The Conversations Higher Ed Needs Next
What happens when you put thirty higher education leaders in Saratoga Springs and give them room to talk about the questions their institutions do not have easy answers for yet?
At the September cohort of the Let’s Go Upstate retreat, the conversations kept circling the same tension: higher education knows the world around it is changing.
The harder question is what that demands of us.
These four questions capture the thinking higher ed needs next.
What if the future is already here?
Gen Alpha is approaching college age. AI has already changed how people find information. Students already expect the digital experiences around them to be intuitive, immediate and personal.
At Oklahoma State, leaders are pushing teams to think beyond the demands right in front of them. The question is not what the audience needs next week. It is what the institution will need to be ready for three years from now.
Because next week is already too late. By then, you are responding to what has already happened. Three years out, you still have a chance to shape what happens next.
2. What if AI is really a leadership test?
The AI conversation kept moving away from technology.
The harder questions were about fear, trust, governance, ownership, judgment and culture. Institutions can buy new tools quickly. Building the capacity and judgment to use them well is something else entirely.
That changes the starting point from What can we automate? to What problem are we actually trying to solve? The discussion repeatedly returned to the danger of designing for institutional efficiency rather than student experience.
It also raised a second question: where should we not automate? Routine questions may be easy to hand off. Moments requiring context, reassurance or consequence are different.
3. What if innovation’s scariest resource is time?
Higher education is not short on ideas. It is short on room for them.
Hamilton College created “What If Grants” to give people permission and resources to explore new possibilities. Frederick Community College identified a low-demand period and deliberately gave 90 minutes of the workweek back to staff for thinking, collaboration and development.
Both examples make the same point. If innovation matters, it has to be scheduled for.
4. What if strategy isn’t what we say, but what we choose?
Higher education has spent years talking about brand as a marketing and communications problem. The conversation at LGU2 pushed further.
What is the institution actually trying to accomplish?
What outcomes is it building toward?
What is it willing to stop doing in order to get there?
At UIC, alignment meant narrowing communications around student success and research. At Cornell, it meant ending long-standing alumni programs and publications that were no longer delivering enough value.
The strongest institutions may not be the ones where everyone tells the same story. They may be the ones where everyone is making choices toward the same destination.
What has to change is us.
Higher education has been talking about transformation for decades. Maybe that is part of the problem. Institutions do not transform because the environment demands it. They transform because people make different choices.
The future will bring new technologies, new audiences and new pressures. But none of them will decide what higher education becomes.
We will.
