By Melanie Gottlieb, Executive Director, AACRAO
I spent a day at the EDUCAUSE Annual Partner Summit, sitting at tables with CIOs, EdTech partners, and association leaders working through a number of questions, including: What does a student-centered, AI-enabled institution look like in 2030? What has to be in place to scale AI responsibly? What do you think are the priorities for higher education in enabling AI, and how do institutions decide what’s most important? I’m still reflecting and digesting, but a few early themes suggest the work we are doing at AACRAO is on the right track.
The connecting thread across all the conversations was about data, trust, and who owns the decisions. That’s familiar ground for the registrar and enrollment professionals I work with every day. In a world where institutional data is a valuable asset, the partnership between CIO and Registrar becomes increasingly important. Our EdTech partners tell us that implementations fail if the Registrar is not a strong player in the process.
Higher Education needs clean, organized, and connected data. Almost every conversation envisioned a learner who doesn’t have to repeat their story to five offices, gets proactive support before trouble shows up, and leaves with a record of learning that shows their skills, not just their grades. We also arrived at the same obstacle: data spread across systems that don’t talk to each other, the expense of knitting those sources together, and the need for open data. AACRAO members have deep expertise in the management, maintenance, and governance of institutional data and are valuable assets in this conversation. Our interoperability learning mobility principle was validated in these conversations.
We don’t all agree on what a “student” is. At AACRAO, we have moved away from the term “student” because it conjures the residential four-year undergrad as the monolithic population we serve. Instead, we use “learner,” which is more inclusive of the variety of individuals on campuses. But the term “student” carries a legal meaning that is not standard either across or within institutions. One group pointed out that admissions, advising, and financial aid each define “student” differently. Is a withdrawn student a student? What about a student worker or an adult learner taking one course in the continuing education division? If our own offices can’t agree, an AI agent drawing on all of those systems will reflect that confusion. Settling definitions is slow, unglamorous work, and it’s what everything else depends on. This is a complex issue, but solvable with thoughtful consideration and learner-centered guidance. At AACRAO, a board-led work group is currently updating guidance on how institutions can think about the legal definition of a student, balancing the compliance implications with serving the evolving needs of the modern learner.
Governance is about practice, not paperwork. The idea of governance with a capital “G” (formal policies and committees) and a lowercase “g” (the norms and relationships that decide whether anyone follows them) resonated. Data governance policies that exist in document form but are not actively discussed or embedded are not effective. Governance is active and evolves, and AACRAO members care deeply about that work because they understand that’s how trust is created and maintained.
Learners are missing from the conversation. Many learners are skeptical of AI, uneasy about its ethics and environmental cost, and pushing back on assignments that require it. Yet one table’s sentence completion, “we will struggle to scale AI responsibly if we fail to involve learners,” got nods from the corporate partners too. Another place where trust needs attention. Learners have to be an active part of the policy and governance conversation.
Higher Education needs support prioritizing how to start. When we talk about AI, we quickly get overwhelmed by the topic. It’s big. It’s new. It’s fast-moving. At my table, we struggled with a list of priorities that included a combination of outcomes (student support operations, administrative process improvement), enablers (data infrastructure, procurement modernization, AI literacy), and foundations (governance, change management, cross-functional coordination, assessment, accessibility). Typical of the AACRAO perspective, my thinking leaned more heavily into infrastructure and the basics. It’s about the quality of the data, who needs it, and how we protect and govern its use. “Garbage in, garbage out,” as they say. But get it right, and we can explore the possibilities it might offer for efficiency and insight. Aligning with our partners in the industry to provide clear, consistent guidance will help institutions realize the potential and mitigate risks of AI.
This matters for our profession. Registrars and enrollment leaders are the architects of trust in higher education. We know the definitions, the use cases, and the policies, and understand the strengths and gaps of the institution’s data environment. We sit at the intersection of academic and operational data. We understand governance and how to create and maintain trust and sustainability. As institutions work to connect data responsibly and make learning portable and understandable to employers, that expertise belongs early in the process, not after a tool has already been bought.
When asked what higher education most needs to get right with AI in the next five years, the answers I found most convincing weren’t about technology. They were:
- Keep people at the center.
- Ensure that the right stakeholders are at the table.
- Stay anchored to the mission.
- Make sure a degree still means something a learner can explain and an employer can trust.
Thank you to EDUCAUSE for bringing together a room where higher ed, associations, and EdTech could think through this together. I’m leaving feeling more grounded in the direction AACRAO is moving. Higher education is in a transformational moment. If we want to see transformation happen quickly, responsibly, and at scale, we need to be collaborative and coordinated in an industry-wide approach. AACRAO members can be strategically leveraged to support this transformation, and our partnership with EDUCAUSE is reflective of that.
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