Higher education institutions continue to face significant challenges in attracting and retaining qualified staff.

According to a survey by HigherEdJobs, 63% of institutions reported an increase in hiring demand in 2023 compared to 2022. However, 39% experienced a decrease in qualified applicants, and 31% saw a decline in overall applications.

Now is when colleges and universities need talented, committed staff most.

The enrollment cliff is no longer a prediction. Schools are living it.

They’re also contending with factors that weren’t on the horizon.

The chaos of the pandemic upended business as usual in every facet of higher ed.

And while many school communities have found their new normals, few remade themselves in a strategic way. They reacted. They survived.

What’s compounding the enrollment cliff is that graduating high schoolers just don’t think college is worth it.

Twenty percent of students said they weren’t going to college because they doubt its value. That figure was only 8 percent in pre-pandemic 2019.

This is happening in the context of a digital revolution that isn’t revolutionary anymore.

Students (and educators) across age and demographic groups expect everything to be online and easy. They’re used to personalized, instant communication and experiences.

Running an AI-Infused Institution

Thirty-three percent of higher education staff said they were "very likely" or "likely" to look for new employment opportunities in the next year, according to a 2023 College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) study.

The areas of greater likelihood were for people who work in student affairs (39%) and enrollment management (36%).

CUPA-HR found that better pay is a significant motivation for seeking new opportunities, with more than half of respondents ranking it as the No. 1 reason, and 86% putting it in their top three. Additionally, the desire for remote work arrangements has increased, with more than 44% of survey respondents citing it among their top three reasons to seek new opportunities

Many young professionals are also leaving the field due to long hours, and a lack of support and training. Dissatisfied higher ed employees say the focus on admissions metrics and the pressure to meet institutional goals can detract from the passion and purpose that initially drew professionals to the field.  

What does this have to do with artificial intelligence?

AI can help leadership cut through the noise of post-pandemic, current-enrollment-cliff anxiety to:

• Improve productivity and reduce the pressure to meet unrealistic goals
• Identify the positions schools need to run a 21st-century institution of higher education
• Design those positions so they’re attractive to today’s workforce
• Recruit the right people  

Running an AI-infused institution means baking AI into every operation of the school so the benefits are obvious as day. It’s a virtuous cycle in which staff and faculty are unburdened by unsatisfying work (let the bots do that) and the school is more effective at enrollment and retention. When schools are in better financial positions, the fierce pressure on employees to over-perform decreases.

Talent Management

Only 22 percent of provosts agree that their institution “very effectively” recruits and retains talented faculty.

Turnover of admissions staff is “even more acute – and comes with higher stakes,” says the Chronicle of Higher Education in response to data from CUPA-HR. Admissions departments, after all, are charged with bringing in the students that fuel most of the nation’s tuition-driven institutions.

The new CUPA-HR data “offer a compelling case that the status quo can’t continue, and illustrate recent Chronicle reporting that called admissions a maxed-out profession on the edge of a crisis.’”

As Deloite Insights notes, “higher education is no longer distinctive; the private sector now provides a range of opportunities for knowledge workers seeking to make an impact in their field and within research-driven missions, all with promises of state-of-the-art labs and access to funding with fewer strings attached and less bureaucracy.”

AI, along with other strategic and technological investments, can relieve institutions of the bureaucracy that eats up people’s time and spirit.

That’s one piece in making higher ed a more compelling place to work.

Another is personalizing the recruiting, onboarding, and professional development of employees so they enjoy their jobs more and want to stay. Intelligent CRMs are part of that equation. So is HR’s view of employee satisfaction and performance.

With AI, human resource departments can keep a pulse on the health of their institution, be empowered with data about where gaps are, and hire (or reassign existing staff) accordingly.

A school’s AI-informed student success program can be used for talent management of new and current employees as well.

Yearly reviews and check-ins to see how employees are feeling just won’t cut it. There needs to be continuous feedback about everything from meeting deadlines and enrollment goals to feeling valued and motivated.

Productivity

Half of higher education employees reported working additional hours beyond full-time expectations, according to a CUPA-HR study. The study also found:

• Employees working in human resources reported the highest rate (60%) of working extra hours.
• Thirty-five percent of supervisors found maintaining staff morale particularly challenging.
• General job satisfaction decreased from 62% in 2022 to 58% in 2023.
• Voluntary turnover for higher education staff was the highest it has been since CUPA-HR started tracking it in 2017-18.

These figures suggest that years after the pandemic, higher education employees still face significant challenges related to workload and additional responsibilities.

It’s no wonder that employees cite burnout as a reason they left higher ed or are thinking about leaving.

And let’s be clear: burnout is a sign that something’s amiss with an organization, not its employees.

Social psychologists have found that pervasive burnout indicates that, among other things, roles aren’t clear, communication is poor, and expectations are unreasonable.

At the same time that employees are jumping ship because they’re overloaded, administrative costs are ballooning.

According to IPEDS data, administrative costs as a percentage of total expenditures at private colleges and universities increased from 44% in 2018 to 47% in 2023.

