permanent changes is frightening and exhausting. Faculty and staff may interpret plans for dual modes of working and teaching as plans to double their workloads. Yet some changes, such as remote work and flexible schedules, will be welcomed by most faculty and staff and in fact may be impossible to discontinue.

Numerous governments gave institutions additional temporary funding during the pandemic to make new investments that would help students and address equity and access issues. Institutional leaders will find it difficult to adjust to reduced funds while sustaining the improvements the support made possible.

If higher education is to expand rather than shrink, people will have to stop viewing change as an occasional, timebound activity that the wily can avoid or subvert. They will have to stop appointing "change agents" as if only a few leaders need to take on that thankless role. Leaders and the workforce alike need to recognize that change is constant and involves everyone and that moments of stasis are brief and not always benign.

Signals of an unhealthy culture in higher education today include widespread agreement with statements like, "this is the way we've always done it," and "this is not what I signed up for." Institutional leaders need to help faculty and staff remember that what they actually signed up for is to serve students. Students' needs and expectations—even who students are—have changed dramatically.

Signs that the culture is adapting include being able to identify the services, processes, and structures that need to be discontinued in order to make way for a new institutional vision and value proposition. Other signs are a willingness on the part of faculty and staff to change the way they think about a sense of place and work and about who the students are.

The institutional workforce cannot evolve until leadership evolves. Old "Newtonian"-era leadership principles that called for clarity of organization and one-dimensional measures of efficiency and productivity will no longer be sufficient to lead an evolving workforce through continued chaos and times of rapid change. What is needed is a new "quantum leadership" that incorporates emotional and spiritual intelligence to focus on helping all institutional community members advance the mission of higher education to serve both our society and the planet. Footnote 10

But everyone, not just leaders, can and must lead from where they are. That requires investments in human resources, faculty, staff, and students in ways that encourage them to generate new ideas and be part of the solutions. Then leaders need to introduce those potential solutions to the institution, rather than to a specific silo, and allow them to either publicly succeed or publicly fail, because that's how the entire workforce will learn.

Recruitment, talent management, and work locations need to transform before institutions can. Applicants have greater leverage than they've ever had to set the terms of their employment. The current workforce expects more flexibility and options. Managers need to restore and even increase professional development and training to help prepare staff for new work and ways of working.

Technology leaders must rethink what infrastructure means in many different contexts. The infrastructure higher education needs must work well for remote learners and visitors. It must either extend beyond the campus to ensure that all learners have high-speed broadband access, devices, and spaces conducive to learning or it must adapt institutional services so that they work just as effectively for smartphones without high-speed access.

The new infrastructure needs to encompass digital experiences and interactions with the institution and deliver them as seamlessly and intuitively as, yes, Amazon. The concepts of consumer-focused infrastructure could also be extended to administrative and academic areas, such as the curriculum and the delivery of course materials.

As hard as technologists have worked over the last years and decades to integrate systems with each other, more progress is needed to achieve the levels of flexibility and seamlessness to which leaders aspire. The barriers are no longer technical; they are financial, political, and structural.

Many institutions still lack the tools and information required to make decisions quickly. Institutional leaders should ensure that they have the data and technologies that will enable them to measure the entire student life cycle, to inform decision makers about the effectiveness of new strategies, and to get accurate measures of strategic progress. Such tools include advanced prescriptive analytics for decision making, a well-developed marketing and enrollment management technology stack, and new tools for efficiently coordinating the evolution of curriculum.

The way higher education certifies learning and graduates is one of the most transformational opportunities. Institutional collaborations that enable students to attain and easily transfer credentials among multiple institutions would be a major advance toward that Amazon-like postsecondary educational experience. Beyond that, employers have been clamoring for clearer information about what graduates know and can do with their education (e.g., competency-based certifications). An associate's, bachelor's, or master's degree is not specific enough to enable employers to evaluate talent for the needs of their companies. If institutions, or the higher education sector as a whole, can clarify learning objectives and accomplishments in ways that advantage graduates and help employers, the value proposition of higher education will increase significantly.

Transformation is attainable, providing institutional leaders have the vision, political will, and ability to change. If not, their institutions may not continue to exist or may exist on the margins and become increasingly irrelevant. This moment matters. Students and alumni need to gain educational experiences and skills that will enable them to immediately contribute to helping solve our societal and world problems going forward.

Issue #8: Weathering the Shift to the Cloud

Creating a cloud and SaaS strategy that reduces costs and maintains control

Paul Harness, Shana Sumpter, Thomas Trappler, and Raimund Vogl

"We are transforming the backbone. We now have one cloud-based instance for all our Blackboard use, which was incredibly resilient when we had to move everybody, in the course of a matter of days, to all-online. Our contract required Blackboard and Amazon Web Services to just scale up. We didn't have to run around and buy a bunch of servers and whatnot."

—Mark Hagerott, Chancellor, North Dakota University System

Cloud computing has many potential benefits. When effectively deployed, cloud services can free up existing resources, enable institutions to scale up and down as demand changes (while paying only for the resources they are using), avoid in-house hardware and software expenses, and in some cases, enjoy increased reliability and security.

To realize the potential benefits of cloud computing, institutions need a cohesive strategy focused on effective coordination of the use of cloud services across departments and on effective management of contracts and supplier relationships.

The adoption of SaaS products accelerated during the pandemic as academic and administrative leaders rushed to transition to online learning and remote work. The need to maintain business continuity prevailed over the need to plan and to mitigate risk through appropriate cloud contract terms. The consequences may need to be addressed in 2022.

Now that many institutions have adopted cloud or SaaS solutions, some suppliers are changing licensing models in ways that dramatically increase costs and are leveraging their market dominance to expand their cloud service models into more markets. Institutional leaders are struggling to negotiate affordable prices and sufficient privacy protections. Even those who participate in demand aggregation—in which state systems or even entire regions negotiate as a single bloc—are struggling to realize even modest discounts. As has long been the practice of solution providers, pricing is a black box that varies from contract to contract.

Some institutions are exploring alternative models that bring challenges of their own. For example, some college and university leaders in Germany are considering adopting an on-premises cloud architecture to preserve digital sovereignty, avoid an over-reliance on proprietary systems, mitigate financial risks, and adhere to the emphasis by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on controlling one's digital destiny. But even those institutions usually have to compromise digital sovereignty when it comes to consumer-level storage, productivity, and creativity software because their end users depend on these applications, with no feasible alternative.

General users can be an additional source of challenges. Staff adopting SaaS cloud products for business units quickly learn that these solution providers are rarely willing to customize their products to fit specific processes. Instead, institutional staff need to adapt the ways they work to fit the products.

Individuals may also inadvertently create security and licensing difficulties for an institution. Any individual can easily download software from the web and begin using it, without understanding whether the software is secure or how users' data and identities are being utilized and shared. Department staff may purchase cloud-based software to address business needs, only later learning that it may not meet institutional security requirements or be easily integrated with institutional applications and infrastructure.

The successful adoption of the cloud entails a broad set of implications, ranging from meeting business needs to complying with policy and the law to realizing that the benefits of cloud computing depend on effectively addressing the associated risks. A key way to accomplish a successful cloud adoption is to establish and manage effective cloud contract terms and conditions. Achieving this requires a strong partnership among those in the procurement, cybersecurity, and legal departments, business process owners, and other key stakeholders to ensure that there are clear and equitable terms and conditions in the cloud contract.

In some cases, mindsets need to expand beyond an institutional focus. Leaders committed to operating technologies on-site rather than contracting with solution providers may choose to adopt a collaborative approach and share cloud services delivery across a district system or even a country.

Adopting cloud computing is not just a technical activity; it is also a procurement activity.

To maximize the value and mitigate the risks of cloud computing, IT and/or procurement staff should gain skills in strategic sourcing, cloud contract negotiation, contract management, and supplier relationship management. Purchasers must be able to understand the contract and what they are actually receiving and are committing to.

Researchers using the cloud for very large storage and compute capacity will need significant technical skills, which many possess. Those who don't will need to rely on IT staff in their labs, departments, or the central IT organization for assistance and support.

The necessary technologies and capabilities differ depending on how an institution is using the cloud. Those institutions that are primarily adopting IaaS (infrastructure as a service) will be using Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Staff at those institutions will have to adapt their skills and work routine to manage IaaS. On the other hand, institutions using cloud technologies for their own service delivery will need staff with a good understanding of mostly open-source technologies such as OpenStack and Kubernetes and a mindset for agile operations (including continuous integration / continuous deployment).

In all cases, institutions need to have a security and privacy strategy. Endpoint protection platforms, two-factor authentication, and cloud monitoring tools are some of the technologies that IT staff use to protect institutional data and individuals' identities.

Cloud adoption is still maturing. IT leaders and staff and cloud providers are all still learning and exploring new possibilities. In many ways, cloud computing has exacerbated long-standing tensions over costs and control between institutions and suppliers. Transformation may be an overly ambitious expectation of technology infrastructure and services provisioning. However, the increased agility enabled by the effective deployment of cloud services is significant and may contribute to a foundation for enhanced institutional innovation and efficiency. Agility enables leaders to try something new, fail fast (as needed), and try again until they get it right.

Issue #9: Can We Learn from a Crisis?

Creating an actionable disaster-preparation plan to capitalize on pandemic-related cultural change and investments

Joseph Moreau, Michelle Rakoczy, and Shana Sumpter

"We need to be flexible enough to pivot. I don't think this is the last pandemic we're going to see. I think climate change itself is going to produce more pandemics. So, we're going to need to be flexible in that way."

—Jeff Rafn, President, Northeast Technical College

It is usually only after a crisis that we learn the importance of anticipating and preparing for disasters. Although most higher education institutions had disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders at many of these institutions had not sufficiently rehearsed their plan. The pandemic showed the importance of rehearsal, helped leaders see what facets of their plans were insufficient, and required institutions to invest in new technologies, processes, policies, and working arrangements. The pandemic also showed whether institutions had strong relationships with solution providers and thus could rapidly negotiate affordable additional services and accommodations. Institutional leaders need to take the lessons they've learned over the last eighteen months and repurpose them for an ever-changing environment and for many different types of crises.

Now is the time to adapt the institutional disaster-preparation plan to capitalize on pandemic-related achievements and to prepare for a variety of crises. But institutional staff lack the stamina to accommodate additional work. They are overwhelmed by continuing to live with the pandemic, and many of them long for equilibrium instead of having to constantly adapt as the public health situation morphs.

Adapting disaster recovery and business continuity plans requires institutional leaders to determine their post-pandemic culture and practices so that these plans can be based on normal operations. But what will "normal" be? For many leaders, the answer is obvious: normal builds on pandemic learnings and investments. But many others still expect the post-pandemic normal to mirror the pre-pandemic normal. Updating disaster preparations may force this issue before some leaders are ready to address it.

Whether leaders are ready or not and admit it or not, the pandemic has transformed their institutions. Students found out about their ability to learn independently and remotely. Faculty found out about their ability to teach effectively with remote instruction and to use technology in new ways. Staff found out about their ability to improve both their productivity and their connection to their families while working remotely. Digital transformation got a big boost. Many institutions made gains in student engagement, equity, access, creativity, and innovation. Leaders now need to work with the institutional community to decide what to take forward and how and what to leave behind. These choices will define the institutional culture going forward.

Communication makes everything work better. The lack of communication often contributes to, or even causes, failure. One reason staff have been so successful in managing the pandemic crisis is their relationships and lines of communication. Leaders need to continue that communication and develop those relationships in remote and hybrid working environments, whether those environments become an ongoing fixture of the institution or are only part of a business continuity plan.

The next disaster is always different from the last one. Today, most minds turn to natural disasters or pandemics, but technology-based crises are also possible. With so many systems being hosted off-site, and with technology becoming the foundation of most institutional missions and operations, IT leaders need to ensure that staff have the tools and the relationships they will need in order to address technology-based crises.

Insufficient training was a common flaw in many disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Staff will struggle to adopt a plan that they have not rehearsed or that requires skills and knowledge they lack. Leaders need to determine the training and the practice that people will require and ensure they obtain both.

Technologists use the concept of the single point of failure—something that, if it fails, stops an entire system from working. This single point is a vulnerability to be avoided. For disaster recovery, the ability to have anytime, anywhere technology infrastructure and services is essential. Cloud technologies, which can offer more redundancy than institutional infrastructure, are very useful in this context.

Leaders might consider broadening the concept of the single point of failure to other institutional operations. Doing so would enable them to be agile in shifting responsibilities to other staff and other locations when the regular staff and locations aren't available. Digitizing information and digitalizing processes can lay the groundwork for anytime, anywhere operations by enabling information and processes to move digitally, rather than physically, through the organization.

