AI in Higher Education Just Became EDUCAUSE's #1 Tech Priority. Every Student Is Riding on the Answer.

For the first time in the history of EDUCAUSE's annual Top 10 IT Issues list, AI in higher education ranks #1, ahead of cybersecurity, and it is a hard question: where does AI add real value? The answer came from 882 technology leaders across higher education, the largest group ever to vote in the survey, and it was presented at the association's annual conference in Denver, which drew more than 7,000 attendees.

Read that ranking slowly. For the past three years, the pressure on campuses ran in one direction: roll out the tools and keep pace with the institution down the road. This fall, the profession's own research body put a different item at the top of the agenda. Adoption has happened. The value is still being worked out.

EDUCAUSE said so plainly in its own report, noting that the #1 rank reflects "urgency more than consensus" and that higher education "is still grappling with what AI-driven change could mean for institutions." A professional association rarely publishes a sentence like that about its own members, and EDUCAUSE deserves credit by name for doing it.

The four-year bet behind every enrollment

The ranking matters well beyond the IT department. Every student who enrolls this fall is relying on a wager the institution makes on their behalf: that the courses and skills chosen today will still carry weight at graduation in 2030. I call it the four-year bet, and EDUCAUSE's survey shows that the people placing it are still deciding what the chips are worth.

The class that graduated this past spring shows how quickly the odds can move. Most of those students arrived on campus in the fall of 2022 and picked their first courses a few months before ChatGPT reached the public in late November. They spent four years preparing for one labor market and walked into commencement facing a different one.

Watch any family at the kitchen table this fall as a high school senior narrows a college list. The conversation covers majors and loans, campus visits and application deadlines. It almost never reaches the question EDUCAUSE just put at the top of its list, even though the answer will shape what that senior can do on the first morning of a first job. A separate, 3-year Babson College study of the same 20 students found their own fear about AI shifted over four years, from getting caught cheating to losing their own voice, which is exactly the kind of value question a ranked list can name but not answer.

An association telling its members the hard part

Mark McCormack, EDUCAUSE's senior director of research and insights, described the moment with the composure it deserves. "There's so much change happening around us, and we need to be honest about the challenges," he told Inside Higher Ed. Then he went further:

"AI is everywhere. Most of us are using it frequently, but adopting new technology simply because it's there isn't good enough."

The coverage also brought in campus leaders who carry this work day to day, among them Melody Buckner, associate vice provost of digital learning and online initiatives at the University of Arizona, and Lori Robbins, head of AI strategy at Denison University in Ohio.

The rest of the list reads like one continuous argument. Second is preparing students "for a volatile world." Fourth is "designing AI structures for responsible innovation." Three of the ten issues carry AI in their names, and the issue about students sits directly beneath the issue about value, which is exactly where it belongs.

The value question also has a second half: value for whom. In the United Kingdom, Cambridge University declined to sign a new Turnitin license that would have let the company use students' submitted coursework to train its own AI tools. After pushback across the sector, covered independently by student newspapers including Varsity and Felix, Turnitin postponed the change to September 2027. Even the companies built to manage AI in coursework are still working out where the value lands and whom it belongs to, the same uncertainty behind the surge in academic integrity cases campuses are now struggling to review.

Where campus leaders can start

I advise the California State University system on AI, and the questions I find most useful in that work are small enough to answer in a single meeting. I'm taking a few of them into my own conversations this fall; borrow them.

The first is a switch-off test. For every AI tool the campus pays for, ask what a sophomore would lose if it disappeared on Monday morning. If nobody can name the loss in one sentence, the tool is a cost, and that money can move toward something students will feel.

The second is pricing the bet in the student's currency. Adoption can be counted in licenses. Value shows up in graduates. A senior who can judge when a model's answer is wrong, and explain why, is evidence the bet is paying; put that measure next to the license count in the next budget review and let the two numbers argue.

What the answer means beyond campus

The stakes reach far past the technology budget. For many families, a degree is the largest purchase they will make after a home, and employers build entry-level hiring around what graduates can actually do. When higher education decides where AI adds value, it is also deciding what a new graduate is worth in the labor market of 2030, and which skills will still pay when the loans come due. That is the half-life of skills arriving on campus first, and it is the thread running through my forthcoming book, The Great Relearning.

None of this calls for alarm. Every institution in that survey faces the same open question at the same moment, and EDUCAUSE just modeled the right response for the entire sector: show families the work. Institutions that tell students which parts of the four-year bet are settled and which remain open will earn more durable trust than institutions projecting certainty they lack. A student enrolling this fall deserves to know what their school is betting on.

So here is the question I would take into your next cabinet meeting, or your next campus tour with your own kid: what is one thing this institution stopped doing because of AI, and one thing it started? If the answer comes easily, the bet is being managed. If it comes slowly, that is where the work begins, and I'm easy to find.

Here is what makes Alex a credible voice on this topic: Alex advises the California State University system on AI governance across 22 campuses, standing that puts him inside the same value question EDUCAUSE's own members just ranked first.

For more, book a conversation →