Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
While much of the executive conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on transformation within business units, more organizations are looking inward. For IT teams, that means turning to AI not for strategic reinvention but to solve long‑standing operational challenges that impact uptime, user experience and cost efficiency. AI‑enabled observability and AI for operations (AIOps) is emerging as one of the most practical, high‑value starting points for institutional AI adoption. Across networking, infrastructure and security operations, IT leaders are looking to AI to help prevent…
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) is a newly expanded research lab where university researchers and private companies collaborate and use the latest tools, including robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), to develop next-generation manufacturing technology. More than 300 graduate and undergraduate students and 22 faculty conducted research in the space over the past year, most of it backed by industry sponsors including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Siemens, says Steven Ferguson, principal research scientist and deputy director of…
Deepfakes have become a serious security and trust problem for colleges and universities, blurring the line between cyberattacks, fraud, misinformation and student harm. Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated voice clones and fabricated media are used to impersonate university leaders, manipulate employees into transferring funds and steal credentials through increasingly convincing social engineering attacks. Students and faculty are confronting a growing wave of manipulated audio, images and video used for harassment, reputational damage and disinformation. Click the banner below to…
Walk into any university computer lab during finals week or remote learning sessions, and audio challenges are immediately apparent. Students on adjacent machines bleed sound into each other’s ears. Spoken instructions compete with the hum of the heating and cooling system. Students toss headsets into bags full of books and personal items, subjecting hardware to the kind of punishment that turns most consumer headsets into trash within weeks. The Jabra Biz 1100 EDU was built in direct response to these conditions, and I recently tested it to ensure it could stand up to the demands of higher…
Pomona College, a member of The Claremont Colleges located in Claremont, Calif., is a longtime leader in campus sustainability policies and is working to become carbon-neutral by 2030. Those efforts extend into many facets of campus life, including the college’s self-operated dining services, where they meet head-on with another Pomona College goal: technological innovation. Pomona College’s Dining Services staff is using an artificial intelligence-driven solution from Metafoodx in the dining hall kitchens that prepare meals for the student population of 1,700 to support campuswide…
Students increasingly judge institutions by the quality and feel of their learning environment: Do they feel innovative, aspirational, collaborative, modern and high-tech? Increasingly, IT leaders are asking questions akin to those of admissions offices more often now than they did even two years ago: does our campus environment look like the future our students are trying to get to? These questions used to be about residence halls and dining. Now they’re about the classroom and learning spaces. And the answers are having a direct impact on whether students choose to enroll, whether…
As many universities face budget pressure, staffing constraints and growing administrative demands, California State University has built a centralized approach to managing workflows across the nation’s largest four-year public university system. “With 22 campuses, it’s always a struggle to achieve continuity and consistency across the board,” says Karen Malone, operations analyst in the CSU Chancellor’s Office. Like many higher education environments, CSU faced “decentralized decision-making, deeply siloed departments, legacy processes that have been in place for decades, and staff with a…
The percentage of physical robots in industrial settings that are designed to work alongside humans has more than quadrupled since 2017, according to data from the nonprofit International Federation of Robotics. To investigate how collaborative robots can effectively communicate with people in manufacturing, medical and other settings, a number of colleges and universities have launched research efforts that involve virtual reality (VR), which may also help provide students with valuable workplace skills and experience. Vision-based training can be a powerful way to tap into the speed,…
As the largest single-district community college system in the nation, Maricopa Community Colleges educates more Arizona residents than its three large public universities combined. The system operates 10 main campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area and more than 30 satellite sites, serving nearly 100,000 students and employing 14,000 faculty members and staff in the 2026 spring semester. Those superlatives and numbers are all familiar to Jamie Spradlin, MCC’s CISO. When he took his position in June 2024, his first order of business was to establish a cybersecurity program…