Disaster-preparation plans won't transform higher education, but a transformed higher education will need new disaster-preparation plans. The pandemic caused numerous changes that need to be considered: a remote workforce that may be distributed across a region, a country, or the world; incoming generations of students who were changed by the pandemic; different types of learning environments, whether hybrid, hy-flex, or some other configuration; increased commitment to equity and the ways in which a focus on equity transforms all aspects of the institution; and an emphasis on supporting people empathetically and holistically.

Issue #10: Radical Creativity

Helping students prepare for the future by giving them tools and learning spaces that foster creative practices and collaborations

Kati Hågros, Orlando Leon, Trina Marmarelli, and Phil Ventimiglia

"The biggest transformation for higher ed is reconciling what is the goal of higher education. Because for so long, it's been focused on preparing citizens, good citizenship. And we've been talking about, for a long time, preparing students for their career and their life. And so if you're really going to go and teach radical creativity, then you have to come back to that conversation about what is the university's ultimate goal and is it to prepare students for successful careers."

—Phil Ventimiglia, Chief Innovation Officer, Georgia State University

Today's students are facing large, difficult challenges at every level, from the current pandemic to the ongoing issues of climate change to the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Employers complain that colleges and universities aren't preparing students well enough for today's jobs. Future jobs will be even more demanding.

In this changing world with increased automation and with artificial intelligence and machines taking over, our strengths as humans are our abilities to be creative and to find new connections. Institutions need to provide students with these higher-level skills and to prepare them for careers that don't yet exist. In five years, many students will probably be in careers that no one could even conceive of today.

Experiences and learning spaces that will help students foster creative practices and collaborations include multimodal projects, maker spaces, cross-disciplinary projects, internships, and entrepreneurial activities.

Creativity needs space and time, and today's institutions, faculty, staff, and students are short on both. Ideally, the current curricula would emphasize creative, entrepreneurial, and so-called soft skills in addition to more traditional academic learning outcomes. Getting to that point takes time in higher education, and the world is changing much faster than curricula. Related barriers include a shortage of faculty with experience in industry and innovation, not enough physical spaces for activities that need dedicated space, and challenges assessing learning outcomes related to creativity, innovation, and soft skills.

Working outside the curricula to leverage cocurricular opportunities can happen much more quickly, but those efforts don't generally have tangible rewards for either faculty or students, and they are very difficult to scale.

Creative culture supports experiments, failures, and uncertainty. Yet the culture of higher education is not always amenable to failing or to learning incrementally from small experiments. When institutional leaders take risks, they often prefer the "go big or go home" strategy. All too often the result is going home, because real innovation and lasting change tend to be an accumulation of smaller, less exciting, but still intentional advances.

Focusing curricula and learning on radical creativity will require leadership if academic culture is to incorporate creative culture. Institutional leaders will need to encourage and reward collaborations across departmental and even institutional boundaries to enable faculty to broaden the range of learning opportunities that they offer to students. Collaborations needn't be limited to academic areas; those that include IT staff, library staff, and other business areas may be the most fruitful of all.

Leaders can't expect faculty to impart radical creativity and staff to contribute unless the leaders themselves have creative and entrepreneurial skills. Too many people still think creativity is a talent rather than a skill that some people master more easily. Faculty and staff need training and opportunities to practice creative skills. They also need encouragement from leadership to partner across academic departments and business units to model flexibility and a collaborative spirit.

Units that employ students can foster creativity by identifying work that will involve students in real-world creative challenges, rather than giving students routine tasks to complete.

Students need both physical and virtual spaces for collaboration and creative work. Collaboration spaces equipped with big screens and state-of-the-art simulcast and videoconferencing capability can support both face-to-face and virtual collaborations. Maker spaces can enable students to work on creative projects, both academic and personal. Radical creativity might inspire institutional staff to design and develop a maker space 2.0 that builds on the first generation of maker spaces.

Many different tools and technologies could foster creative practices and collaborations. Examples include media creation tools and digital collections to support visual creativity and mixed reality, robotics automation, and programming software for technological creativity.

Faculty can incorporate the productivity, collaboration, and development technologies that employers use into standard coursework to help students gain experience with the tools they will use when they begin working. Similarly, IT staff can use their awareness of new technologies and tools not only to improve IT operations but also to collaborate with faculty in providing students with opportunities for creative exploration.

Emphasizing radical creativity may prompt leaders to revisit the ultimate goal of higher education. For so long, higher education has focused on preparing citizens. More recently, the conversation has shifted to preparing students for their career and their life. A curriculum that stresses creativity must do so with a shared understanding of how creativity reflects the mission of the institution.

Such a transformation could empower students to act as the creators and the authors of their own futures and could equip them with the skills, ways of thinking, and collaboration opportunities that they need in order to attack the problems that are facing our society and our world. These students would become the architects of our collective future through the creative practices and skills they acquired during their time in higher education.

Reflections and Conclusion

If there is one word describing the trait that institutional and technology leaders will need in 2022, that word may be flexibility. The institutional leaders we spoke with viewed the pandemic as a disaster that jolted higher education out of a set of rigid tendencies. Or as one president put it: "A silver lining coming out of the pandemic is the ability to be flexible, which we've always talked about as delivering anytime, anywhere education. And flexibility has just become that much more real, in my viewpoint."

Flexibility is what students increasingly need and expect. Another president we interviewed emphasized that flexibility must become part of the value proposition for an institution: "Flexibility is going to be the core issue that higher ed is going to have to deal with. We're going to have to be much more flexible and meet students where they are, but also deliver them the in-person experience because the cocurricular, the making friends, the getting to know faculty, the creating of networks is essential to the college experience. But I want flexibility in terms of how it's delivered." Flexibility is also an institutional competency that will help higher education prepare for and respond to climate change and the constellation of disasters that are happening more frequently.

One of the presidents we interviewed noted that while the pandemic is what has pushed institutional culture toward greater flexibility, technology is what has provided the means to achieve it: Another president noted: "We've developed much better capabilities with using technology to deliver education in more flexible and more readily accessible ways. More flexible degrees, more flexible learning opportunities, more flexibility in scheduling. We can serve that [fully online] market better, but we can also take the traditional student and increase the quality and the value of their experience with this transit, with these new technologies and new uses of online and technology-assisted learning."

Warning Signs

Several panelists described exacerbating tensions with solution providers. The pandemic has worsened financial conditions at many institutions as enrollments declined while new investments were needed to support remote learning and work. A late 2020 EDUCAUSE QuickPoll found that almost two-thirds (63%) of the survey respondents reported overall IT budget decreases in the 2020–2021 academic year, with a median decrease of 10%. Footnote 11 In the first year of the pandemic, many solution providers offered discounts and other remedies to help institutions weather the pandemic. Our panelists said this welcome support is now waning, without any commensurate increase in IT budgets. Many described double-digit increases in license fees as well. Colleges and universities have some leverage with companies whose primary market is higher education, but many IT expenses are directed toward companies for which higher education is a very small market. This gap between cost drivers and institutional IT budgets may be increasing at a pace and time that could impede institutions from making potentially transformative technology investments.

Other Versions of the Top 10

Respondents to the IT Issues survey had 17 issues to choose from. The following are the 7 issues, in order of their ranking, that did not make the Top 10 list:

#11. We Should All Belong: Developing culturally relevant digital programming to support all student populations

#12. Where Have All the Applicants Gone?: Using technology to streamline administrative processes and leveraging artificial intelligence to assist the enrollment pipeline

#13. Getting Personal : Leveraging technology and institutional resources in support of differentiated and personalized student experiences

#14. The Digital Revolution of Course Materials : Maturing open educational resources (OER) and courseware to enhance higher education, lower costs, increase equitability, and share resources across institutions

#15. How Technology Can Improve the Curriculum : Using curriculum management tools to create stackable credentials and to simplify and modernize existing programs

#16. Creating a Culture of Care : Expanding the uses of analytics and technologies to address mental health

#17. Which Badge for the Job? Offering ongoing hybrid learning opportunities and creating a common framework for microcredentials to support lifelong learning needs

Respondents rated issues differently, of course, meaning that not everyone's Top 10 IT Issues are the same. Some of those differences are associated with institutional differences. As a result, all of the remaining 7 issues except one made it onto the Top 10 list of an institutional subset (see table 1).

The issues most likely to be in these other Top 10 lists were Where Have All the Applicants Gone?, Getting Personal, and We Should All Belong . Radical Creativity and Can We Learn from a Crisis? were most frequently replaced by other issues. The Top 10 lists of the very smallest and the very largest institutions retained the original 10 issues, as did public doctoral institutions. Public master's institutions diverged the most from the primary Top 10 list, with three new issues replacing three issues in the primary list.

The only issue that did not appear on the Top 10 list of any type of institution was Creating a Culture of Care . Its average importance for the institutional groupings ranged from 6.37 to 7.02 on a scale from 1 to 10. These relatively low ratings may not indicate that mental health is not an important issue that technology can help address. They may instead suggest that the contributions of technology to improving mental health are nascent. The Early Adopter institutions rated Creating a Culture of Care most highly, whereas the lowest average rating for this issue came from Late Adopter institutions.

It's All About People

Looking at the entire slate of 17 potential IT issues shows a major shift in our panelists' perspectives on what constitutes an "IT Issue." For the first time, the list looks at students as more than learners and as more than customers who need services. The list reveals students as people with rights, dreams, and fears. The panelists responded to the concerns their leaders expressed in our interviews. They shaped IT Issues around creativity (issue #10), equity (issue #11), individual needs and preferences (issue #13), and mental health (issue #16). With the exception of the focus on personalization in issue #13, this is brand-new territory for the panelists and their ideas on the contributions that technology can make to the most pressing challenges and opportunities in higher education.

Staff, faculty, and leaders are exhausted and chronically stressed. They are tired of pivoting, are overloaded with too much work and the emphasis on learning new ways to work, teach, and collaborate, are overwhelmed by family challenges or extended social isolation, and are fearful of the future. Footnote 12 Yet these are the people who must create the higher education we deserve. This concern permeated almost every conversation we had with the IT Issues panelists, this year and last.

Institutional leaders need to put the risk of workforce disengagement and departure at the top of the risks they address. Certainly there are opportunities to improve working conditions. A September 2021 EDUCAUSE and CUPA-HR QuickPoll found that most IT staff aren't able to work remotely at all or as much as they'd like. D. Christopher Brooks and Jacqueline Bichsel warned: "The lack of alignment between employees' ideal and actual work arrangements might not be due to their immediate supervisors' preferences but could be tied to policies that are set at higher leadership levels or even by an institution-wide policy." IT staff want a flexible work arrangement and flexible work hours. Institutions cannot ignore these desires. The QuickPoll also found that 24% of IT staff described themselves as likely (7%) or very likely (17%) to be looking for a new job sometime in the next year. Footnote 13

The Higher Education We Deserve

These days we all are surrounded by difficulties and disasters: the COVID-19 pandemic, social unrest, entrenched inequalities, a mental health epidemic, and climate change. As the film director Lisa Joy said, "The world is outpacing our ability to imagine it." Footnote 14 But imagine it we must, because every choice we make, every plan we create, embodies our anticipation of tomorrow, the next term, the next year, the next decade. Is the higher education we deserve the one from 10, 50, 100 years ago—or the one yet to come?

Higher education is more than 1,000 years old. Many universities and colleges are older than the countries in which they're located. Maintaining this legacy can be a huge burden, but many of us are devoted to honoring what has come before us. Surely there is a reason that "we've always done it this way." If our institutions have lasted this long, then surely we must continue always doing it that way.

But those of us in higher education owe a greater debt to the future than we do to the past. Our learners need us to prepare them for the future, not the past. We are obligated to help every student who aspires to attain a degree as the basis for a better life. Now is the time to create the higher education they—and we—deserve.

Acknowledgments

Many people at EDUCAUSE make the Top 10 IT Issues report and resources possible each year. I'm grateful to Gerry Bayne for his clever summary videos, to Thomas Rosa for his accurate, timely, and thorough data summaries, and to Connie Ferger, Marc Stith, and my other marketing colleagues for their help in thinking through and reviewing the draft themes and narratives about the issues. Teddy Diggs makes revising and reviewing the article drafts easy and always makes the article so much better. Jamie Reeves is my partner in all things IT Issues; this work would simply not be possible without her help and guidance.

