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The field of higher education is notoriously slow to change. Yet, when faced with the extraordinary challenges of today, our associations are quick to foster support, collaboration and unity.

I just returned from the UPCEA Annual Conference held in Denver. A record attendance of some 1,300 administrators, faculty and staff from member institutions gathered to share policies, practices, innovations and knowledge in advancing the mission of higher education in 2025. It was a thriving and exciting environment of energy and enthusiasm in seeking solutions to challenges that confront us today and into the future.

Recent policy shifts regarding the federal funding of grants provided by the institutes and foundations that support university research were on the minds of most who attended. These topics provided the undercurrent of discussions in many of the sessions. The spirit was one of supporting each other in advancing their initiatives despite the prospect of cuts in federal support. The confluence of the demographic enrollment cliff of college-bound students due to the drop in births during the previous recession of 2007-2009 and additional promised cuts in funding from federal and many state sources, created an environment for collaboration on solving shared challenges rivaled only by that of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A number of the sessions addressed innovations with cost savings, efficiencies, and effectiveness gains that can be realized by thoughtfully introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into supporting many aspects of the higher education mission. The potential savings are significant if they can take over duties of positions that become vacant or instances where staff are better utilized by shifting their efforts elsewhere.

By Fall 2025, readily available AI tools will be able to serve in course development, delivery and assessment:

• Conceive, design, create, online (even self-paced) courses
• Adapt and update class materials with emerging concepts, societal situations, and news context
• Lead and assess class discussions – stimulate deeper thought and engagement
• Assess course assignments with personalized recommendations to fill in the gaps in knowledge
• Provide one-on-one counseling on academic matters and referrals for personal challenges
• Create a summative assessment of course outcomes and initiate revisions for improvement
• Generate a deep-thinking report for administrators and committees to consider

By Fall 2025, readily available AI tools will be able to serve in curriculum development, marketing and student on-boarding:

• Survey specified fields for addition or expansion of degree and certificate programs
• Recommend detailed curriculum for new programs and suggest tuition/fees
• Create marketing plans after developing a report on demand and competitors in the program area
• Develop, track, implement and adapt marketing budget
• Prepare and support student advising to optimize retention and completion
• Prepare updated and revised plans for Spring 2026

By Fall 2025, develop optimal staff allocation and review process:

• Assess performance evaluations, recommend additional interviews as appropriate
• Develop, refine and utilize departmental/college priority list to respond to revenue and enrollment trends for the year
• Match staff skills with desired outcomes
• Monitor productivity and accomplishments for each employee
• Make recommendations for further efficiencies, having AI perform some tasks such as accounting and data analysis tasks previously done by humans
• Be responsive to employee aspirations and areas of greatest interest
• Review and prepare updated and revised plans for Spring 2026

These tasks and many more can be accomplished by AI tools that can be acquired at modest costs. Of course, they must be carefully reviewed by human administrators to ensure fairness and accuracy is maintained.

I learned from a number of those attending the UPCEA conference that, in these relatively early stages of AI implementation, many employees harbor fears of AI. Concerns center around human job security. While there are many tasks that AI can more efficiently and effectively perform than humans, most current jobs include aspects that are best performed by humans. So, in most cases, the use of AI will be in a role of augmentation of human work to make it more expedient and save time for other new tasks the human employees can best perform.

This presents the need for upskilling to enable human staff to make the efficiencies possible by learning to work best with AI. Interestingly, in most cases experts say this will not require computer coding or other such skills. Rather, this will require personnel to understand the capabilities of AI in order to tap these skills to advance the goals of the unit and university. Positions in which humans and AI are co-workers will require excellent communication skills, organizational skills, critical thinking, and creative thinking. AI performs well at analytical, synthetical, predictive, and creative tasks among others. It is adept at taking on leadership and managerial roles that recognize the unit and institutional priorities as well as employee preferences and abilities.

How then can we best prepare our staff for optimizing their working relations with the new AI co-workers? I believe this begins with personal experience with AI tools. We all should become comfortable with conducting basic searches using a variety of chatbots. Learning to compose a proper prompt is the cornerstone of communicating with AI.

The next step is to use a handful of the readily available deep-research tools to generate a report on a topic that is relevant to the staff member’s work.  Compare and contrast those reports for quality, accuracy and the substance of cited material. Perform the research iteratively to improve or refine results. This Medium post offers a good summary of leading deep-research engines and best applications, although it was released in February and may be dated due to the Gemini version 2.5 Pro released last week on March 26. This new version by Google is topping many of the current ratings charts.

In sum, we are facing changes of an unprecedented scale with the disruption of long-standing policies, funding sources, and a shrinking incoming student pool. Fortunately, these changes are coming at the same time as AI is maturing into a dependable tool that can take on some of the slack that will come from not filling vacancies. However, to meet that need we must begin to provide training to our current and incoming employees to ensure that they can make the most of AI tools we will provide.

Together, through the collaborative support of UPCEA and other associations, we in higher education will endure these challenges as we did those posed by the COVID pandemic.

 

This article was originally published on Inside Higher Ed.