Managed Security Service Providers used to be seen as a way to “outsource the pain” of monitoring and incident response. For many universities — where small teams are tasked with protecting sprawling, open and highly connected environments — that was reason enough to consider them. But in today’s threat landscape, simply shipping logs to a vendor and measuring them by ticket closure rates is no longer enough. The question for higher ed leaders is not, “Do we have an MSSP?” It’s “Is our MSSP helping us achieve our institutional outcomes?” Why Managed Security Service Providers Matter More Than…
Generative artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how colleges and universities operate, streamlining workflows, supporting research and enhancing learning. But as adoption grows, so do the risks. Higher education institutions manage sensitive student data, proprietary research and intellectual property. Without the right guardrails in place, AI systems can expose this information or violate compliance standards, putting institutions at risk for reputational damage. For CISOs and CIOs, securing AI environments must be a strategic priority. Here are four key security considerations when…
Sometimes, dealing with cybersecurity can feel like the boardwalk arcade game Whac-A-Mole. Just when you’ve addressed a potential threat with hardware, software and operating system patches, another threat comes from a direction you never anticipated. A new threat to many organizations’ cybersecurity is looming, and it could be the biggest one of all: quantum computing. The good news is that universities and other organizations can take steps now to protect their systems that might be vulnerable in a few years. Quantum computing, where processors use the principles of quantum physics, is…
Higher education IT leaders increasingly aim to consolidate digital tools and reduce friction. To do so, they first must address the shadow IT concerns emerging from faculty going rogue and creating their own work-arounds. By and large, higher ed faculty seek out shadow IT not to create problems but to solve problems their current technology setup cannot address. “Usually, shadow IT is not done for malicious reasons. It’s trying to meet a need within a certain time frame,” says Joel Larson, director of IT support, networking and disaster recovery planning at Kalamazoo Valley Community…
Ambient artificial intelligence is being hyped as a new wave of AI with the potential to make today’s tech-enabled classrooms even smarter. Compared with the transactional nature of traditional AI, ambient AI “fades into the environment rather than sitting in a visible tool waiting for someone to type a prompt,” explains Narmeen Makhani, founder of AIxecute, a strategic advisory and consulting firm. The technology is already being employed in medical settings, helping clinicians with note-taking and after-visit summaries. To pick up on engagement and classroom interaction in real time,…
Higher education has spent the last decade optimizing for the student experience with everything from enrollment funnels to retention analytics and personalized dashboards, while largely overlooking the people responsible for keeping it all running. And all of that optimization matters. But there’s a conversation that can’t wait any longer: the employee experience — specifically, what happens when the higher ed IT staff who keep institutions running don’t feel like institutions are keeping them. This isn’t a soft HR concern. It’s an operational risk. EDUCAUSE’s 2026 Workforce Report found…
Growing cyberthreats and limited head count create ongoing challenges for security teams at colleges and universities. According to research from Nile, 94% of higher education IT teams are understaffed amid rising cybersecurity threats. Artificial intelligence could be a way to augment their security strategies to free up staff and resources. “For organizations with lean security teams, there is an exciting opportunity for AI to support some of the heavy lifting,” says Ramya Chitrakar, vice president of engineering at Google Cloud Security. “We are already seeing huge gains for…
When an AI system makes a “bad decision,” most organizations can’t really explain why. They aren’t entirely sure which data trained it, where the error was, which version it was running or which third-party components were involved. This is an ethical and regulatory blind spot that creates risk for tech leaders in institutions of all sizes, and it’s driving interest in a newer framework called the AI bill of materials. If you’ve ever seen a software bill of materials, or SBOM, then you already understand the concept. But many organizations have not yet thought about applying that framework…
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how businesses operate, how students learn and how communities solve complex problems. From predictive analytics to generative design and autonomous systems, AI is becoming foundational to innovation across industries. What was once a competitive advantage is quickly becoming a baseline expectation. Recognizing this shift, the Center for Entrepreneurship at the College of Charleston created the AI Innovation Challenge to empower students to leverage AI in tackling real-world societal issues. This momentum is especially powerful among younger…