• Each year the IT Issues initiative kicks off with about two dozen interviews of the IT Issues panelists' presidents, chancellors, provosts, CBOs, and other senior-most institutional leaders. We ask them to talk about the most pressing and strategic issues, challenges, and opportunities their institutions are facing, now and in the near future. Our panelists use the summaries of those conversations to identify how technology can contribute to the most important priorities for higher education. Jump back to footnote 1 in the text. ↩
• Once a year, members of the EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel select a slate of 15–20 topics they believe will be the most important IT-related issues facing higher education institutions. EDUCAUSE members receive a survey with those issues and are asked to prioritize them. The 10 issues with the highest-priority scores become the Top 10 IT Issues. This methodology also enables EDUCAUSE to determine the Top 10 IT Issues among various types of institutions. For 2022, 14,017 email invitations to complete the survey were sent to EDUCAUSE members, and 717 (5.1%) completed the survey. Where multiple representatives from a single institution completed the survey, we selected the response from the representative in the highest-ranking position to determine the Top 10 IT Issues. The final Top 10 IT Issues list is thus based on the responses of 395 US-based respondents. Jump back to footnote 2 in the text. ↩
• Susan Grajek and Betsy Reinitz, "Getting Ready for Digital Transformation: Change Your Culture, Workforce, and Technology,"   EDUCAUSE Review, July 8, 2019. Jump back to footnote 3 in the text. ↩
• D. Christopher Brooks and Jacqueline Bichsel, "EDUCAUSE and CUPA-HR QuickPoll Results: The Misalignment of Preferences and Realities for Remote Work,"   EDUCAUSE Review, September 10, 2021; Tanya Joosten, Nicole Weber, Margaret Baker, Abigail Schletzbaum, and Abby McGuire, Planning for a Blended Future: A Research-Driven Guide for Educators (Every Learner Everywhere, 2021). Jump back to footnote 4 in the text. ↩
• In response, US President Joe Biden has made resilient supply chains a national priority. See Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth (The White House, June 2021). Jump back to footnote 5 in the text. ↩
• EDUCAUSE has materials  to help institutions jumpstart their own awareness campaigns. Jump back to footnote 6 in the text. ↩
• D. Christopher Brooks, Eric Jacobsen, Mark Kimionakis, and Tom Grundig, "Endpoint Detection and Response at Boston University: An EDUCAUSE Research Case Study"  (EDUCAUSE, August 11, 2021); "7 Things You Should Know About Endpoint Detection and Response"  (EDUCAUSE, May 25, 2021. Jump back to footnote 7 in the text. ↩
• Dana C. Gierdowski, D. Christopher Brooks, and Joseph Galanek, EDUCAUSE 2020 Student Technology Report: Supporting the Whole Student  (EDUCAUSE, October 21, 2020). Jump back to footnote 8 in the text. ↩
• Susan Grajek, "EDUCAUSE COVID-19 QuickPoll Results: The Technology Workforce,"   EDUCAUSE Review, April 24, 2020. Jump back to footnote 9 in the text. ↩
• Steve Burrell, "The CIO as Quantum Leader,"   EDUCAUSE Review, October 18, 2021. Jump back to footnote 10 in the text. ↩
• Susan Grajek, "EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: IT Budgets, 2020–21,"   EDUCAUSE Review, October 2, 2020. Jump back to footnote 11 in the text. ↩
• Lindsay Ellis, "The Great Disillusionment," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2021. Jump back to footnote 12 in the text. ↩
• Brooks and Bichsel, "EDUCAUSE and CUPA-HR QuickPoll Results."   Jump back to footnote 13 in the text. ↩
• "'Reminiscence' Movie Depicts a Dystopian Future That's Not Far Off," August 21, 2021, NPR. Jump back to footnote 14 in the text. ↩

Susan Grajek is Vice President, Partnerships, Communities, and Research, for EDUCAUSE.

© 2021 Susan Grajek and the 2021–2022 EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel. The text of this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

• Tech & Innovation
• Data Analytics

Higher Ed’s Top 10 IT Issues

By  Susan D’Agostino

You have / 5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in.

LightFieldStudios/Getty Images

DENVER—In a packed ballroom at Educause’s annual conference on Thursday, Susan Grajek, the organization’s vice president for partnerships, communities and research, laid bare higher education’s top 10 technology issues for 2023.

“The pandemic sparked a great rethink that upended previous models of management and working,” Grajek said. “In 2023, institutional and technology leaders are ready for a new approach.”

Grajek’s speech was peppered with technology concepts such as “cybersecurity” and “privacy,” while also including numerous references to “empathy” and “humanity.”

Educause’s 2022 IT issues panel and higher education institutional and technology leaders identified the trends along with their implications for colleges. The report is scheduled to publish Monday. Here’s a sneak preview that highlights higher ed’s need to move from data insight to data action, develop learning-first strategies, and lead with humility.

Ensure IT Leadership Is a Full Strategic Partner

Chief information officers need a seat at college leadership tables to “facilitate a dialogue between institutional aspiration and digital possibilities,” Grajek said. When CIOs are involved in institutional decision-making from the start, they can help guide digital transformation in business and academic matters in a proactive, rather than reactive, way. They also learn more about the college’s mission, operations and culture and, as a result, are better equipped to support it.

Evolve, Adapt or Lose IT Talent

As unemployment dropped to record levels, industry has outcompeted higher education for IT talent in terms of pay, benefits, flexible work options and, in some cases, work-life balance. Moving forward, college hiring managers may need to offer compensation that may not be in line with internal standards, Grajek said.

The work culture may also need to adapt to build community among hybrid staff. To retain staff, employers will need to better accommodate employees’ shifts in personal and professional goals and also foster healthier work-life balance.

Jonathan Hardy, deputy CIO at Villanova University, would also like to see more meaningful progress in hiring with diversity, equity and inclusion in mind.

“Hundreds of schools have signed Educause’s CIO commitment on diversity, equity and inclusion statement. Where are the results?” Hardy asked, noting that more needs to be done for large-scale, systemic change.

Lead With Humility and Candor

Once IT employees are hired, they want clear expectations on what they will be held accountable for, and they want to be empowered to achieve it, Grajek said.

Leaders with candor hold employees accountable to a certain standard, and those with humility have compassion for their employees, according to Brian Basgen, chief information officer of Emerson College.

“These two things are not commonly held together by any individual, particularly at the same time,” Basgen said. A leader with too much compassion but not enough accountability may find that their team fails. Likewise, a leader who holds their team to high standards without compassion may face retention problems.

“Excessive workloads are burning staff out,” Grajek said. “It is time to bring capacity and commitment into alignment.”

Update Privacy and Cybersecurity Awareness

The privacy and cybersecurity landscape has changed from a decade ago, and higher education has fallen behind other industries, Grajek said.

Colleges need to update their cybersecurity and privacy awareness and training, especially given that their community members often entrust their information to institutions without sufficiently understanding how important it is or will be in the future.

Colleges’ information culture needs to “shift from ‘the more information, the better, because you never know when it will be useful’ to data minimization wherever possible,” Grajek said. This is especially true when working with third parties and given the threat of ransomware attacks.

Updated legislation that applies to higher education would help, according to Pegah Parsi, chief privacy officer at the University of California, San Diego.

“FERPA [the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] is from—good grief—1974,” Parsi said. “We need an update that meets the needs of today.”

Leverage Technology for Frictionless Student Experiences

Students need on-demand access to campus resources in a secure, private and accessible way, Grajek said. This will require an investment in technology systems and staff to ensure a frictionless experience when and where they need services.

Individual students should be able to define what success means to them, which may challenge institutions’ understanding of traditional student journeys. A college student’s experience should be personalized, Grajek said, and technology can help address their varying needs to blend digital and physical environments.

Leverage Data to Expand Enrollments

Data is at the heart of enrollment strategies, but many college cultures do not emphasize data, Grajek said.

Data analysts would benefit if they could interrogate data that emanated from a single source, said Karen Warren, deputy chief information officer at Wesleyan University.

“We’re pretty far from that,” Warren said. “Right now, there’s still a lot of work being done moving data around, trying to get it into suitable places where you can then extract data and do what you need to do with that data.”

Ubiquitous—or at least improved—access to broadband connectivity could help diversity and enrollment, according to Sue Traxler, assistant chancellor for learning and information technology and CIO at the University of Wisconsin at Stout.

Move From Data Insight to Data Action

When institutions convert data analytics efforts into institutional action plans, they lay the groundwork for enhancing operational efficiency and improving student success.

“The focus of data analytics needs to change from an historical approach using data to understand what’s happened to a future-oriented approach of using data to project where we’re heading,” Grajek said. Such an effort will require that leaders work with stakeholders to decide on a path forward.

Those who work with the data need to feel safe to experiment. Also, colleges may need to hire staff with specialized analytics skills for this intelligence, and those staff members may be embedded across the college.

Develop an IT Support Strategy That Works In Person and Virtually

Students and instructors now work together both in person and remotely. Employees also work from home and on campus. This means that “everything is anywhere,” Grajek said and “pandemic measures won’t suffice.”

Such an environment warrants its own IT support strategy to optimize outcomes. Colleges need a willingness to change if they are to overcome challenges in developing a robust digital campus, managing students’ high expectations, Grajek said.

Individuals across institutions need up-to-date cybersecurity and data management training. IT staff will need to optimize and simplify computer configurations for end users. Institutions need to create a productive and supportive hybrid culture that supports members of diverse communities they’ve sought to create.

“I’d want a CIO, CTO or other IT leader at a university board level, so [the institution] treats digital investment and design with the same care and attention” as physical campus designs, said Emma Woodcock, chief information officer at York St. John University, in the United Kingdom.

Develop a Learning-First Strategy, Regardless of Modality

The pandemic offered faculty a crash course in tech tools to support teaching. At the same time, ed-tech companies and universities have innovated on new tech products. Such developments could support new ways of thinking about teaching.

“Courses should be designed in a way that allow students to achieve their learning objectives using the technology tools that best get them there,” Grajek said. Flexible, interoperable options supported by technology can reduce barriers and allow more students to engage. Institutions will need to invest in supporting faculty efforts to access, experiment with and implement practices with these tools.

Manage IT Costs, Risks and Opportunities

Many colleges are facing a deferred technology maintenance problem, Grajek said. She noted that technology systems are not simply about administrative efficiency; they can provide data that may inform and impact the institution’s missions and businesses. But to make progress on this front, institutions may need to change their cultures.

“Technology leaders need to help develop an institutional culture of ‘here are all of the problems we need to address—let’s find a good solution,’” Grajek said, noting that too often, many find the tech first and let it define the problems on which to work.

With the Educause conference underway, attendees appeared glad to be together in person, even if the challenges that lie ahead are not for the faint at heart.

“It’s hard to think of a more heroic or exhausted population of professionals than those who make up the Educause community,” John O’Brien, the association’s president and CEO, said in the conference keynote. “The biggest fires have been put out, but that doesn’t extinguish the burnout and stress that sometimes continues.”

Pictures at a (Cancelled) Exhibition

Alex Lichtenstein writes that the cancellation of an art exhibit at Indiana University was but a prelude to further i

Share This Article

More from data analytics.

‘Ruby Tuesday’ Is a Venue to Chew on Data at UTSA

Weekly meetings among student success professionals at the University of Texas at San Antonio guide data-based decisi

Professors Worry About ‘Digital Surveillance’ of Their Work

Union’s survey of academics elicits concerns that electronic systems that track teaching, grades and research product

New Data Consortium Wants Colleges to ‘Own’ Their AI Future

American Council on Education will lead global effort to pool data on tens of millions of students to improve learner

• Become a Member
• Sign up for Newsletters
• Learning & Assessment
• Diversity & Equity
• Career Development
• Labor & Unionization
• Shared Governance
• Academic Freedom
• Books & Publishing
• Financial Aid
• Residential Life
• Free Speech
• Physical & Mental Health
• Race & Ethnicity
• Sex & Gender
• Socioeconomics
• Traditional-Age
• Adult & Post-Traditional
• Teaching & Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Digital Publishing
• Administrative Tech
• Alternative Credentials
• Financial Health
• Cost-Cutting
• Revenue Strategies
• Academic Programs
• Physical Campuses
• Mergers & Collaboration
• Fundraising
• Research Universities
• Regional Public Universities
• Community Colleges
• Private Nonprofit Colleges
• Minority-Serving Institutions
• Religious Colleges
• Women's Colleges
• Specialized Colleges
• For-Profit Colleges
• Executive Leadership
• Trustees & Regents
• State Oversight
• Accreditation
• Politics & Elections
• Supreme Court
• Student Aid Policy
• Science & Research Policy
• State Policy
• Colleges & Localities
• Employee Satisfaction
• Remote & Flexible Work
• Staff Issues
• Study Abroad
• International Students in U.S.
• U.S. Colleges in the World
• Intellectual Affairs
• Seeking a Faculty Job
• Advancing in the Faculty
• Seeking an Administrative Job
• Advancing as an Administrator
• Beyond Transfer
• Call to Action
• Confessions of a Community College Dean
• Higher Ed Gamma
• Higher Ed Policy
• Just Explain It to Me!
• Just Visiting
• Law, Policy—and IT?
• Leadership & StratEDgy
• Leadership in Higher Education
• Learning Innovation
• Online: Trending Now
• Resident Scholar
• University of Venus
• Student Voice
• Academic Life
• Health & Wellness
• The College Experience
• Life After College
• Academic Minute
• Weekly Wisdom
• Reports & Data
• Quick Takes
• Advertising & Marketing
• Consulting Services
• Data & Insights
• Hiring & Jobs
• Event Partnerships

4 /5 Articles remaining this month.

