Higher Education’s Efficiency Crisis has a Technology Solution

I’m very passionate about Higher Education and its missions and outcomes because they’ve been really impactful in my own life and in the lives of loved ones.

I was always passionate about technology and did what I could to learn about it, but I didn’t have access to the resources of wealthier families from bigger cities nor the internet as we know it today. So getting the opportunity to attend a high-end computer engineering institution like Virginia Tech literally changed my life by getting me an opportunity to be a developer and architect at IBM in the middleware space.

My sister also does a lot of great work in infectious diseases at UNC Chapel Hill and they do really meaningful work that benefits everyone on the planet. But over the last few months, they are under unprecedented scrutiny to make massive changes, basically overnight. I know from personal experience that changing this rapidly is monumentally difficult for a startup like Green Irony that grew from one person to thirty in five years, let alone a massive organization like a 30,000 student university and research institution.

Higher education and non-profit organizations face an unprecedented budgetary challenge and these economic drivers force Higher Ed to prioritize at both strategic and tactical levels. And technology is the key to success.

The way technology is applied in these institutions resembles what I saw in industry in the 2010-2015 timeframe. By rapidly bringing the technology to what we see in the present day, Higher Education and non-profit organizations can equip themselves to navigate these budgetary challenges without sacrificing their missions.

Current State of Higher Ed Technology

Higher education has long relied on niche solutions and entrenched education-focused technology providers. While these providers have deep sector expertise, their technology stacks remain outdated, rigid, and cumbersome. Unlike commercial industries, which adopt at-scale, flexible technology solutions to streamline complex operations and manage data and systems at scale, higher ed institutions are frequently stuck managing fragmented, siloed systems that drive inefficiency at scale.

This situation is highly problematic because it spreads labor resources across a ton of different platforms while also making it more challenging to deliver impactful technology solutions.

In short, it costs way more to get lesser outcomes that take way longer to deliver.

This at scale problem surfaces itself with numerous symptoms. A few examples:

• Disjointed communications with students or other key constituents in the form of text messaging and emails
• Labor-intensive, time-consuming support services for financial aid, donations,  enrollment, IT helpdesk, and other table stakes areas of student success
• Inability to understand the student and proactively detect issues despite having the information to do so
• Working out of multiple systems that have disconnected copies of the same data, resulting in lots of error-prone data entry for key personnel
• Large IT investments with lengthy implementation timelines and unclear ROI
• Multiple copies of the same system (e.g. Salesforce) across departments, disabling their ability to deliver value at scale

These problems are all symptoms of the same root cause: not leveraging IT investments in a modern way that meets the needs of today’s constituents.

And this should come as no surprise: higher education and non-profits exist to deliver on their missions, like research and educational outcomes. They are not in the business of digital transformation.

But these problems were all solved commercially in the 2010-2020 timeframe, and Higher Education’s problems are exactly the same as those. So why not solve them in a proven way?

Using Technology More Effectively

So where do you turn? A stack comprised of #1 and #2 below was heavily leveraged by for-profit organizations who faced these challenges a decade ago. #3 is a new entry that simply must be considered because of its stunning outcomes:

1. A flexible system of engagement and marketing platform (e.g. Salesforce) that enables you to address high-impact problems for constituents
2. An integration platform (e.g. MuleSoft) that allows you to make your systems talk to one another, allows them to be accessible by AI Agents, and enables you to perform a smooth migration from legacy systems
3. A platform for leveraging digital labor (e.g. Agentforce) that enables you to fine-tune AI Agents to help you accomplish tasks like student support services more easily and effectively so you can concentrate on your mission

Modern platforms like Salesforce are incredibly capable of delivering exponential operational efficiencies, higher constituent satisfaction, and helping do more with less. But they must be applied correctly in order to deliver value. So you need to make sure you have a very clear, granular plan to deliver value to the organization that starts to compound over time. And you need the right team to execute the plan.

I have boatloads of examples of how this type of thing impacts organizations at scale (positive and negative), but I don’t want to make this blog waaaaaay too long. I’ll share that in another one. The key takeaway is that it’s important to have a really good plan that lets your technology investment grow more lucrative over time through economies of scale with a skilled technology team to execute on that plan.

If you do this correctly, you can be like UNC Charlotte, who is experiencing around 50% deflection of IT cases with a simple Agentforce implementation. Or Spirit Airlines, who saw a 5X+ increase in time to value of IT investments after an API strategy unified its legacy systems from silos to a comprehensive solution.

Conclusions

Higher education must embrace robust, commercially proven technologies that offer scalability, integration, and flexibility. Migration and implementation may initially seem daunting, but the alternative—clinging to outdated systems—guarantees continued inefficiency and escalating costs. Numerous high-impact outcomes result in massive budget savings:

• Digital labor to enable human labor to focus on higher impact work
• Technology-driven efficiency gains the entire connected campus
• Technology investment license cost savings
• Technology investment labor savings

The technology approaches I see in Higher Ed and non-profit resemble those I saw in for-profit organizations in the 2010-2015 timeframe. By catching up, they can realize massive budget savings and increase focus on their outcomes that matter.

As I said in the opener, I’m passionate about Higher Ed and non-profits and I’d love to help. If you’re a higher education leader wondering how technology systems can help with your current crunch, drop me a line.