Artificial intelligence dominates the headlines, but quantum computing isn’t far behind. That’s especially true in Texas, where Texas Tech University CIO, Vice President for IT and Executive Director of AI and Quantum Computing Lin Zhou was recently appointed by the governor to the state’s Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee. The committee will guide the new Texas Quantum Initiative, which aims to make Texas a national and global leader in the field. The committee is a perfect fit for Zhou, who started his career as a physicist and spent many years leading AI initiatives at IBM. He’s…
In higher education, the standard advice on data governance has been pretty simple for a long time: Build a council, centralize decisions and route everything through IT. For a while, that works. You stand up a committee, you write a charter, you centralize definitions and approvals. And then, quietly, the model stops working. IT becomes the bottleneck for every data question on campus. You’re chasing report definitions, field names and artificial intelligence (AI)-related concerns one request at a time. The council still meets, but governance isn’t really operating day to day. The problem…
In May, a cybercriminal group executed the largest educational data breach on record, targeting Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management system. The breach impacted 275 million students, teachers and staff across approximately 9,000 education institutions. Many took quick action. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, issued real-time alerts warning faculty and students: “If Canvas prompts you to perform any action — such as clicking a link, logging in, resetting your password or completing any tasks — do not proceed.” For universities, the incident…
Community colleges serve as a bridge between education and employment, helping students gain the skills needed for local and regional jobs. But with workforce needs evolving more rapidly, these institutions are under pressure to ensure programs remain aligned with labor market demand. Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are helping community colleges leverage labor market intelligence (LMI) to make more informed decisions about program creation, student success initiatives and workforce development strategies. However, overcoming organizational challenges, fragmented systems, data…
The original compliance date for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II digital accessibility for large public institutions came and went in April. Then the Justice Department extended it. And for the organizations tracking this closely, the honest assessment is still that almost no one is ready. That’s not a criticism. It’s a baseline. There is no time back. Every institution is well behind in becoming compliant, at least according to the updated regulation. This is a full-throttle, go-forward moment. The extension doesn’t change the urgency; it adds time to do a thing that…
Most colleges and universities are asking IT and academic technology leaders to integrate artificial intelligence tools across campus. But that job may be easier said than done, as negative sentiment toward generative AI technology is growing, particularly among college-aged Americans. A recent Gallup survey found that excitement about AI among U.S. 14- to 29-year-olds has dropped 14 percentage points since 2025, to 22%. Hopefulness has fallen 9 points, to 18%, and anger has increased 9 points, to 31%. Anxiety remained unchanged, at 42%. As students and other members of the campus community…
It’s not a matter of if, but when. This cybersecurity maxim is true for almost any organization, but it is especially true for higher education institutions. They are continuing to experience a significant uptick in attacks, numbering about 4,200 per week in 2026 across higher education institutions, according to Randy Rose, vice president of security operations and intelligence at the Center for Internet Security (CIS). “We’re holding steady for 2026, but that’s not necessarily a good thing,” says Rose. “Depending on who’s measuring it, higher education saw anywhere from a 20% to 40%…
Every board wants to know the AI plan, but AI readiness starts with a question most institutions haven't answered: is your data ready? Simply put, AI readiness starts with data readiness. You don’t build a house without a solid foundation. The stronger your data as your foundation is, the greater opportunity that you have to build, and we are all building right. Our goal is not to be static. Our goal is to help our organizations grow, be more effective for our students and achieve the outcomes that higher ed is there to provide. Click the below banner to explore building data governance…
In addition to CIOs establishing themselves as leaders when it comes to a unified data strategy and university leadership understanding that data governance is the foundation of AI readiness, there is a growing understanding that data governance is a required discipline, essential to data-centric transformation on campuses. However, there are other data considerations to be mindful of, as well. Click the banner below to explore how to build a foundation for scalable AI at your higher ed institution.
