Recruiting Intelligence

Our regular readers know our devotion to cross-cultural intersections. Today we focus your attention on the financial value of global.

At the NACUBO 2026 Annual Meeting, I spent several days listening to chief business officers talk about the problems consuming higher education: rising personnel costs, deferred maintenance, enrollment pressure, AI investments, student success vs. access, the loss of institutional knowledge as long-serving leaders retire, oh, and changing Federal policies and guidelines.

Important to note: just 13% of CBOs say their institution understands per-student program and activity costs very well as reported in Inside Higher Ed from their annual survey of CBOs. There’s an opportunity for you right there.

You know what did not come up at the conference? International enrollment.

Nearly every concern being discussed at NACUBO pointed toward the need for new, sustainable revenue streams. While international enrollment cannot solve every financial challenge facing a college or university, it can become a meaningful part of the solution. And given today’s pressures, international is just as reliable as any other options for revenue-sustainability being evaluated by your leadership.

The larger point is easy to miss amid headlines about visa delays, geopolitics, and fluctuating student demand: international enrollment drives revenue. And that revenue opportunity is not well understood by your business officers. In fact, your CBO needs to hear from you, and this is important: they don’t know that they need to hear from you.

Read on...

The transformation of higher education is a hot topic for authors.  Two new books will be released this spring by Kevin Carey from the New America Institute and Ryan Craig from University Ventures. While the authors have very different professional backgrounds - a policy analyst versus a professional venture capital manager -- they derive at similar conclusions and insights about the future of higher education.  Higher education as we know it will not be sustainable according to the authors and a great deal of disruption and change will be upon future student generations.  

Both books have a remarkable optimism that sees the future of education with greater access, more innovation, better outcomes and lower costs.   Yet change will not happen without pain for many existing institutions. 

Welcome back to Intead Insights. We are refreshed by our summer hiatus and eager to share our perspective on an extremely valuable report out of MIT (just a stone’s throw from our Boston office if you have a really good arm).

MIT published an incredibly exciting, insightful and highly promising report about its future plans.  The report developed 16 recommendations that are worth reading- even if you choose not to read the 200 pages of appendices.   ;-)

Five Trends to Watch in Higher Education, published this month by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a management consulting group, has some dramatic and valuable things to say. You may recall that last week, we presented our thoughts on another BCG report in our Intead Insight: Can Millennials Change Marketing Forever? Uh, yes (eyeroll). We certainly consider both of these BCG reports worthy your attention. 

In this latest BCG report, the authors talk about influential forces rather than trends, saying that "five forces are reshaping Higher Education." Today, we'll review these forces and offer up a few of the report's charts that we find the most informative and intriguing.

University President is a high profile and very challenging position. Trends in higher education are not making the position easier. As a result, we were interested in this little study of What Presidents Think underwritten by Pearson and published by the Chronicle of Higher Education.