Doing Everything at Once: How Presidents Are Navigating Enrollment Declines, AI Disruption and Financial Pressure

If you are leading an institution in 2026, you are likely fighting fires on multiple fronts. With traditional‑age enrollment shrinking, federal funding uncertain and artificial intelligence (AI) disrupting curricula and career planning, it becomes hard to know where to point the hose.

Based on findings from Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 Survey of College and University Presidents with Hanover Research, this newly published decision guide, "Doing Everything at Once: How Presidents Are Navigating Enrollment Declines, AI Disruption and Financial Pressure," explores how presidents are responding to these converging challenges. 

Through institutional case studies and leadership insights, the guide examines how presidents are responding to competing demands, aligning strategies across campus and finding ways to innovate under constraint.

Download the decision guide to learn:

• The ways institutions are leaning into AI to improve efficiency and scale
• How enrollment efforts are diversifying, now that the traditional-age enrollment cliff has arrived
• Where leaders are looking for revenue streams outside traditional tuition
• Key navigation principles for managing change, prioritizing resources and building institutional resilience

➤ Get the full decision guide by clicking the Read Now button above. 

Number of Pages: 10 (5.11 MB PDF)

About the Author: Ben Upton is a freelance journalist based in Washington. He served as Times Higher Education’s Europe reporter between November 2021 and October 2023 and previously covered European research policy for Research Professional News. Before graduating from City, University of London’s journalism school in 2017, he worked in academic publishing and taught at a private university in Wuhan, China.

The decision guide was made possible in part by the financial support of Liaison.