Higher ed IT leaders grappling with integrating rapidly accelerating artificial intelligence throughout their campuses need only flip back a few pages in their playbooks to the pandemic. Institutions that invested in hybrid cloud flexibility and business continuity before 2020 pivoted to remote work and hybrid learning far more quickly than those still in legacy environments. Universities that leaned into early modernization in the age of AI find themselves equally well positioned now. The mindset shift that serves college and university IT teams — and one that Nutanix is built around — is…
Higher education is at an inflection point. The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report identifies the forces most likely to reshape teaching and learning over the next decade — and the picture is complex. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s changing relationships across campus. Institutions also continue to face mounting enrollment challenges. And emerging risks related to cybersecurity, policy reform and sustainability are compounding institutional strain. AI’s Influence on Teaching and Learning According to the report, AI is redefining instructional design and how faculty teach…
Earlier this year, an agentic artificial intelligence tool called Einstein caused an uproar in higher education. Einstein offered to log autonomously into the learning management system Canvas every day, watch lectures, write papers and submit homework on students’ behalf — without their professors knowing. Einstein exposed a core problem in higher education IT: There’s no reliable way to distinguish students from AI agents acting in their place on any major LMS. “The Einstein tool was a big wake-up call,” says Josh Callahan, CISO for California State University. “It echoes the…
Higher education leadership and IT teams are battling ghost students, establishing AI governance and managing competing priorities as students return to campus. Adding to this strain is a major shift in federal philosophy about National Institutes of Health grants, National Science Foundation funding and broader federal research funding cuts in what has historically been a university-centric system. In previous years, Congress has approved the federal budget, so that agencies such as NIH, NSF and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science could move swiftly to release funding…
Amazon Web Services recently announced the launch of Student Rewards, offering free educational and certification opportunities to verified university students. The company has committed more than $500 million in resources to support workforce development via artificial intelligence and cloud computing education for students enrolled in college. Verified students over the age of 18 can receive premium access to the AWS Skill Builder platform, $30 in AWS credits and a $100 Certification Exam voucher. As employer demand for AI and cloud computing skills grows, this program bridges the gap…
One of the major barriers to artificial intelligence adoption across industries is the idea of displacement. Will AI eventually be able to replace humans? Will automation render our skills — and our jobs — obsolete? Most of us understand that however powerful this technology might be, it still requires human oversight to ensure it’s working properly. The question now is how we can collaborate with this technology in ways that amplify the value of us both. DISCOVER: Organizations are creating frictionless digital experiences for employees. Trusting in Technology Is Key to Harnessing Its…
The job market is often perceived as tough: too few jobs and too many applicants. Newly graduated college students trying to secure their first jobs in the cybersecurity industry have it tough for another reason: Employers want experience. “One of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity is that employers want people with experience, but students need somewhere to get that experience before they can land those jobs,” explains James Lanham, director of operations at Marshall University’s Institute for Cyber Security. Thanks to a partnership with Intuit, Marshall University is helping students…
Universities produce an enormous amount of visual content. Faculty members create lecture presentations and course materials. Marketing teams produce event promotions and recruitment campaigns. Students generate slides, videos and graphics for coursework. But keeping all of those efforts coordinated while maintaining quality and brand consistency can be difficult. Canva for Campus is designed to simplify that process by providing a shared platform where students, faculty and staff can design, collaborate and publish visual materials without needing specialized design software. Canva for…
Faculty and students, academic researchers, the staff and administrators working behind the scenes at colleges and universities around the country are all leveraging artificial intelligence to teach, learn, and work more efficiently and effectively. One recent survey, in fact, found that 95% of students and educators are actively using AI tools. And while the surge in AI adoption in higher education kicked off in 2022 with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, today it’s being driven by a wide range of platforms from established and emerging companies alike. In this environment, a growing number of…
In 2025, the Workforce Pell Grant was announced as part of the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. On August 4, the first program was approved for the new Workforce Pell Grant, a milestone in higher education. To be eligible, institutions must prove a 70% completion rate and 70% job placement rate — in the industry or field of the program — within 180 days. Programs must also run between eight to 15 weeks in length. “If an institution is starting now, they’re six months too late — minimum,” says Wesley Bange, a chief information and technology officer at Bossier Parish Community College. Meeting…
For years, cybersecurity has been treated as a technical problem and an unavoidable cost of doing business. In higher education, that framing is no longer workable. Universities are competing for students, grants and reputation in an environment where outages and breaches have direct consequences on retention, research dollars and institutional credibility. The conversation has shifted. Cybersecurity is now fundamentally about business value — and the institutions that recognize this are starting to pull ahead. Cybersecurity Goes From Cost Center to Strategic Growth Driver Higher education…
A university is a small city in itself: There’s lighting, waste management, traffic control. That means, when researchers look to optimize a campus, they can simultaneously build a “smart cities” proof of concept for a municipality. It’s a logical fit. “Universities are often at the cutting edge of technology. What they lack is a city use case,” says Chris Lucero, technology and design director for The Connective, a smart city consortium for the greater Phoenix region. Cities meanwhile “have resource constraints and budget issues but would like to pilot new technologies to solve municipal…
Technical debt is the accumulation of future costs that come with every IT product in your portfolio. For many IT managers, managing technical debt is a careful balancing act to ensure expenditures are predictable and problems are avoided. Security debt is a variation on technical debt — and a bigger problem in higher education. Click the banner below to read the recent CDW Cybersecurity Research Report.