Sign up for a free account or log in.

• Sign Up, It’s FREE

Student mental health is in crisis. Campuses are rethinking their approach

Amid massive increases in demand for care, psychologists are helping colleges and universities embrace a broader culture of well-being and better equipping faculty to support students in need

Vol. 53 No. 7 Print version: page 60

• Mental Health

By nearly every metric, student mental health is worsening. During the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, according to the Healthy Minds Study, which collects data from 373 campuses nationwide ( Lipson, S. K., et al., Journal of Affective Disorders , Vol. 306, 2022 ). In another national survey, almost three quarters of students reported moderate or severe psychological distress ( National College Health Assessment , American College Health Association, 2021).

Even before the pandemic, schools were facing a surge in demand for care that far outpaced capacity, and it has become increasingly clear that the traditional counseling center model is ill-equipped to solve the problem.

“Counseling centers have seen extraordinary increases in demand over the past decade,” said Michael Gerard Mason, PhD, associate dean of African American Affairs at the University of Virginia (UVA) and a longtime college counselor. “[At UVA], our counseling staff has almost tripled in size, but even if we continue hiring, I don’t think we could ever staff our way out of this challenge.”

Some of the reasons for that increase are positive. Compared with past generations, more students on campus today have accessed mental health treatment before college, suggesting that higher education is now an option for a larger segment of society, said Micky Sharma, PsyD, who directs student life’s counseling and consultation service at The Ohio State University (OSU). Stigma around mental health issues also continues to drop, leading more people to seek help instead of suffering in silence.

But college students today are also juggling a dizzying array of challenges, from coursework, relationships, and adjustment to campus life to economic strain, social injustice, mass violence, and various forms of loss related to Covid -19.

As a result, school leaders are starting to think outside the box about how to help. Institutions across the country are embracing approaches such as group therapy, peer counseling, and telehealth. They’re also better equipping faculty and staff to spot—and support—students in distress, and rethinking how to respond when a crisis occurs. And many schools are finding ways to incorporate a broader culture of wellness into their policies, systems, and day-to-day campus life.

“This increase in demand has challenged institutions to think holistically and take a multifaceted approach to supporting students,” said Kevin Shollenberger, the vice provost for student health and well-being at Johns Hopkins University. “It really has to be everyone’s responsibility at the university to create a culture of well-being.”

Higher caseloads, creative solutions

The number of students seeking help at campus counseling centers increased almost 40% between 2009 and 2015 and continued to rise until the pandemic began, according to data from Penn State University’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH), a research-practice network of more than 700 college and university counseling centers ( CCMH Annual Report , 2015 ).

That rising demand hasn’t been matched by a corresponding rise in funding, which has led to higher caseloads. Nationwide, the average annual caseload for a typical full-time college counselor is about 120 students, with some centers averaging more than 300 students per counselor ( CCMH Annual Report , 2021 ).

“We find that high-caseload centers tend to provide less care to students experiencing a wide range of problems, including those with safety concerns and critical issues—such as suicidality and trauma—that are often prioritized by institutions,” said psychologist Brett Scofield, PhD, executive director of CCMH.

To minimize students slipping through the cracks, schools are dedicating more resources to rapid access and assessment, where students can walk in for a same-day intake or single counseling session, rather than languishing on a waitlist for weeks or months. Following an evaluation, many schools employ a stepped-care model, where the students who are most in need receive the most intensive care.

Given the wide range of concerns students are facing, experts say this approach makes more sense than offering traditional therapy to everyone.

“Early on, it was just about more, more, more clinicians,” said counseling psychologist Carla McCowan, PhD, director of the counseling center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “In the past few years, more centers are thinking creatively about how to meet the demand. Not every student needs individual therapy, but many need opportunities to increase their resilience, build new skills, and connect with one another.”

Students who are struggling with academic demands, for instance, may benefit from workshops on stress, sleep, time management, and goal-setting. Those who are mourning the loss of a typical college experience because of the pandemic—or facing adjustment issues such as loneliness, low self-esteem, or interpersonal conflict—are good candidates for peer counseling. Meanwhile, students with more acute concerns, including disordered eating, trauma following a sexual assault, or depression, can still access one-on-one sessions with professional counselors.

As they move away from a sole reliance on individual therapy, schools are also working to shift the narrative about what mental health care on campus looks like. Scofield said it’s crucial to manage expectations among students and their families, ideally shortly after (or even before) enrollment. For example, most counseling centers won’t be able to offer unlimited weekly sessions throughout a student’s college career—and those who require that level of support will likely be better served with a referral to a community provider.

“We really want to encourage institutions to be transparent about the services they can realistically provide based on the current staffing levels at a counseling center,” Scofield said.

The first line of defense

Faculty may be hired to teach, but schools are also starting to rely on them as “first responders” who can help identify students in distress, said psychologist Hideko Sera, PsyD, director of the Office of Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Morehouse College, a historically Black men’s college in Atlanta. During the pandemic, that trend accelerated.

“Throughout the remote learning phase of the pandemic, faculty really became students’ main points of contact with the university,” said Bridgette Hard, PhD, an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “It became more important than ever for faculty to be able to detect when a student might be struggling.”

Many felt ill-equipped to do so, though, with some wondering if it was even in their scope of practice to approach students about their mental health without specialized training, Mason said.

Schools are using several approaches to clarify expectations of faculty and give them tools to help. About 900 faculty and staff at the University of North Carolina have received training in Mental Health First Aid , which provides basic skills for supporting people with mental health and substance use issues. Other institutions are offering workshops and materials that teach faculty to “recognize, respond, and refer,” including Penn State’s Red Folder campaign .

Faculty are taught that a sudden change in behavior—including a drop in attendance, failure to submit assignments, or a disheveled appearance—may indicate that a student is struggling. Staff across campus, including athletic coaches and academic advisers, can also monitor students for signs of distress. (At Penn State, eating disorder referrals can even come from staff working in food service, said counseling psychologist Natalie Hernandez DePalma, PhD, senior director of the school’s counseling and psychological services.) Responding can be as simple as reaching out and asking if everything is going OK.

Referral options vary but may include directing a student to a wellness seminar or calling the counseling center to make an appointment, which can help students access services that they may be less likely to seek on their own, Hernandez DePalma said. Many schools also offer reporting systems, such as DukeReach at Duke University , that allow anyone on campus to express concern about a student if they are unsure how to respond. Trained care providers can then follow up with a welfare check or offer other forms of support.

“Faculty aren’t expected to be counselors, just to show a sense of care that they notice something might be going on, and to know where to refer students,” Shollenberger said.

At Johns Hopkins, he and his team have also worked with faculty on ways to discuss difficult world events during class after hearing from students that it felt jarring when major incidents such as George Floyd’s murder or the war in Ukraine went unacknowledged during class.

Many schools also support faculty by embedding counselors within academic units, where they are more visible to students and can develop cultural expertise (the needs of students studying engineering may differ somewhat from those in fine arts, for instance).

When it comes to course policy, even small changes can make a big difference for students, said Diana Brecher, PhD, a clinical psychologist and scholar-in-residence for positive psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), formerly Ryerson University. For example, instructors might allow students a 7-day window to submit assignments, giving them agency to coordinate with other coursework and obligations. Setting deadlines in the late afternoon or early evening, as opposed to at midnight, can also help promote student wellness.

At Moraine Valley Community College (MVCC) near Chicago, Shelita Shaw, an assistant professor of communications, devised new class policies and assignments when she noticed students struggling with mental health and motivation. Those included mental health days, mindful journaling, and a trip with family and friends to a Chicago landmark, such as Millennium Park or Navy Pier—where many MVCC students had never been.

Faculty in the psychology department may have a unique opportunity to leverage insights from their own discipline to improve student well-being. Hard, who teaches introductory psychology at Duke, weaves in messages about how students can apply research insights on emotion regulation, learning and memory, and a positive “stress mindset” to their lives ( Crum, A. J., et al., Anxiety, Stress, & Coping , Vol. 30, No. 4, 2017 ).

Along with her colleague Deena Kara Shaffer, PhD, Brecher cocreated TMU’s Thriving in Action curriculum, which is delivered through a 10-week in-person workshop series and via a for-credit elective course. The material is also freely available for students to explore online . The for-credit course includes lectures on gratitude, attention, healthy habits, and other topics informed by psychological research that are intended to set students up for success in studying, relationships, and campus life.

“We try to embed a healthy approach to studying in the way we teach the class,” Brecher said. “For example, we shift activities every 20 minutes or so to help students sustain attention and stamina throughout the lesson.”

Creative approaches to support

Given the crucial role of social connection in maintaining and restoring mental health, many schools have invested in group therapy. Groups can help students work through challenges such as social anxiety, eating disorders, sexual assault, racial trauma, grief and loss, chronic illness, and more—with the support of professional counselors and peers. Some cater to specific populations, including those who tend to engage less with traditional counseling services. At Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), for example, the “Bold Eagles” support group welcomes men who are exploring their emotions and gender roles.

The widespread popularity of group therapy highlights the decrease in stigma around mental health services on college campuses, said Jon Brunner, PhD, the senior director of counseling and wellness services at FGCU. At smaller schools, creating peer support groups that feel anonymous may be more challenging, but providing clear guidelines about group participation, including confidentiality, can help put students at ease, Brunner said.

Less formal groups, sometimes called “counselor chats,” meet in public spaces around campus and can be especially helpful for reaching underserved groups—such as international students, first-generation college students, and students of color—who may be less likely to seek services at a counseling center. At Johns Hopkins, a thriving international student support group holds weekly meetings in a café next to the library. Counselors typically facilitate such meetings, often through partnerships with campus centers or groups that support specific populations, such as LGBTQ students or student athletes.

“It’s important for students to see counselors out and about, engaging with the campus community,” McCowan said. “Otherwise, you’re only seeing the students who are comfortable coming in the door.”

Peer counseling is another means of leveraging social connectedness to help students stay well. At UVA, Mason and his colleagues found that about 75% of students reached out to a peer first when they were in distress, while only about 11% contacted faculty, staff, or administrators.

“What we started to understand was that in many ways, the people who had the least capacity to provide a professional level of help were the ones most likely to provide it,” he said.

Project Rise , a peer counseling service created by and for Black students at UVA, was one antidote to this. Mason also helped launch a two-part course, “Hoos Helping Hoos,” (a nod to UVA’s unofficial nickname, the Wahoos) to train students across the university on empathy, mentoring, and active listening skills.

At Washington University in St. Louis, Uncle Joe’s Peer Counseling and Resource Center offers confidential one-on-one sessions, in person and over the phone, to help fellow students manage anxiety, depression, academic stress, and other campus-life issues. Their peer counselors each receive more than 100 hours of training, including everything from basic counseling skills to handling suicidality.

Uncle Joe’s codirectors, Colleen Avila and Ruchika Kamojjala, say the service is popular because it’s run by students and doesn’t require a long-term investment the way traditional psychotherapy does.

“We can form a connection, but it doesn’t have to feel like a commitment,” said Avila, a senior studying studio art and philosophy-neuroscience-psychology. “It’s completely anonymous, one time per issue, and it’s there whenever you feel like you need it.”

As part of the shift toward rapid access, many schools also offer “Let’s Talk” programs , which allow students to drop in for an informal one-on-one session with a counselor. Some also contract with telehealth platforms, such as WellTrack and SilverCloud, to ensure that services are available whenever students need them. A range of additional resources—including sleep seminars, stress management workshops, wellness coaching, and free subscriptions to Calm, Headspace, and other apps—are also becoming increasingly available to students.

Those approaches can address many student concerns, but institutions also need to be prepared to aid students during a mental health crisis, and some are rethinking how best to do so. Penn State offers a crisis line, available anytime, staffed with counselors ready to talk or deploy on an active rescue. Johns Hopkins is piloting a behavioral health crisis support program, similar to one used by the New York City Police Department, that dispatches trained crisis clinicians alongside public safety officers to conduct wellness checks.

