Let me start with the obvious. In 2026, higher ed remains under siege in a way never before experienced. Hard stop. In last year’s Fall edition, I referenced what we at Pathify call “The Perfect Storm.” I’m certain the 11 brave souls that made it to the bitter end of that article have a crystal clear recollection of how we define it… but for everyone else, I’ll summarize quickly:
People made fewer babies during the Great Recession, so fewer students now graduate from high school. Regulation changes make enrolling international students more difficult. Prospective students gravitate toward less expensive options, while increased focus on degree ROI saps confidence. And no matter what side of the fence you sit on, higher ed now finds itself weaponized politically.
And I’m not sure if you’ve heard it mentioned in passing — but people seem to be talking about this weird little noun called AI. (Person, place, thing, idea)??
I never want to suggest things were easy in the past. But I do believe it’s fair to say, looking at the first couple of decades this century, things seemed easier. Traditional student counts increased, full tuition international students drove growth and a majority of people carried a positive view of higher ed. I read one stat the other day that said as recently as 2018, 73% of teenagers viewed higher ed as a likely next step. In 2025, that number dropped to 45%. I was the guy in college whose lone math class was “The Art of Deceiving With Digits” (Intro to Statistics), so I’m no mathematician — but that seems bad. Real bad.
What’s so wild is that it felt like it all just changed so quickly last year. So let me check in here… same page? Am I crazy?
It’s no secret that students’ expectations have shifted massively. And if there’s one message I want you to hear, it’s that higher ed can no longer expect to deliver a positive overall experience if the way the community experiences technology day-to-day stinks.
We spoke with thousands of students over the last year, and three “new” expectations consistently beat out the rest. Students expressed zero interest in being a nameless face. They simply won’t engage with clunky VHS-era technology impeding their path to success. And they now rank an institution’s technology as “very important” to their final decision.
It’s fair to say institutions delivering a consumer-grade technology experience will prove significantly more competitive, and therefore, digital transformation must move to the top of the priority list. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of teams really get stuck.
Here’s my (always unsolicited) advice when wrapping your head around the Perfect Storm, digital transformation and what feels like a monumental effort to deliver consumer-grade technology to your entire community.
- Upgrading legacy SIS portals solves only a fraction of the problem, and letting all resources be sucked into the SIS to the cloud black hole delivers zero value to how your broader community experiences technology. It probably makes it worse — for years. You need to do this, but it cannot be at the expense of everything else.
- Drinking the CRM Kool-Aid that ultimately requires you to somehow consolidate ALL your data into a single place for AI agents to save the world requires more time and resources than most Fortune 100 companies bring to bear.
Annually updating two or three of the 37 front-end UIs students use on any given day is actually the antithesis of digital transformation. This is not a consumer-grade strategy.
So here’s where Pathify asks folks to think differently.
As soon as possible, prioritize dramatically improving the way the broader community experiences technology, focusing on solutions that deliver tangible ROI in less than a year and do not dramatically increase overall spend long term. Focus on closing the rapidly widening Experience Gap driven by the exponential, AI-powered advances people enjoy with consumer technology.
Closing this Experience Gap comes down to stopping the daily — maybe hourly — treasure hunt people find themselves navigating with your tech stack. Pathify does this like no other by consolidating all the clunky front doors and interfaces that accumulated over time into a single personalized front-end experience.
Think about an AI-powered student concierge that answers questions and nudges on what’s next to actually help get things done. And at the end of the day, integrating people and the community into the mix remains absolutely critical. It never ceases to amaze me how community and people connection seem to fall out of the equation with enterprise software. We put the community front and center.
Welcome to the CXP, baby.
Pathify’s Campus Experience Platform isn’t perfect. It will not do coursework for you or guarantee a diploma. It does not eat pressure for breakfast. And it certainly won’t deliver a six-figure career within 10 minutes of graduation.
But it’s still pretty damn cool. The CXP enables schools to eliminate the cost, overhead and obsolete experience of maintaining a multitude of legacy front-end systems and portals. It does not require ripping and replacing super-heavy source systems (while actually increasing usage of some of the really cool tech you’ve already invested in). And it is absolutely not just a “portal 2.0” or app refresh. The CXP is a fundamental shift in philosophy and strategy — built with the campus community at the center.
Back 10 or 20 years ago, nobody really desired a crappy technology experience. People didn’t want to be treated as numbers. Prospective students probably were not seeking a stuck-in-the-mud technology posture. IT folks really didn’t want to maintain an expensive, siloed, Rorschach test of a tech stack.
Instead, because of the headwinds facing higher ed, and because of the AI revolution, people now take these expectations much more seriously. To the point where they’re desperately searching for institutions that also take them seriously. What happens if public opinion of higher ed continues to erode, losing its place as an invaluable beacon of knowledge and experience that truly makes people better? This is happening, and it’s up to us to listen. The next decade will be the most challenging faced by higher ed since the Great Depression. And if we choose not to listen, choose not to take action, we will continue to lose ground to all the other options people perceive cost less — and make more.
We kicked off this edition with a challenge: the question is no longer whether higher ed will change…but what today’s leaders will leave behind for the generations and communities who follow. If you agree closing the Experience Gap represents a solid first step in this direction — you’re one of us — so let’s get moving. Yesterday was better than today. Today is better than tomorrow. And tomorrow’s better than next year.
Look at that — I think I also ended with the obvious.
About the Author
Matt has been Pathify’s Chief Revenue Officer since 2022, where he is responsible for sales, solutions, customer implementation, ongoing account management and marketing. Before joining Pathify in 2020, Matt served as Principal at Middlepond & Associates and Vice President of Sales at FullContact. Matt currently lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife and daughter. He enjoys (obsessively) following Boston sports, camping, reading and playing the drums (while his daughter is sleeping, of course).