This continued upward trend in administrative costs reflects the ongoing financial challenges faced by higher education institutions, even as they struggle to keep pace with rising expenses.

The increase in administrative costs relative to total expenditures suggests that private colleges and universities are allocating a growing proportion of their budgets to non-instructional activities, potentially impacting resources available for academic programs and student services.

The productivity-boosting potential of AI makes it a natural partner in the race to cut costs and refocus resources on students.

In the case of admissions, in particular, gains come from AI automating the planning, writing, technical setup, and other aspects of bringing in a class.

The same efficiency is seen across all functional areas of a college.

Customer service related tasks are ripe for productivity savings with AI chatbots, for instance. So are the massive amounts of personalized communications required to truly attract and serve today’s students.

The key will be to balance productivity gains with fostering a healthy, supportive workplace.

AI is meant to let us be more human.

Measurement

When the pandemic hit and college campuses shutdown overnight “industry observers saw disaster looming for higher education.” But as Bain & Company notes “the sector proved more resilient than expected.”

Bain and other higher ed business experts have been raising alarms about the financial stability of colleges for over a decade. During the 2010s, “when these institutions should have been getting costs in line, we saw them escalating expenses as they raced to build and renovate facilities and expand student services and administrative functions. Tuitions increased significantly during this period, but expenses grew faster. The number of institutions in precarious financial positions rose by 70%.”

Now that government funding to support higher ed through the pandemic is drying up and we’re stepping beyond the enrollment cliff into more uncertainty, the alarms are ringing again and getting louder.

Bain, in particular, expects the financial stability of colleges “to fall below pre-pandemic levels” over the next couple of years.”

To improve their resilience, “institutions need to focus on understanding student needs, simplifying their mission, innovating their academic offerings, optimizing operations, and transforming their economics.”

We’ll look at what “transforming their economics” means in this next part of our guide, with a focus on how AI can help measure the return on investment of a college degree and the investments schools make in their institution.

Return on a College Education

The percentage of young adults who say a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent over the past decade.

More stunning is that almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

The lack of faith in a college degree isn’t a perception problem. New research shows that the return on investment isn’t worth it for many students — at least from a purely economic point of view.

As a report from the New York Times Magazine explains: “economists have a term for the gap that exists between the incomes of college graduates and high school graduates: the college wage premium. It reflects the relative demand in the labor market for college-educated workers. When employers want more college graduates, the premium goes up; when there is a surplus of college grads, the premium goes down.”

The college wage premium has risen since the 1980s. In the early 2000s it got above 60 percent and has stayed around 65 percent since.

The college wage premium has a huge blindspot: student loans. A group of economic researchers developed a new measurement: the college wealth premium. It considers all assets and debts to determine the ROI of a college education.

When they analyzed the data using wealth, not just income, they found “the benefits to a college degree began to evaporate.”

Those parents and students who said they didn’t think college was worth it didn’t need economists to form their opinions. They saw it firsthand in their families and communities. A diploma doesn’t ensure financial abundance, nor security.

What are colleges to do?

• Measure their own outcomes. How are your graduates fairing in the college wealth premium compared to national trends? Developing better reporting and insights (aided by AI) helps tell your school’s story.
• Be clear about costs. What does attending your school actually cost? Students and parents want to know before they apply what they should be planning for. Transparency helps those who may think they can’t afford your school reconsider it. Those that underestimate won’t find themselves mid-degree needing to drop out or take on more loans.
• Balance the conversation. Marketing and admissions has long advertised the financial rewards of a college degree. It’s time to lean into the other skills college develops: social, emotional, independence, critical thinking, professionalism, interpersonal, and research. Personalized communication platforms like intelligent CRMs delivers these messages to prospects.
• Help students look beyond the next 10 years. The college wage premium is likely to increase. The consulting firm Korn Ferry projects that by 2030, the American labor market will face a significant shortage of workers with associate and bachelor’s degrees.

Return on School Investments

Higher ed is awash in numbers. Whole departments and roles are dedicated to managing and reporting institutional data.

The majority of that data is concerned (and rightly so) with academics and demographics. We’re not suggesting that change.

What would help is for higher ed to widen its data net and use AI to turn to an always-on reporting and feedback cycle.

Take, for instance, admissions and advancement events. Traditional in-person events are expensive and come with less obvious impact on employees. Working overtime, traveling, and coordinating with vendors. These things may be part of someone’s job description, but the level of intensity often goes unchecked.

So, rather than assess the performance of events by how many applications were submitted or how much money was donated, consider asking attendees and organizers about their experience. Short surveys uncover the true costs and benefits of an activity.

The purpose is not to slash budgets on what doesn’t work; it’s to identify what IS working and do more of it.

It’s also important to get clear about why money is being spent on a particular initiative. Is it because that’s the way it’s always been done? To become financially resilient, schools need better reasons and results for spending money.

And for schools that need to radically transform their operations in order to survive, data is even more critical.

McKinsey & Company found that “while a reasonable degree of cost management is usually necessary” to turnaround “it’s more important to focus on improving student outcomes and identifying new ways to diversify and grow revenues.”

All of which requires real-time data, instant reporting, and AI brainpower.