A New Mandate in Higher Ed – driven by AI, enrollment and ROI concerns

Colleges and universities have faced financial and enrollment challenges for years. Yet today – with the added pressures on leaders in an increasingly political environment coupled with ROI questions on the cost of school – higher education institutions are being asked if the very institutions that were meant to level the playing field are instead propagating inequities.

Higher ed institutions need to deliver more value and create equitable opportunities all while keeping students safe and healthy. Technology plays an ever-important role in that – both helped by and exacerbated by AI.

Educause, a higher ed technology association recently published its 2024 Top 10 IT Issues Survey and Report. The top 3 reported IT issues were:

#1 Increasing need for data security & protection against threats to personal privacy 🔒

#2 Demand for continued hybrid & remote work arrangements 💻

#3  More calls for data-informed decision-making and reporting 📊

What do all of these have in common?

...The need for more digitized workflows!

🔒 Data security and protection is critical. With the advent of collecting more data and creating analytics, there is increased scrutiny on the safety of that data, whether it is institutional or student data. The rush to create use-case-specific LLM’s throughout education is exacerbating the fear of privacy. Tightly controlling the risks and process for ensuring data is protected is just as important as the technology to protect. The workflows around data security and data privacy must be digitized to ensure transparency and accurate reporting.

💻 Remote and hybrid work arrangements are incredibly complex. Will learning today take place from a dorm room? A car? A student’s home 3,000 miles away or a lecture hall? What should the educator expect in their class? How do they plan for that? Giving students flexibility in their learning requires significant new workflows for approvals and exceptions.

✏️  A note from our intern, Lola Daley –  a senior at Vanderbilt University:

"For the countless students dealing with financial or home-life challenges, the opportunity to learn remotely when necessary is one way to alleviate some of their burden. However, these students often struggle to receive such flexible learning because professors lack the tools to manage both in-person and temporarily remote students. This should be a key target for improvement if we want to move towards more equitable education."

📊 Data-informed decision-making is the quest of almost every organization. This means ensuring your workflows are digital so data can be collected. When a specific college is doing things manually and not recording it in a system or each department does something differently, you wind up with decision-making that is not optimally informed by data.

ServiceNow is designed to ensure the workflows behind these goals are optimized. Now powered with NowAssist, ServiceNow can add and continuously learn intelligently to drive toward these goals quicker. Colleges and universities were some of the earliest adopters of ServiceNow, particularly in ITSM. In today's challenging higher ed landscape, we see ServiceNow being increasingly adopted in HR, procurement, curriculum choice & exception workflows, and alumni fundraising.