What’s on the minds of higher ed CBOs as they look beyond COVID-19

The infusion of federal relief funds can help financially strained colleges – if they take advantage of the opportunity to reimagine how they operate.

The pandemic also precipitated a major transition in college and university employees’ ways of working. On average, CBOs reported that more than half of their institution’s faculty and staff worked remotely during the past year – a major shift for workforces that have traditionally been almost fully in-person. Looking forward, CBOs expect that roughly one quarter of their institutions’ faculty and staff will work remotely on a permanent basis.

With such a significant shift in ways of working, nearly all CBOs expressed concerns about managing a remote or hybrid workforce, particularly around supporting employee well-being and sustainability in a remote work environment. Managing a successful remote workforce will likely also require institutions to provide effective productivity tools, find new ways to support employee engagement and potentially revise existing HR policies.

An important consideration of the shift toward remote faculty and staff workforces is the change in student service delivery, such as orientation, advising or mental health. A president at a large, public, four-year institution noted that the institution is “discussing which virtual service disruptions during the pandemic were positive and which were harmful, all around the framework of responding to student needs.”

In order to gain efficiencies and transform their business models, institutions of all types are expressing newfound interest in outsourcing and partnership, both in areas that have traditionally been contracted out, such as dining services or bookstores, and in new areas, such as instructional design and mental health counseling. A significant portion of institutions have also already initiated, or are considering, new public-private partnerships, particularly for the development of commercial space.

The past 16 months have been particularly difficult for institutions of higher education, but, in many cases, the difficult circumstances have provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spur change on campuses. The institutions that have quickly pivoted and made difficult decisions will likely be in a stronger position coming out of the pandemic. The key is to now continue to transform to face the future.

Institution leaders who were able to take advantage of opportunities during the pandemic are now grappling with the question of how they can maintain momentum coming out of the pandemic. As a president at a large, private institution shared, “We developed a management style during the pandemic to act more nimbly and try innovative structures, but how do we maintain that agility and speed of change without driving everyone to exhaustion?”

Maintaining the appetite for strategic change can be critical moving forward because institutions that do not take the opportunity to transform during this period will be especially vulnerable to the challenges ahead. Federal relief funding provides a “bridge” for the next two or so years. But decreased birthrates during and after the Great Recession are still expected to result in a demographic decline of high school graduates from 2025 through 2037, meaning that competition for students will continue. The federal funding postponed the “day of reckoning” for sure. Will it spur institutions into reimagining themselves in a highly competitive setting, or will institutions take the reprieve and return to business as usual? Time will tell.