What 50 Academic Leaders Taught Us About Modernizing Academic Operations

On November 5, 2025, more than 50 higher education leaders from across the Tri-State region came together in Princeton, NJ for a convening focused on academic operations. Representatives from registrar’s offices, institutional research, assessment, and academic affairs shared candid reflections on where institutions face challenges, what’s working, and where they hope to head next.

Throughout the day, participants echoed a sentiment that continues to resonate across the sector: academic operations is no longer just administrative infrastructure—it is foundational to student access, clarity, and timely completion.

Curriculum Processes: Manual Steps and Inconsistency Represent the Greatest Barriers

Across institutions, curriculum processes remain one of the most time-consuming and inconsistently executed areas of academic operations. Several participants noted persistent challenges such as:

• Paper-based forms completed incorrectly or reused year after year with minimal updates
• Color-coded form systems that rely on institutional memory rather than clear standards
• Email-driven approval chains that leave faculty and staff uncertain about status
• Inconsistent enforcement of requirements (e.g., “two years ago you approved something without that block filled out”)

These fragmented processes come with both workload and risk. Curriculum updates must be reflected across the catalog, degree plans, curriculum maps, and degree audit systems. However, many teams still update each system separately, introducing opportunities for misalignment.

From a benchmarking standpoint, this challenge is more common than many assume: according to a University Business survey 46% of higher ed leaders report being dissatisfied with their ability to modify curriculum in response to student demand, and 49% say they are dissatisfied with how quickly new programs can be proposed and approved.

Promising curriculum management practices discussed

Throughout the day, conversations kept returning to a central theme: leveraging structured workflows and integrated data to surface discrepancies before they become student-facing issues. One attendee raised that structured workflows have helped their curriculum committees operate with more consistency and accountability. Other tactics discussed included:

• A single point of data entry that populates all connected systems
• Required fields to improve curriculum form completeness
• Workflow visibility so stakeholders can see where a proposal sits
• Pre-filled forms based on existing courses to reduce re-entry errors

Policies Hidden in Plain Sight: Catalogs as Governance Tools, Not Just Publications

Participants also discussed the widening gap between the policies institutions believe they have and the policies students and faculty can actually find or understand.

Common challenges discussed included:

• Email chains and informal exchanges serving as de-facto policy history
• Lack of visibility into who changed what, and when
• No consistent process for tracking policy reviews or updates
• Disconnected academic, student, and faculty policies scattered across websites or PDFs

These issues have implications for both compliance and student clarity. According to national findings, 48% of institutions report that curriculum changes are not always accurately reflected on student-facing sources, and 21% say the catalog does not accurately reflect programs, courses, or policies.

What leaders hope to adopt for better policy documentation:

• Version control for policies
• Audit trails to replace email approvals
• Centralized workflows for both public and faculty-only policies
• A more navigable, mobile-responsive catalog experience
• Better alignment between policy documentation and degree audit rules
• Review of historical documents to identify inconsistencies

Balancing Faculty Needs, Student Access, and Space Realities Across Course Scheduling

Leaders from institutions across the Tri-State area shared stories of creative strategies and ongoing frustrations in course scheduling. These challenges have direct student consequences. Nationally, 65% of higher ed leaders say scheduling inefficiencies can lengthen students’ time to completion, and 55% of students report difficulty enrolling in required classes.

What institutions are struggling with

• Heavy clustering of classes in specific prime-time blocks
• Specialized labs and clinicals requiring multi-hour exceptions
• Faculty preferences conflicting with student-centric design
• Room restrictions, specialized equipment, and limited accessible spaces
• Reactive approaches to course conflict detection (“I find out when a student tells me”)

Leaders emphasized the need for proactive rather than reactive conflict detection—surfacing missing sections, imbalanced patterns, or unmet student demand before registration opens, not after.

Emerging scheduling best practices

• Open editing periods for departments followed by controlled request phases
• Rollover schedules to reduce rebuilds
• Clear approval workflows instead of email requests or hallway conversations
• Early scheduling incentives tied to preferred room selection
• Schedule-validation dashboards (e.g., color-coded meeting pattern distribution)

Institutions Want to Know “What Good Looks Like” With Benchmarking

Institutions want comparative insight, not just internal dashboards so they can have a more nuanced understanding of how well their institution operates.

Participants articulated the need for peer-based metrics such as:

• Time from curriculum proposal creation to approval
• Prime-time and meeting pattern utilization
• Room capacity alignment with enrollment
• Course performance comparisons by discipline
• Credit momentum and milestone tracking
• Faculty workload distribution
• Curriculum volume by institution type or size

These desires align with broader national trends: academic leaders overwhelmingly want clearer data to support decisions, yet many report uneven data standards and inconsistent analyses across departments. In AACRAO’s benchmarking research, institutions cite challenges using data effectively, with policies, processes, and systems often varying widely.

How future-focused teams hope to benchmark

• Data visualization tools that compare scheduling and curriculum patterns across peers
• AI-supported course equivalency matching and transfer-path analysis
• Dashboards that show whether curriculum structures are helping or hindering student progress
• Directory-based communities of practice to connect institutions facing similar challenges

Assessment & Analytics: Decisions Need Better Data Foundations

Many attendees described hesitation around making data-informed curricular or assessment decisions due to incomplete underlying data sets.

Several attendees shared examples where departments made sweeping curricular changes based on assessments that captured only a fraction of courses or students. As one speaker noted, departments often don’t realize they’re “drawing conclusions based on 10% of their classes.”

What institutions want

• Clear thresholds that display data completeness (e.g., “This represents 10% of your courses”)
• Student-level learning analytics that surface patterns over time
• Tools to identify competency gaps and link them to advising or program improvements
• More alignment between internal improvement cycles and external reporting demands

The Human Side: Technology Helps, But People Still Guide the Work

Even as institutions consider more advanced analytics or AI-supported workflows, participants reinforced a common perspective: people remain essential to academic operations and student success.

As attendee Kira Farberov, Director of the Project Management Office for Technology at Touro University stated, “Jobs aren’t going away. Human interaction is needed to guide it.”

This sentiment echoed across the day’s discussions. Workflow tools and data systems can streamline processes, reduce errors, and surface insights—but academic operations teams provide the judgment, context, and collaboration that move decisions forward.

‍