A culture of wellness

With mental health resources no longer confined to the counseling center, schools need a way to connect students to a range of available services. At OSU, Sharma was part of a group of students, staff, and administrators who visited Apple Park in Cupertino, California, to develop the Ohio State: Wellness App .

Students can use the app to create their own “wellness plan” and access timely content, such as advice for managing stress during final exams. They can also connect with friends to share articles and set goals—for instance, challenging a friend to attend two yoga classes every week for a month. OSU’s apps had more than 240,000 users last year.

At Johns Hopkins, administrators are exploring how to adapt school policies and procedures to better support student wellness, Shollenberger said. For example, they adapted their leave policy—including how refunds, grades, and health insurance are handled—so that students can take time off with fewer barriers. The university also launched an educational campaign this fall to help international students navigate student health insurance plans after noticing below average use by that group.

Students are a key part of the effort to improve mental health care, including at the systemic level. At Morehouse College, Sera serves as the adviser for Chill , a student-led advocacy and allyship organization that includes members from Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University, two other HBCUs in the area. The group, which received training on federal advocacy from APA’s Advocacy Office earlier this year, aims to lobby public officials—including U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, a Morehouse College alumnus—to increase mental health resources for students of color.

“This work is very aligned with the spirit of HBCUs, which are often the ones raising voices at the national level to advocate for the betterment of Black and Brown communities,” Sera said.

Despite the creative approaches that students, faculty, staff, and administrators are employing, students continue to struggle, and most of those doing this work agree that more support is still urgently needed.

“The work we do is important, but it can also be exhausting,” said Kamojjala, of Uncle Joe’s peer counseling, which operates on a volunteer basis. “Students just need more support, and this work won’t be sustainable in the long run if that doesn’t arrive.”

Further reading

Overwhelmed: The real campus mental-health crisis and new models for well-being The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2022

Mental health in college populations: A multidisciplinary review of what works, evidence gaps, and paths forward Abelson, S., et al., Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, 2022

Student mental health status report: Struggles, stressors, supports Ezarik, M., Inside Higher Ed, 2022

Before heading to college, make a mental health checklist Caron, C., The New York Times, 2022

Related topics

• Mental health
• Stress effects on the body

Contact APA

You may also like.

Higher Education Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges in 2022

Trends impacting higher education organizations are expected to create both opportunities and challenges in 2022 and beyond.

Those trends include revenue growth, tuition increases, and cost-cutting. Tuition increases also affect the competition between community colleges, colleges, and universities.

Revenue Growth

Colleges and universities are projected to see slower revenue growth through 2027.

Related Trends

This slower growth could lead to a few changes in direction.

Retention Rates

The labor market is expected to expand which could discourage people from starting or staying in school. Combined with a stagnant high school retention rate, college enrollment is expected to decelerate.

Online Education

Growth in online education could enable colleges to serve more nontraditional students at lower costs. Online courses may increase interest in industry institutions, boosting enrollment and revenue.

Appropriations

State and local appropriations are poised to grow as unemployment likely declines and the government recovers lost tax revenue.

Tuition and Community Colleges

Continued tuition increases could make it more difficult for some students to pursue higher education.

As a result of the trends below, the number of colleges and universities will likely increase an annualized 1% to 2,120 enterprises over the next five years.

Rising tuition costs could change students’ plans for their educations.

Student Loans

While the federal government took steps to increase student loan availability, the rising cost of a four-year college education could steer students toward more affordable options.

That could lead to competition from community colleges and trade schools. The federal government has taken measures to support these institutions.

Competition

Competition from community colleges will likely remain moderate as traditional colleges and universities dominate the higher education market.

Because many students transfer to a four-year institution after completing two years at a community college, lower tuition for community colleges may ultimately result in higher demand for industry institutions.

Cutting Costs

According to IBIS World, industry employment is projected to increase an annualized 1.2% to 3.3 million workers over five years. Additionally, the transition to relatively inexpensive forms of labor is expected to bolster industry profit over the coming years.

However, industry institutions operate on a not-for-profit basis, and colleges and universities could continue to cut costs to bolster the long-term sustainability of higher education.

Consolidation

Universities are expected to merge redundant departments and courses to reduce administrative costs.

Tenured Versus Part-time Positions

The number of tenure-track positions, which typically have higher salaries, will also likely be reduced. Instead, industry institutions could continue to hire part-time lecturers and nontenured professors at lower wages.

Institutions will also likely further implement online education programs to lower costs and compete with community colleges and for-profit universities.

Online education reduces costs because classrooms aren’t required and a small number of professors can instruct a substantial number of students. By increasing the number of courses available online, universities could reach new markets.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)

Start-ups that provide a platform for universities to offer online courses could continue to gain traction over the coming years.

While some MOOC services may pull students away from traditional universities by offering free and low-cost education services, traditional universities provide benefits not found in online education services such as access to professors, contact with peers, and accreditation from an established institution.

These factors limit direct competition between industry institutions and MOOC services. While MOOCs and similar online education services could make higher education more accessible, they aren’t expected to significantly reduce demand for industry services.

Future Opportunities and Challenges

Based on the above trends, higher education organizations could face several challenges over the next two to three years. However, there are several opportunities as well.

Opportunities

• Mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Mergers, acquisitions , alliances, and consortiums are becoming commonplace. Small, faith-based institutions are a prime target for acquisitions. Many institutions are aligning with other colleges or universities to share services such as digital platforms to save on costs.
• Personal wealth and market performance. Institutions for fiscal year-end (FYE) 2021 posted record market performance and endowments, and investments pools are at all-time highs providing purchasing and institutional aid power.
• Federal and state funding. Public and private schools will continue to see infusions of government funding. The Biden administration seeks affordable college and free community college for all. Conversely, as funding increases in the public sector, the private sector will continue to feel pressure to compete and keep tuition rates low.
• Construction. As institutions emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, they’ll likely move forward with campus expansions and deferred maintenance plans.
• Digital transformations. Many institutions transformed their digital programs due to COVID-19. Some schools outside of major East or West Coast cities are using hybrid models. Many students and faculty prefer a return to campus and in-person learning, however.
• Inflation. Personnel costs are a major operating expense in higher education and will have a great impact as they rise. Cost-of-living adjustments face double-digit growth. The increased cost of goods, especially construction materials, will delay capital expansion and deferred maintenance.
• Workforce shortages. The shortage of personnel and availability of candidates in the workforce will drive costs up. Baby boomers are retiring at record rates. Additionally, the shortages will create an inability to deliver services to students. Also, those shortages could prevent institutions from effectively implementing strategic plans.
• Compliance and regulations. Continued and increased compliance and state and federal regulations on higher education are driving overhead and personnel costs up.

We’re Here to Help

For guidance on how to take advantage of opportunities or overcoming challenges for your organization, contact your Moss Adams professional. You can also visit our Higher Education Practice for related articles.

The material appearing in this communication is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, accounting, tax, or investment advice or opinion provided by Moss Adams LLP or its affiliates. This information is not intended to create, and receipt does not constitute, a legal relationship, including, but not limited to, an accountant-client relationship. Although these materials have been prepared by professionals, the user should not substitute these materials for professional services, and should seek advice from an independent advisor before acting on any information presented. Moss Adams LLP and its affiliates assume no obligation to provide notification of changes in tax laws or other factors that could affect the information provided.

Contact Us with Questions

Thank you. Your contact request has been received. We will be in touch soon.

2023 Higher Education Trend Watch

This report focuses on the workforce, cultural, and technological shifts for ten macro trends emerging in higher education in 2023. Across these three areas of shift, we report the major impacts and steps that institutions are taking in response to each trend. Some trends overlap with the 2022 Higher Education Trend Watch report.  However, while some topics and issues remain consistent, significant shifts have occurred across many of the trends for 2023.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions shifted from emergency response to long-term adaptation and strategically planning for what's next. Many institutions have already implemented hybrid/remote work and learning arrangements, supported by a variety of innovative technologies and tools. Institutions are now focused on designing and implementing needed policies and initiatives, creating new positions, committees, and workgroups, and expanding and upgrading their technology. This focus on adapting and planning can also be seen in some additional trends this year, such as Focus on increasing institutional resilience and Expansion of the digital transformation of higher education.

While institutions are preparing in these ways for a sustainable future, leaders still need to consider and plan for significant challenges, including retention and recruitment (students, faculty, staff, and leaders), costs and budgets, varying and changing expectations and preferences when it comes to teaching, learning, and work modality, and broader cultural issues such as DEI, digital literacy, and the perceived value of higher education.

Respondents to the 2023 Top 10 IT Issues survey were provided not only with a list of 20 IT Issues but also with a list of 20 wider trends  emerging around the higher education landscape. For each of the emerging trends, we asked respondents to rate the level of impact on their institution's technology strategy, policies, and/or practice. The interactive table below summarizes the trend impacts as rated by the respondents and includes dropdown menus for exploring how the trends and their impacts differ across institutional sizes and types.

IT TRENDS RANKINGS

In this section of the report, we take a closer look at the emerging higher education trends selected as most important by the survey respondents, with summaries of the planning and actions they're exploring or implementing at their institutions in response to each trend. Responses have been categorized along three primary areas of institutional shifts: workforce, culture, and technology.

How are institutions responding to Increasing need for data security and protection against threats to personal privacy ?

Shifts in Workforce: Institutions are creating new teams, working groups, and positions that focus solely on cybersecurity issues. However, in the wake of the “Great Resignation” and due to the competitiveness of the current job market, institutions face challenges in recruiting and hiring staff. To equip their existing faculty, staff, administrators, and students with necessary cybersecurity skills and knowledge, institutional leaders are increasing their efforts in providing training and education.

Shifts in Culture: Institutions are conducting strategic planning and are implementing new initiatives and policies addressing cybersecurity issues. Some have begun campaigns to increase cybersecurity awareness, along with policies to comply with federal and state regulations or other security frameworks and programs (i.e., GDPR, NIST-CSF, GLBA). Institutions are also investing in cyber insurance and are ramping up their efforts in detecting and preventing security threats and attacks by implementing regular risk assessments, phishing tests, third-party consulting and monitoring, and audits. Respondents reported a growing need for planning and policies that specifically focus on data privacy and ethics and cybersecurity issues that are unique to work-from-home environments.

Shifts in Technology: Most institutions have expanded, upgraded, and adopted new technologies and security measures such as multi-factor authentication, password tools, threat detection, monitoring, ransomware protection software, and endpoint and Wi-Fi security. While respondents reported an increase in costs as institutions implement these technologies, institutional leaders are also more willing to devote an increased share of their budget toward these resources.

How are institutions responding to Continued adoption and normalization of hybrid and remote work arrangements ?

Shifts in Workforce: The increase in hybrid/remote work opportunities has created a highly competitive job market, and institutions that have not fully embraced this new norm are having difficulties filling positions—in terms of both retention and recruitment. Some institutions are hiring more fully remote staff in order to remain competitive in the job market. At many institutions, hybrid/remote work arrangements vary widely, based on position and department. Despite this, most IT departments and staff report having hybrid/remote work arrangements. Respondents at institutions with hybrid/remote work arrangements reported associated cost savings and increased employee productivity.

Shifts in Culture: Many institutions have implemented policies and HR practices supporting hybrid/remote arrangements. Some are still piloting and testing, while others are assessing and analyzing impacts and effectiveness and are moving forward with strategic planning. As institutions move forward with hybrid/remote arrangements, they face concerns such as creating and maintaining culture and engagement, reconfiguring tasks and events to fit a digital format, and addressing mental health and equity issues (i.e., how to ensure that decision-making regarding remote work and learning is both fair and equitable for all).

Shifts in Technology: Many institutions have adopted technology to support hybrid/remote work, including expanded cloud-based services, access to virtual private networks, Zoom and other meeting platforms, remote phone capabilities, equipment such as headsets and cameras, and a shift from desktops to laptops. Many institutions are also upgrading or reconfiguring workspaces to support a flexible, hybrid work culture (e.g., upgraded classrooms, conference rooms, shared workspaces).

How are institutions responding to Continued resignation and migration of leaders and staff from higher education institutions ?

Shifts in Workforce: The Great Resignation continues, with many institutions reporting significant turnover, especially in leadership roles. Recruitment is a big challenge for many institutions, with declining budgets and a very competitive job market. In response to the increasing number of retirements among upper-level positions, respondents observed that leadership positions are being filled by individuals with less knowledge and experience. Another consequence of resignations is a shift in the workload. Respondents reported having to take on the extra work of those who left, projects being stalled or canceled due to turnover, and an increase in contracting and outsourcing.

