Understaffed IT teams are working on a growing list of projects and tasks, and campus leaders may not have the budget to pivot to a Great Retention. Turnover means CIOs and IT directors are spending time and money recruiting, hiring, and training new employees instead of the important work of leading digital transformation.

In addition, we are on the cusp of a population decline of 18–24-year-olds in 2025. Because people had fewer children during the Great Recession in 2008, the number of 18-year-olds graduating from high school is expected to fall nationally after 2025 by 11 to 15 percent, according to estimates by Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) and Carleton College economist Nathan Grawe, respectively.

It is a strange mix of forces that, combined with the federal COVID-19 relief funds’ expiration in June 2023, threatens higher education once again.

What’s next? The pandemic after-effects will likely be long-lasting. Students now demand more flexibility in how and where they take classes. They have won some relief from student loan debt. They want to be better prepared for the real world of work. And colleges and universities know they must continue to innovate and get smarter about the delivery of education to face the economic uncertainty and population drop.

Higher ed began transforming in the wake of the pandemic, and now is the time to capitalize on that momentum.

This e-book presents the results of a survey Boldyn conducted in late 2021 of 188 campus IT professionals across all school sizes, private and public, and provides a roadmap to harness your innovation momentum from a managed technology services provider’s perspective. We will focus on the needs of IT departments and how the struggle with the shortage of campus IT staff and expertise is inhibiting innovation and smarter IT strategies and decisions. Boldyn has a 22-year history solely serving higher education. We partner with nearly 400 institutions and serve over one million students, and we believe there are some steps you can take to address the IT talent crisis and embed a culture of innovation and smart decision-making in the next two years. Let’s dive in.