The signals are undeniable: Modernized campus network infrastructure is now the central nervous system of a competitive higher education institution. When the network stumbles, the institution feels it everywhere. That’s the shift we want more campus leaders to sit with. We used to think of digital infrastructure as more of a back-office concern. It isn’t anymore. The network, the security posture and the classroom technology now shape the student experience, influence enrollment and increasingly determine how competitive an institution can be over the long term. Click the banner below for…
Leaders at the State University of New York’s 64 campuses have until the end of the year to establish or update artificial intelligence guidelines, including standards for bias evaluation, student data privacy and responsible AI use. The mandate comes from a binding AI governance policy passed in May, leaving higher ed IT leaders at SUNY campuses to devise ways to evaluate AI vendors, implement governance workflows, protect institutional data and support responsible AI adoption at scale. The framework is already having an impact beyond the Empire State, with CIOs and IT leaders across…
Three departments walk into a meeting with three different enrollment numbers — all of them technically correct. Most institutions are surrounded by data: reports, dashboards and transactional systems pulling from every corner of campus. And yet, when a leader needs to make a fast, confident decision, the data doesn’t quite deliver. It can be fragmented and inconsistent. I think about data strategy as everybody’s opportunity and no one area’s problem. Academic affairs, enrollment, student success and finance — each of these teams is using data in smart ways to solve local problems. What a CIO…
Higher education IT leaders are caught in a bind. Campuses face institutional and cultural pressure to move fast on artificial intelligence and digital transformation. But that ambition collides with the reality that faculty and students still depend on core systems, such as registration, identity verification and learning platforms, that cannot afford to fail. ListEdTech, an education market research firm, calls this dilemma “the stability paradox.” A 2026 ListEdTech report found that the top IT investment priorities at 55 universities include data and storage, identity and access management…
Artificial intelligence promises big gains for faculty in higher education, including greater efficiencies and elevated learning outcomes. To realize the wins, professors need to get up to speed on the tools. While many are experimenting on their own, some institutions are taking steps to accelerate that learning. At Ventura College, a California community college, leaders recently stood up communities of practice around AI use. A CoP brings together individuals with a shared interest in a topic or technology; in this case, AI. The group then works together to learn more about the topic or…
Higher education technology leaders face an increasingly difficult balancing act. Enrollment pressures, tighter budgets and rising expectations around artificial intelligence (AI) are forcing institutions to modernize while proving the value of every technology investment. At the same time, aging infrastructure, fragmented data and staffing constraints leave little room for missteps. Research from EDUCAUSE shows institutions are increasingly prioritizing data modernization to improve operational efficiency, student success, decision support and institutional research, while Deloitte’s 2026…
First, there was the zombie college scam. Now it’s “ghost students,” bad actors leveraging artificial intelligence to create fake identities and enroll imaginary students to scoop up grants and loans. AI tools now allow synthetic identities to mimic genuine student behavior long enough to collect financial aid disbursements, and traditional enrollment systems are falling short. The schemes are costing the U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in siphoned-off federal financial aid packages. What Are Ghost Students, and How Is AI Making Fraud Worse? Ghost students are “fake or…
“The premise that cybersecurity is a back-office or administrative expense and that something might not happen — that needs to be changed,” says Fadi Fadhil, field CIO and director of field strategy at Palo Alto Networks. “CISOs and CIOs can steer that change by engaging in simplified conversations with university leadership. It’s a strategic effort, helping them understand how the investment reduces institutional risk.” When it comes to budgeting for their cybersecurity programs, higher education CISOs must overcome some unique hurdles, ranging from the federated nature of university IT…