The 2026 EDUCAUSE Top 10 Part 1: The Right Culture Is Critical

October 29, 2025 |

From the arrival of the long-anticipated enrollment cliff to rising expectations around artificial intelligence to growing cybersecurity concerns, higher education has entered a period of heightened urgency and reinvention. Technology, tools, and data alone won’t solve these pressures; success depends on an institution’s culture.

Perhaps this is why the 2026 EDUCAUSE Top 10 list feels more important than ever. In Part 1 of our yearly EDUCAUSE Top 10 series, we unpack the first three themes and explore how the right culture can empower institutions to respond effectively, safely, and strategically to the industry’s most pressing challenges.

1. Collaborative Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity threats are growing faster than many institutions can respond. Phishing attacks, ransomware, and vulnerabilities in third-party systems put students, faculty, and data at risk. For this reason, collaborative cybersecurity takes this year’s top spot.

Too often, campuses treat cybersecurity as an IT-only issue, leaving gaps across departments and user groups. What institutions need to do is make cybersecurity a shared responsibility across the entire campus. Everyone—from students to staff to faculty—should understand their role in keeping the institution safe.

This year, institutions should focus on:

Offering Regular Training: Offer staff and students short, frequent training sessions that teach how to recognize and respond to common threats.
Clarifying Roles: Define who is responsible for what—from data handling to reporting suspicious activity.
Providing Accessible Tools and Support: Make security services easy to use so people are protected without extra friction.
Embedding Security Into Workflows: Integrate security checks and reminders into everyday systems and processes.

Read about how Jenzabar’s Managed Resources Team responded to the CrowdStrike Outage.

2. The Human Edge of AI

AI has enormous potential in higher education; it can help institutions streamline operations, enhance student support, reduce staff burnout, and even improve retention outcomes. Despite these benefits, however, adoption has been slow. Institutions often struggle to implement AI effectively because of the perceived risks and uncertainties involved. Without clear guidance, it’s difficult to identify appropriate use cases, build cross-department consensus, and ensure ethical and responsible use. This can leave students, faculty, and staff unsure how to engage AI tools safely and productively.

But number 2 on EDUCAUSE’s Top 10 this year highlights the need to empower students, faculty, and staff so they can engage with artificial intelligence tools critically, creatively, and safely. To maximize the use of AI this, institutions need to create a culture around AI that supports learning and innovation.

This year, institutions should focus on:

Establishing Clear Guidelines: Define appropriate uses for AI in teaching, research, and administrative tasks to reduce risk and confusion.
Providing Training and Education: Teach students, faculty, and staff how AI works, its limits, and how to evaluate outputs critically.
Creating Safe Spaces for Experimentation: Pilot programs or sandbox environments that allow users to explore AI tools without compromising data or operations.
Fostering a Culture of Responsible Use: Encourage cross-department discussions about ethics, best practices, and continuous learning around AI.

Download our white paper, AI in Higher Education: A How-To Guide for Responsible Adoption.

3. Data Analytics for Operational and Financial Insights

As though college and university business offices weren’t already under pressure, shifting enrollment patterns and recent changes to federal regulations have compounded challenges.

Luckily, technology is ahead of need in this case. Modern solutions consolidate and integrate campus data so staff can analyze and use it to make faster, more informed decisions. With the right tools, decision-makers can uncover actionable insights into spending, enrollment trends, and operational efficiencies to guide decisions.

This year, institutions should focus on:

Collecting and Unifying Data: Ensure data from all systems is centralized and accurate.
Obtaining Actionable Insights: Go beyond dashboards—identify trends, risks, and opportunities that can inform real decisions.
Embedding Analytics Into Everyday Operations: Use insights from data analyses to inform program planning, budgeting, and resource allocation.
Regularly Reviewing and Refining Data: Continuously assess data and analyses and update metrics to match changing institutional priorities.