Shifts in Culture: Staff, administrators, faculty, and leaders are retiring or resigning because of burnout, unhealthy or unsupportive workplace cultures, and/or the ability to find more desirable work conditions elsewhere. People are leaving for better salaries, the opportunity to work remotely or hybrid, and better work/life balance. Few institutions are engaged in strategic planning that targets recruitment, retention, succession, and offboarding. Those institutions that are working on strategic planning in these areas are reviewing salaries, developing succession plans, identifying non-monetary incentives, and considering cultural changes such as offering hybrid/remote work arrangements.

Shifts in Technology: While respondents did not report any direct technological shifts due to the resignation of leaders and staff, they did report difficulties in retaining and hiring technology staff and leadership. Thus, moving forward, this challenge has the potential to lead to indirect effects on technological processes managed by the IT department—for example, technology that is more difficult to maintain and upgrade and delays with technological support due to understaffing and/or loss of institutional and departmental knowledge.

How are institutions responding to More calls for data-informed decision-making and reporting ?

Shifts in Workforce: Many institutions are adding new positions, teams, and cross-functional work groups and committees devoted to data analytics, though respondents reported difficulties in retaining and recruiting qualified individuals to support big data systems and analytics. Some institutions are redesigning existing positions to focus on data reporting and visualization needs, while others are merging existing teams and workgroups with those that intersect with data analytics (e.g., enterprise tech groups and data science and analytics groups). Some institutions have begun offering training on analytics (e.g., student success analytics) to their faculty and staff.

Shifts in Culture: There is increasing awareness of the value and need for data across all functional areas of the institution, including recruitment, retention, student success, budgeting and fiscal performance, and business operations. Institutional leaders are pushing for more data-informed decision-making, but the need remains for growth and improvement in the areas of data governance, cybersecurity issues, data literacy, and access (i.e., making data easy to report and interpret via dashboards).

Shifts in Technology: Institutions are adopting and/or upgrading their data infrastructure and tools (e.g., dashboarding platforms, warehouses, analytics programs, reporting and integration platforms, CRMs), while also utilizing more of the data from their existing technologies and platforms (e.g., LMSs, ERP systems). Due to increases in the awareness of data privacy and security issues, many of these institutions have adopted security systems and network monitoring solutions to allow for safer data collection.

How are institutions responding to Continuation and normalization of hybrid and online learning ?

Shifts in Workforce: Institutions have increased their number of fully online instructional design staff, in addition to adding leadership positions focused on online learning and instruction. Many institutions are providing more funding and training efforts so that faculty members can improve their instruction and course delivery.

Shifts in Culture: Despite the widespread adoption of hybrid and online learning, respondents reported conflicting preferences. For example, most students want these options, yet faculty and leadership have mixed preferences. With many institutions already having adopted hybrid and online courses for undergraduates, efforts are now shifting toward moving graduate programs to these formats. As institutions continue to offer hybrid and online programs, issues surrounding equity and accessibility, along with the ability to balance flexibility and the quality of the teaching and learning experience, are and continue to be in discussion.

Shifts in Technology: Many institutions have upgraded or renovated their classrooms and other learning spaces and will continue to do so (e.g., making spaces hybrid-capable with updated AV equipment and integration with Zoom). Some have implemented new student engagement platforms (e.g., CRM, online tutoring, advising, wellness tools) and/or adopted additional support technologies and tools (e.g., lecture-capture technology, plagiarism-detection tools, analytics tools and platforms, vertical market products). Institutions have largely shifted away from desktops in favor of laptops and have adopted or are in the process of considering different LMS options that work well with hybrid and online learning methods.

How are institutions responding to Expansion of the digital transformation of higher education ?

Shifts in Workforce: While many institutions are in the process of planning for and implementing digital transformation, respondents reported that the traditional Dx concept needs to be augmented with remote workforce management, effective hybrid workforce support, and new work ethics standards. Further, due to the Great Resignation and the state of the job market, retraining existing staff and filling new positions created as part of the Dx process remains a challenge.

Shifts in Culture: Digital transformation is necessary for institutions to survive and to sustain operations in the face of enrollment pressures, declining budgets, and changes in students' expectations. Institutions are increasingly focused on the Dx process for all functional areas of higher education—not just academics but also athletics, HR, finance, and administration. Institutions are working on strategic plans that incorporate digital transformation, though they face a number of challenges, including keeping up with fast-paced technology changes and stakeholder buy-in.

Shifts in Technology: Institutions have adopted new CRM tools for monitoring the student life cycle and advancement, as well as for managing collaborations, communication, and workflow. There has been widespread adoption of cloud-based services to facilitate hybrid/remote work and learning arrangements, and the focus now is more on accessibility, equity, and the challenges of getting equipment to all who need it. More institutions are adopting technologies to support the processes of digitizing, automating, and streamlining (e.g., digitized procurement and hiring processes, implementation of digital signatures, big data and storage tools, ERP tools).

How are institutions responding to Rising costs of higher education as public perceptions of its value are declining ?

Shifts in Workforce: Many institutions have frozen tuition and fees in an effort to keep costs at a minimum for students. In response to reduced budgets, coupled with declining enrollment numbers, institutions have put holds on increasing salaries and filling vacant positions and have started exploring programs like retirement incentives to help reduce human capital costs.

Shifts in Culture: Institutional leaders widely recognize the impact that rising costs have had on the perceived value of higher education, and they are focused on demonstrating the value proposition of their institutions by improving graduates' career outcomes and employability while also reducing costs and providing financial assistance. To demonstrate value, institutions are expanding career services programs and aligning academic programs with career, skill, and job market needs. To curb spending, institutions are limiting their budget growth and re-examining software contracts, pushing back on price increases, and/or dropping products. They are also exploring various financial assistance options (e.g., additional need-based support), increasing advancement and fundraising goals to help close the gap from public funding, ramping up FAFSA applications and affordability conversations, and revisioning their financial support models to offer only grant-based funding.

Shifts in Technology: With an increased emphasis on student workforce readiness, institutions are investing in technologies that are comparable to or better than those in students' future work environments. Advising platforms and academic planning technologies are helping maximize students' time and financial investment in their coursework, and some institutions are engaging in automating processes in the CRM and recruiting functions and creating team and process maps to support enrollment. IT units are also prioritizing efficiency by reviewing the impacts of ERP systems on institutional flexibility, avoiding duplicative solutions, repurposing technology circulation pools, and changing reserves policies and procedures.

How are institutions responding to Focus on increasing institutional resilience ?

Shifts in Workforce: Resiliency efforts in the workforce during the pandemic were singularly focused on budgetary concerns and the effects of faculty and staff turnover on the ability of institutions to operate effectively. Now, some institutions are viewing turnover as an opportunity to rebuild their operational strategy and are increasing cross-departmental flexibility among staff to reduce the impact of turnover. Others noted that the increase in workload and the decreased budgets—namely, the lack of salary increases and the reduction in backfilling vacancies—have taken a toll on faculty and staff.

Shifts in Culture: Many institutions are working on shifting campus culture to focus on agility and flexibility to meet rapidly changing needs. Business continuity is an important aspect of this work, as institutions are translating the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic into revised disaster recovery and process continuity plans to ensure they are ready to pivot to an on-campus or virtual environment at any given moment. They are also increasing cross-unit collaboration and cross-training and identifying business models to tap new markets and students. Financial recovery planning is critical as well, and institutions are updating their health care benefits to rebuild savings and shore up finances, consolidating courses, and exploring alternative revenue streams and earning options outside of traditional educational programs.

Shifts in Technology: Aligned with institutional efforts to increase agility and flexibility, IT units are building institutional resilience by repurposing funds to modernize data centers and disaster recovery facilities, utilizing a cloud-first approach to build resilience capabilities in security and disaster recovery, instituting new backup systems, and continuing end-of-life equipment replacement grounded in sustainability through automated and scheduled updates and replacements.

How are institutions responding to Widespread efforts to understand and address discrimination and inequity ?

Shifts in Workforce: IT units are proactively engaging with their HR teams to refine job descriptions and encourage more diverse candidate pools, develop rubrics for resumé reviews, and include job search advocates on search committees. Staff development and support programs are providing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, staff affinity groups, and new career pathways and training opportunities for under-represented populations within the institution. Several institutions have also created positions to directly support DEI awareness and culture.

Shifts in Culture: From listening sessions to campus-wide virtual reality experiences, institutions are taking steps to understand and address the discrimination and inequity concerns of students, faculty, and staff. To help ensure that institutional leaders are proactively anticipating and responding to these concerns, DEI efforts are being strategically embedded into institutional policies and are shaping institutional practices such as the following: more inclusive language and alt-text in all documentation; department-level DEI plans; dedicated DEI student groups and faculty/staff working groups; DEI academic programs, lectures, and courses; and DEI offices (e.g., Office of Diversity, Office of Community and Belonging) and leadership roles (e.g., Chief Diversity Officer, Vice Provost for DEI, Vice President of DEI and Belonging, department-level DEI Directors).

Shifts in Technology: A number of institutions are working with their IT units to support DEI efforts. IT units are engaged in projects such as pronoun collection to allow self-selection of preferred pronouns that are automatically populated in downstream systems and instructional rosters, platform development to gather data and reports on DEI initiatives, and analytics solutions for disaggregating student metrics. Institutions are also considering digital equity and minimum technology requirements in their technology planning to increase resources and support for all students.

How are institutions responding to Need for improved data literacy and skills to keep up with growth in big data and analytics ?

Shifts in Workforce: Institutional leaders are facing challenges in upskilling existing staff, within and outside of the IT department, and in hiring qualified candidates to help improve workforce data literacy and skills. Institutions are offering staff development opportunities (e.g., a "Data Innovators” certificate) that focus on appropriate collection and management of data and best practices for using data to extract insights and support decision-making. To help support and lead these efforts, institutions have created positions such as Director of Data Analytics and Vice President for Enterprise Analytics. They are also including more prominent and consistent language about desired data analytics skills in relevant job descriptions and postings.

Shifts in Culture: To keep up with the growth in big data and analytics, institutions are developing new courses, strategically aligning data governance with Dx plans, and building capacity to sustain these efforts. Many institutions have begun planning or are already offering interdisciplinary courses and short-term academies related to data literacy and skills to ensure that all students are exposed to data science. Others are incorporating content into required first-year courses, covering topics from information and digital literacy to data analytics and privacy. To broaden and deepen the integration of data governance efforts with their Dx strategy, institutions are creating related communities of practice, pursuing transparency with data privacy dashboards, and partnering with their institutional research teams to increase institutional knowledge of analytics.

Shifts in Technology: With data and analytics siloed or poorly structured at many institutions, and without a centralized and robust set of tools, the requests for data that support specific strategic initiatives and measures are being stalled. A number of IT units, however, are ramping up their support for data delivery and consumption by expanding the role of business intelligence teams, implementing data lakehouse environments, deploying self-service data-analysis portals and platforms, and improving data aggregation, management, and business process automation.

Although the next steps for each institution must be carefully charted out according to its own context, mission, resources, and needs, the following EDUCAUSE resources and professional learning opportunities can provide leaders and practitioners with general guidance to get started, strategies to consider, and peer communities to contact.

• For support with increasing data security and protection against privacy threats, the EDUCAUSE Library provides a variety of resources on data security and data privacy .
• To learn more about the changing workforce in higher education , visit the EDUCAUSE Showcase "Workforce: Evolve or Become Extinct" and "The Workforce Shakeup" QuickPoll, which cover issues such as budget cuts, worker attrition, recruitment, and widespread burnout . For additional information on the restructuring of the technology workforce, visit The Technology Workforce in Higher Education, 2022 , research hub.
• For additional information on hybrid/remote work arrangements , see David Weil's EDUCAUSE Review article "A Dx Roadmap for Leading the New Hybrid IT Workforce." The EDUCAUSE Dx model provides a useful framework for thinking through the leadership changes needed to support the new hybrid workforce. EDUCAUSE also has a variety of resources on working remotely .
• For support in adopting hybrid/remote learning models , consider registering for the EDUCAUSE Digital Learning Innovators Institute (March 13–May 5, 2023) and Digital Learning Leaders Institute (May 8–July 21, 2023). For additional information, see the 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition. EDUCAUSE also has a variety of resources on digital learning .
• For professional learning support in data literacy and skills needed to keep up with growth in big data and analytics , consider registering for a Data Literacy Institute being offered by EDUCAUSE next year (January 23–March 17, 2023, and June 5–July 28, 2023). Each institute is designed to provide participants with a comprehensive view into the information life cycle and hands-on practice with each step from data creation to leading change through data storytelling and data governance. To understand your institution's current capabilities in advancing analytics initiatives, complete the Analytics Institutional Self-Assessment. To learn more about making data-informed decisions , visit EDUCAUSE Library resources on analytics , data administration and management , data literacy , data governance , and data curation , and explore the Analytics channel in EDUCAUSE Review .
• To learn more about digital transformation (Dx) , consider registering for the EDUCAUSE webinar "Supporting Transformational Change with Design Strategy Tools" (February 9, 2023). In this webinar, Phyllis Treige, chief experience officer at UC Santa Cruz, will discuss her experience and strategies in designing and supporting institutional transformational change and will share practical and easy-to-use methodologies. You can also visit the EDUCAUSE Dx Journey and the Dx channel in EDUCAUSE Review for more information and resources for charting your institution's Dx journey.
• To learn more about the current state of resilience at institutions , see "EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Institutional and IT Resilience" ( EDUCAUSE Review ). To learn more about increasing institutional resilience, read Stephanie Moore's EDUCAUSE Review article "Reclaiming Resilience: Building Better Systems of Care," which discusses how to build support systems within higher education institutions, starting with a framework that identifies barriers to and enablers of organizational processes .
• To learn more about equity and discrimination, visit The EDUCAUSE Guide to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The guide provides action steps to put diversity, equity, and inclusion principles into practice, as well as learning and engagement opportunities to deepen your understanding of the principles. See also the DEI Resources in the EDUCAUSE Library and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) channel in EDUCAUSE Review.
• To learn more about funding and the rising costs of higher education, visit the EDUCAUSE resources on budget issues in higher education IT and IT funding and spending in higher education. The 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition also includes a discussion on current economic trends in higher education.

