AI Leads 2027 Educause Top 10
While artificial intelligence has long factored into the trends and issues within Educause's annual Top 10, the technology has officially risen to the No. 1 spot for 2027. The association for higher education IT professionals ranked "Determining where AI adds real value" at the top of the list, noting that AI's importance is accompanied by much uncertainty.
"Its rank signals urgency more than consensus, and higher education is still grappling with what AI-driven change could mean for institutions," the report opens. "In many ways, AI embodies a broader reality: We're living in an age of perpetual change."
That sense of uncertainty pervades much of the Top 10 list, which touches on many of higher education's biggest challenges, such as cybersecurity, workforce readiness, responsible AI, capacity constraints, data governance, declining enrollments, and more. "While this atmosphere breeds uncertainty and anxiety, it can also inspire innovation and growth," the report notes. "The 2027 Educause Top 10 highlights how the higher education technology community is responding to those opportunities."
The Top 10 issues for 2027 are:
- Determining where AI adds real value
- Future-proofing students for a volatile world
- Balancing cybersecurity boundaries with autonomy and trust
- Designing AI structures for responsible innovation
- Designing human-centric technology experiences
- Working creatively within real-world constraints
- Building a strong and adaptive data governance backbone
- Measuring and navigating enrollment shifts
- Meeting stakeholders where they are with AI
- Reducing friction for more seamless technology experiences
On its Top 10 website, Educause has included a downloadable discussion guide designed to plug into an AI assistant such as Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, to help users interpret the report for their own institutional context. The guide "is designed to turn the 2027 Educause Top 10 into a more personalized discussion about what the findings mean for your role, priorities, and the higher education technology landscape," ChatGPT explained to Campus Technology after ingesting the text file with the prompt, "Begin the guided discussion."
As the overall takeaway from the report, ChatGPT offered: "Higher education technology appears to be entering a period in which adopting new technology is the relatively easy part. The harder work is deciding where technology creates genuine value, building institutional structures that allow innovation without losing trust or control, simplifying the environment enough to create capacity, and ensuring that technological change ultimately improves the experience of students, faculty, and staff."
The full Top 10 list, discussion guide, and additional resources are available here on the Educause site.
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].