Visit the IT Issues web page for additional resources.

© 2022 Ashley Caron and Nicole Muscanell. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.

Citation for this work Ashley Caron and Nicole Muscanell. 2023 Higher Education Trend Watch. Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE, October 31, 2022.

EDUCAUSE is a higher education technology association and the largest community of IT leaders and professionals committed to advancing higher education. Technology, IT roles and responsibilities, and higher education are dynamically changing. Formed in 1998, EDUCAUSE supports those who lead, manage, and use information technology to anticipate and adapt to these changes, advancing strategic IT decision-making at every level within higher education. EDUCAUSE is a global nonprofit organization whose members include US and international higher education institutions, corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and K–12 institutions. With a community of more than 99,000 individuals at member organizations located around the world, EDUCAUSE encourages diversity in perspective, opinion, and representation. For more information, please visit educause.edu.

More From Forbes

The future of higher education: what it means for students and educators.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

The Future of Higher Education What It Means For Students and Educators

“The idea that one can earn a degree at the age of 22 and be set for a career has become as antiquated as the pocket watch.”

—Jeffrey R. Brown, dean at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, from his position paper: “ It’s Time to Transform Higher Education ”

• How do we prepare students and workers to do jobs that don’t even exist yet?
• For challenges we can’t even imagine yet?
• To compete in industries and with business models that haven’t even been invented yet?

Higher education is facing one of its biggest periods of unknowns in recent memory. There’s not a single person or aspect of education that hasn’t been utterly shaken by the pandemic.

But that’s not the only source of uncertainty. Technology changes so fast, the skills we master in school are constantly changing and becoming outdated in a matter of years. Some of the most exciting career opportunities might be for roles that don’t even exist yet in industries we can’t even imagine.

We must acknowledge the pace at which technology evolves, and the extent to which the traditional model limits access to education. Experts across higher education suggest that education should look less structured and make room for more variety: calling for new paths, multiple streams, a wider array of credentials — so people can reskill as needed and put those skills to work immediately.

One of those experts is Jeffrey R. Brown, dean at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, author of this report: “ It’s Time to Transform Higher Education .”

Best Travel Insurance Companies

Best covid-19 travel insurance plans.

He argues that to fully embrace their missions, higher education institutions and educators must think differently about the suite of educational “products” they offer. In his report, he calls for “new forms of content delivery, new ways to assess learning, and new ways to certify that a learner has mastered various concepts and skills.”

I had a conversation with him to explore those ideas further. He started with a reminder of the original purpose of higher education.

“If we go back to the classical, liberal education, the idea was to make us more rational, more thoughtful, more informed citizens,” he said. “And that has benefits not only to the individual receiving the education, but also to society at large – to teach us that there's a bigger world out there, to think about the world's problems.”

Higher education used to be a luxury for a small segment of society, but it’s become more of a necessity for people to be able to thrive, take care of their families, and solve the grand problems of the world. He said there’s still a role for traditional education, but what we also need today is lifelong, skills-based training that is available to people at any point in their lives.

“That's the transformation that needs to take place,” said Brown. “We're working with a very old model, and that old model is not as well-suited to the needs of today's citizens.”

He outlined three main ways higher education needs to evolve.

Transformation in higher education: 3 ways to make it more accessible, lifelong and skills-based

1. The future of higher education is democratized. He wants to democratize education by taking advantage of technology.

“We need to use technology to expand our educational offerings to be less expensive, to work around people's work and family lives, and to reach people who are not fortunate enough to live in an area where they have access to top scholars and top universities.”

2. The future of higher education is individualized. Once you're operating at scale and with technology, you can individualize education. He recommends expanding our idea of what types of credentials are valued – getting beyond the four-year degree to include sub-degrees or less-intensive credentials, certificates, or digital badges. Some people don’t necessarily need to spend two years getting an MBA, but they could benefit from learning cutting-edge material in business, finance or analytics. There should be recognized credentials for doing so.

“It might be enough for me to take three courses in these areas that I really need right now to reach that next level of excellence in my current job. I can individualize my educational needs to where I am in my life, where I am in my career.”

3. The future of higher education is accessible. He talked about breaking down the many barriers that exist for people to get the education they want. Those barriers might be that it’s too expensive, they’ve got a family and a full-time job, or there are no good schools within a 50-mile radius of their home. Leaders can demolish those barriers with some intentional design.

“We've tried to design our program not just in terms of your ability to choose content, but also with some scheduling flexibility to accommodate when you're able to jump in and out – to truly make it more accessible.”

For more insights on the future of higher education, listen to our conversation below.

Future Generations and Higher Education: Students need to Lead the Way

I have a seven-year-old daughter, so I asked Brown: What's the higher education experience going to look like for her?

“Children need to learn how to learn in multiple environments,” he said. “I know the pandemic was a painful time for lots of school-aged children. But they're going to need to learn to navigate in a world where they have face-to-face interaction, online interaction and, increasingly, virtual interactions – using augmented or virtual reality. Getting exposure to a wide range of learning modalities, in addition to a wide range of fields and materials, is going to be really important.”

Leaders in higher education, take note: change is coming whether you’re ready or not. As Brown put it: “You've basically got three choices. You can lead. You can be a very fast follower. Or you can become irrelevant.”

Higher education has been through the ringer over the past few years. Make sure you don’t simply rebuild what you’ve been doing since the 1600s and miss your opportunity to evolve.

"What makes a great leader today is the ability to tolerate and even welcome a future that's unknown," said Wendy York, dean of Clemson's Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business.

Are you ready to adapt? If you can’t change your institution, how can you claim the ability to shape the next generation of leaders that society needs?

To learn more about how leaders are preparing for the future of higher education, register free for the virtual version of the 2022 Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit hosted by Clemson University’s Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business on October 14.

• Editorial Standards
• Forbes Accolades

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

• False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
• Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
• Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
• Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

• Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.

Four of the biggest problems facing education—and four trends that could make a difference

Eduardo velez bustillo, harry a. patrinos.

In 2022, we published, Lessons for the education sector from the COVID-19 pandemic , which was a follow up to,  Four Education Trends that Countries Everywhere Should Know About , which summarized views of education experts around the world on how to handle the most pressing issues facing the education sector then. We focused on neuroscience, the role of the private sector, education technology, inequality, and pedagogy.

Unfortunately, we think the four biggest problems facing education today in developing countries are the same ones we have identified in the last decades .

1. The learning crisis was made worse by COVID-19 school closures

Low quality instruction is a major constraint and prior to COVID-19, the learning poverty rate in low- and middle-income countries was 57% (6 out of 10 children could not read and understand basic texts by age 10). More dramatic is the case of Sub-Saharan Africa with a rate even higher at 86%. Several analyses show that the impact of the pandemic on student learning was significant, leaving students in low- and middle-income countries way behind in mathematics, reading and other subjects.  Some argue that learning poverty may be close to 70% after the pandemic , with a substantial long-term negative effect in future earnings. This generation could lose around $21 trillion in future salaries, with the vulnerable students affected the most.

2. Countries are not paying enough attention to early childhood care and education (ECCE)

At the pre-school level about two-thirds of countries do not have a proper legal framework to provide free and compulsory pre-primary education. According to UNESCO, only a minority of countries, mostly high-income, were making timely progress towards SDG4 benchmarks on early childhood indicators prior to the onset of COVID-19. And remember that ECCE is not only preparation for primary school. It can be the foundation for emotional wellbeing and learning throughout life; one of the best investments a country can make.

3. There is an inadequate supply of high-quality teachers

Low quality teaching is a huge problem and getting worse in many low- and middle-income countries.  In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the percentage of trained teachers fell from 84% in 2000 to 69% in 2019 . In addition, in many countries teachers are formally trained and as such qualified, but do not have the minimum pedagogical training. Globally, teachers for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects are the biggest shortfalls.

4. Decision-makers are not implementing evidence-based or pro-equity policies that guarantee solid foundations

It is difficult to understand the continued focus on non-evidence-based policies when there is so much that we know now about what works. Two factors contribute to this problem. One is the short tenure that top officials have when leading education systems. Examples of countries where ministers last less than one year on average are plentiful. The second and more worrisome deals with the fact that there is little attention given to empirical evidence when designing education policies.

To help improve on these four fronts, we see four supporting trends:

1. Neuroscience should be integrated into education policies

Policies considering neuroscience can help ensure that students get proper attention early to support brain development in the first 2-3 years of life. It can also help ensure that children learn to read at the proper age so that they will be able to acquire foundational skills to learn during the primary education cycle and from there on. Inputs like micronutrients, early child stimulation for gross and fine motor skills, speech and language and playing with other children before the age of three are cost-effective ways to get proper development. Early grade reading, using the pedagogical suggestion by the Early Grade Reading Assessment model, has improved learning outcomes in many low- and middle-income countries. We now have the tools to incorporate these advances into the teaching and learning system with AI , ChatGPT , MOOCs and online tutoring.

2. Reversing learning losses at home and at school

There is a real need to address the remaining and lingering losses due to school closures because of COVID-19.  Most students living in households with incomes under the poverty line in the developing world, roughly the bottom 80% in low-income countries and the bottom 50% in middle-income countries, do not have the minimum conditions to learn at home . These students do not have access to the internet, and, often, their parents or guardians do not have the necessary schooling level or the time to help them in their learning process. Connectivity for poor households is a priority. But learning continuity also requires the presence of an adult as a facilitator—a parent, guardian, instructor, or community worker assisting the student during the learning process while schools are closed or e-learning is used.

To recover from the negative impact of the pandemic, the school system will need to develop at the student level: (i) active and reflective learning; (ii) analytical and applied skills; (iii) strong self-esteem; (iv) attitudes supportive of cooperation and solidarity; and (v) a good knowledge of the curriculum areas. At the teacher (instructor, facilitator, parent) level, the system should aim to develop a new disposition toward the role of teacher as a guide and facilitator. And finally, the system also needs to increase parental involvement in the education of their children and be active part in the solution of the children’s problems. The Escuela Nueva Learning Circles or the Pratham Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) are models that can be used.

3. Use of evidence to improve teaching and learning

We now know more about what works at scale to address the learning crisis. To help countries improve teaching and learning and make teaching an attractive profession, based on available empirical world-wide evidence , we need to improve its status, compensation policies and career progression structures; ensure pre-service education includes a strong practicum component so teachers are well equipped to transition and perform effectively in the classroom; and provide high-quality in-service professional development to ensure they keep teaching in an effective way. We also have the tools to address learning issues cost-effectively. The returns to schooling are high and increasing post-pandemic. But we also have the cost-benefit tools to make good decisions, and these suggest that structured pedagogy, teaching according to learning levels (with and without technology use) are proven effective and cost-effective .

4. The role of the private sector

When properly regulated the private sector can be an effective education provider, and it can help address the specific needs of countries. Most of the pedagogical models that have received international recognition come from the private sector. For example, the recipients of the Yidan Prize on education development are from the non-state sector experiences (Escuela Nueva, BRAC, edX, Pratham, CAMFED and New Education Initiative). In the context of the Artificial Intelligence movement, most of the tools that will revolutionize teaching and learning come from the private sector (i.e., big data, machine learning, electronic pedagogies like OER-Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, etc.). Around the world education technology start-ups are developing AI tools that may have a good potential to help improve quality of education .

After decades asking the same questions on how to improve the education systems of countries, we, finally, are finding answers that are very promising.  Governments need to be aware of this fact.

To receive weekly articles,  sign-up here  

Get updates from Education for Global Development

Thank you for choosing to be part of the Education for Global Development community!

Your subscription is now active. The latest blog posts and blog-related announcements will be delivered directly to your email inbox. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Consultant, Education Sector, World Bank

Senior Adviser, Education

Join the Conversation

• Share on mail
• comments added

Global education trends and research to follow in 2022

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, emily gustafsson-wright , emily gustafsson-wright senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education helen shwe hadani , helen shwe hadani former brookings expert kathy hirsh-pasek , kathy hirsh-pasek senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education maysa jalbout , maysa jalbout nonresident fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education elizabeth m. king , elizabeth m. king nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education jennifer l. o’donoghue , jennifer l. o’donoghue deputy director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development brad olsen , brad olsen senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education jordan shapiro , jordan shapiro nonresident fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education emiliana vegas , and emiliana vegas former co-director - center for universal education , former senior fellow - global economy and development rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development.

January 24, 2022

• 12 min read

As the third calendar year of the pandemic begins, 2022 promises to be an important one—especially for education. Around the world, education systems have had to contend with sporadic closures, inequitable access to education technology and other distance learning tools, and deep challenges in maintaining both students’ and teachers’ physical and emotional health. At the same time, not all of the sudden changes precipitated by the pandemic have been bad—with some promising new innovations, allies, and increased attention on the field of global education emerging over the past three years. The key question is whether 2022 and the years ahead will lead to education transformation or will students, teachers, and families suffer long-lasting setbacks?

In the Center for Universal Education, our scholars take stock of the trends, policies, practices, and research that they’ll be closely keeping an eye on this year and likely in the many to come.

More than ever, in 2022 it will be critical to focus on strengthening the fabric of our global education system in order to achieve positive outcomes—particularly through an increased focus on data-informed decisionmaking. We have seen a renewed focus on different forms of data that are critical to enhanced education outcomes, such as real-time performance data, which allow teachers and other decisionmakers to course-adjust to the needs of learners to better support their educational journeys. Additionally, high-quality program cost data are needed for decisionmakers to plan, budget, and choose the most cost-effective interventions.

One way we are seeing these areas strengthened is through innovative financing for education, such as impact bonds , which require data to operate at full potential. This year, pooled funding through outcomes funds—a scaled version of impact bonds—should make a particularly big splash. The Education Outcomes Fund organization is slated to launch programs in Ghana and Sierra Leone, and we also expect to see the launch of country-specific outcomes funds for education such as OFFER (Outcome Fund For Education Results) in Colombia, the Back-to-School Outcomes Fund in India, and another fund in Chile. At the Center for Universal Education, we will be following these innovations closely and look forward to the insights that they will bring to the education sector.

As we look ahead to 2022, one continued challenge for many families is navigating the uncharted territory of supporting children’s learning with a growing number of school closures . But while the pandemic forced an abrupt slowdown in modern life, it also provided an opportunity to reexamine how we can prioritize learning and healthy development both in and out of school. Moreover, the cascading effects of the pandemic are disproportionally affecting families living in communities challenged by decades of discrimination and disinvestment—and are very likely to widen already existing educational inequities in worrisome ways.

One innovative approach to providing enriching learning opportunities beyond school walls that address the inequities in our current systems is Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL) —installations and programming that promote children and families’ learning through play in the public realm. A current focus for PLL at Brookings is measuring the impact of these spaces to show that PLL works and to garner greater investment in them. To that end, Brookings and its partners developed a framework and an initial set of indicators from both the learning science and placemaking perspectives to help assess the positive effects of PLL on learning outcomes , as well as its potential to enhance social interaction and public life in revitalized spaces. The framework will continue to evolve as we learn from communities that are testing the expansion and adaptation of PLL—this important work is just beginning.

The pandemic highlighted several trends in education that promise to be the focus of future policy and practice in 2022 and beyond: the importance of skills that supplement the learning of content, systemic inequities in education systems, and the role of digital technology in the education of the future. It has become increasingly clear that the memorization of content alone will not prepare children for the jobs and society of the future. As noted in a Brookings report “ A new path for education reform, ” in an automated world, manufacturing jobs and even preliminary medical diagnoses or legal contracts can be performed by computers and robots. Students who can work collaboratively—with strong communication skills, critical thinking, and creative innovation—will be highly valued. Mission statements from around the globe are starting to promote a “whole child” approach to education that will encourage the learning of a breadth of skills better aligning the education sector with needs from the business sector.

The past year also demonstrated weaknesses and inequalities inherent in remote learning that I’ll be closely tracking in the years to come. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that virtual learning presents risks to social-emotional learning . Further, research suggests that academic progress during the pandemic slowed such that students demonstrated only 35 to 50 percent of the gains they normally achieve in mathematics and 60 to 68 percent in reading. The losses are not experienced uniformly , with children from underresourced environments falling behind their more resourced peers.

The failure of remote learning also raises questions about the place of digital learning in the classroom. Learning will become more and more hybrid over time, and keeping an eye on advances in technology—especially regarding augmented reality and the metaverse—will be particularly important, as both have real consequences for the classrooms.

In 2022, I’ll be focusing on one group of children in particular–refugees–who are among those children who have historically had the least access to preprimary education. The pandemic has affected them disproportionally , as it pushed them and their families into poverty and deprived them from most forms of education during the school closures.

While much more investment in early childhood education research and evaluation is needed to improve evidence and channel scarce resources effectively, there are a few important efforts to watch. A report commissioned by Theirworld last year provided an overview of the sector and focused on a critical gap and opportunity to address the inequity of access to early childhood education in refugee settings by better supporting teachers and community workers. This year, Theirworld and partners will pursue two of the report’s recommendations–making the science of early childhood brain development widely accessible in refugee communities and building the evidence base on what works in supporting early childhood education teachers and the young refugee children they teach.

The report was informed by existing initiatives including Ahlan Simsim, which in 2017 received the largest known grant to early education in a humanitarian context. While the evaluation of Ahlan Simsim will not be complete until two more years, the Global Ties for Children research center, Sesame Workshop, and the International Rescue Committee will share critical insights into their learning to date in a forthcoming episode of the podcast the Impact Room .

This coming year I’ll be focused on how education systems can prepare for future disruptions, whatever the cause, with more deliberateness. The past two years of the COVID pandemic have seen education systems throughout the globe struggle to find ways to continue schooling. Additionally, there have been other public health crises, natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and severe storms, and wars and terrorism in different parts of the world that have gravely tested school systems’ ability to minimize the cost of catastrophes on students and teachers. Finding safer temporary learning places outside the school and using technologies such as radio, TV broadcasts, and online learning tools have helped, but quick fixes with little preparation are not effective approaches for sustaining and advancing learning gains.

In the age of broadcast and digital technologies, there are many more ways to meet the challenges of future emergency situations, but life- and education-saving solutions must be part of the way school systems operate—built into their structures, their staffing, their budgets, and their curricula. By preparing for the emergencies that are likely to happen, we can persevere to reach learning goals for all children.

By the close of 2021, a number of studies began to document the impact of COVID-19 on girls’ educational trajectories across the Global South. These studies point to promising trends –lower than expected dropout rates and reenrollment rates similar to (if not greater than) those of boys–while still highlighting the particular challenges faced by adolescent girls and girls living in poverty , conflict, and crisis .

In 2022, it will be critical to continue to generate more nuanced evidence—carefully considering questions such as “for which girls,” “where,” “when,” and “why.” And then we must put this knowledge to use to protect and promote girls’ and young women’s rights not just to education, but to participate and thrive in the world around them. Ensuring that marginalized girls and young women become transformative agents in improving their lives and livelihoods—as well as those of their families and communities—requires us to develop new strategies for learning and acting together.

At the Center for Universal Education, this means strengthening our work with local leaders in girls’ education: promoting gender-transformative research through the Echidna Global Scholars Program ; expanding the collective impact of our 33 Echidna alumni; and co-constructing a learning and action community to explore together how to improve beliefs, practices, programs, and policies so that marginalized adolescent girls’ can develop and exercise agency in pursuing their own pathways.

Going into year three of COVID-19, in 2022 I’m interested to see whether countries will transform their education systems or largely leave them the way they are. Will leaders of education systems tinker around the edges of change but mostly attempt a return to a prepandemic “normal,” or will they take advantage of this global rupture in the status quo to replace antiquated educational institutions and approaches with significant structural improvement?

In relation to this, one topic I’ll be watching in particular is how countries treat their teachers. How will policymakers, the media, parent councils, and others frame teachers’ work in 2022? In which locations will teachers be diminished versus where will they be defended as invaluable assets? How will countries learn from implications of out-of-school children (including social isolation and child care needs)? Will teachers remain appreciated in their communities but treated poorly in the material and political conditions of their work? Or will countries hold them dear—demanding accountability while supporting and rewarding them for quality work?

I’m interested in learning more about how pandemic lockdowns have impacted students. So far, we’ve only gotten very general data dealing with questions that are, in my opinion, too simple to be worthwhile. It’s all been about good and bad, positive and negative, learning loss and achievement. But I’ll be watching for more nuanced studies, which ask about specific ways increased time away from school has impacted social-emotional development. How do those results differ between gender, race, socioeconomic status, and geographic location? I suspect we’re going to learn some things about the relationship between home environment and school environment that will challenge a lot of our taken-for-granted assumptions.

In 2022, I’ll be tracking emerging evidence on the impact of the COVID-19 school closures on children and youth. Several researchers, including my co-authors and me , have provided estimates of the school closures’ impact on student learning losses, unemployment, future earnings, and productivity globally. But only recently are researchers analyzing actual evidence of learning losses , and an early systematic review finds that “Although robust and empirical research on COVID-19-related student learning loss is limited, learning loss itself may not be.”

Likewise, there is little rigorous reviews of remote learning tools’ and platforms’ impact on student learning during the school closures. After the pandemic, it is almost certain that remote and hybrid learning will continue—at a minimum occasionally and often periodically—in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education. It is urgent that we build the evidence base to help education decisionmakers and practitioners provide effective, tailored learning experiences for all students.

Finally, a key issue for education is how to redesign curricula so that this generation (and future generations) of students gain a key set of skills and competencies required for technologically-advancing labor markets and societies. While foundational literacy and numeracy skills continue to be essential for learning, a strong foundational knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is ever more important in the 21st century, and I look forward to contributing research this year to help make the case for curricula redesign efforts.

I will be interested to see how parent-teacher relationships progress after the pandemic has (hopefully) faded into the background. COVID-19 has had an inescapable impact on the way we deliver education globally, but none more so than on how education leaders and teachers interact with students and their families.

For the past three years, I have been studying family-school collaboration. Together with my colleagues and partners, we have surveyed nearly 25,000 parents and 6,000 teachers in 10 countries around the world and found that the vast majority of teachers, parents, and caregivers want to work together more closely. Quality family-school collaboration has the potential to significantly improve educational outcomes, spur important discussions on the overall purpose of school, and smooth the path for schools and families to navigate change together. From community schools in New Mexico  to text message updates from teachers in India , new innovations are popping up every day—in every corner of the world. I’m excited to see what the future holds for family-school collaboration!

Education Technology Global Education

Global Economy and Development

Center for Universal Education

Emily Gustafsson-Wright, Elyse Painter

September 25, 2024

Michael Trucano, Sopiko Beriashvili

September 20, 2024

Brahima Sangafowa Coulibaly, Landry Signé, George Ingram, Priya Vora, Rebecca Winthrop, Caren Grown, Belinda Archibong, Brad Olsen, Jennifer L. O’Donoghue, Sweta Shah, Ghulam Omar Qargha

September 19, 2024

Trends Shaping Education 2022

• Education and skills
• Teachers and educators

Select a language

Cite this content as:.

Did you ever wonder what the impact of climate change will be on our educational institutions in the next decade? What does it mean for schools that our societies are becoming more individualistic and diverse?

Trends Shaping Education is a triennial report examining major economic, political, social and technological trends affecting education. While the trends are robust, the questions raised in this book are suggestive, and aim to inform strategic thinking and stimulate reflection on the challenges facing education.

This 2022 edition covers a rich array of topics related to economic growth, living and working, knowledge and power, identity and belonging and our physical world and human bodies and interactions. It includes a specific focus on the impact of COVID‑19 on global trends, and new futures thinking sections inviting readers to reflect on how the future might differ from our current expectations.

This book is designed to give policy makers, researchers, educational leaders, administrators and teachers a robust, non-specialist source of international comparative trends shaping education, whether in schools, universities or in programmes for older adults. It will also be of interest to students and the wider public, including parents.

In the same series

Related publications