NACUBO Top Business Issues 2026 for Chief Business Officers

Higher Education’s Top Business Challenges Are Connected. The Solutions Should Be, Too.

NACUBO’s 2026 Top 5 Business Issues reveal a common thread: Higher education leaders are being asked to build stronger, more resilient institutions while navigating tighter resources, workforce constraints, greater accountability, and persistent uncertainty.

Each year, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) asks higher education business officers to identify the issues weighing most heavily on their institutions.

For 2026, five higher education business issues rose to the top of the list:

• Managing rising costs
• Demonstrating higher education’s value
• Building a resilient workforce
• Planning amid uncertainty
• Leading institutional transformation

On the surface, these may appear to be distinct challenges. In practice, they are deeply interconnected.

A staffing shortage can expose an inefficient process. An inefficient process can drive up costs. Outdated technology can make both problems worse. Limited access to timely data can make it harder to anticipate what comes next. And all of those challenges can constrain an institution’s ability to deliver—and demonstrate—meaningful outcomes for students.

That means the work ahead cannot simply be about cutting costs, filling vacancies, implementing new technology, or writing another strategic plan. It is about building higher education institutions that have the capacity to adapt.

Here are five places to start.

1. Managing Rising Costs: Look for Structural Efficiency Before Making Across-the-Board Cuts

NACUBO reports that colleges and universities are contending with rising costs across compensation and benefits, technology, cybersecurity, facilities, and other critical areas. At the same time, affordability pressures make it increasingly difficult to simply pass those costs along through tuition increases.

For chief business officers, the instinct in a constrained environment may be to ask, Where can we cut?

A more productive question is: Where are we spending resources without creating proportional value?

Technology is one place to look.

Over time, institutional technology environments tend to accumulate systems, applications, contracts, customizations, and workarounds. New solutions are added to address emerging needs, but older ones may remain. Systems may overlap. Manual processes persist between platforms. Deferred maintenance grows. Specialized talent becomes harder—and more expensive—to recruit and retain.

Before making another major technology investment, institutions can benefit from taking an objective look at what they already have.

A comprehensive technology assessment can examine technology management, systems, infrastructure, operations, staffing, data, security, and service delivery against institutional priorities. The goal isn’t simply to find deficiencies. It is to identify where investments are delivering value, where gaps create risk, and where duplication or inefficiency may be consuming resources unnecessarily.

For some institutions, the assessment may also raise a bigger question: Does everything have to be done in-house?

Increasingly, the answer is no.

Application management services can provide specialized expertise for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, student information systems (SIS), constituent relationship management (CRM) systems, learning management systems (LMS), and other enterprise applications without requiring institutions to recruit every skill set themselves.

And comprehensive IT Managed Services can provide access to a broader ecosystem of technology leadership and expertise while helping institutions modernize infrastructure, address deferred maintenance, improve service, and create a more sustainable IT operating model.

The opportunity: Don’t view cost management only as an exercise in subtraction. Use it as an opportunity to redesign how institutional capacity is delivered.

2. Demonstrating Higher Education’s Value: Prepare to Prove Outcomes, Not Just Tell the Story

The debate over higher education’s value is entering a new phase.

For years, colleges and universities have worked to better communicate the value of a degree: stronger employment prospects, increased lifetime earnings, economic development, community impact, research, innovation, and public service.

That work remains important. NACUBO notes that public concern about affordability continues to shape perceptions of higher education, even as significant evidence demonstrates its benefits.

But demonstrating value is increasingly becoming more than a communications challenge. It is becoming an accountability imperative.

New federal policies, like The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), introduce accountability measures that connect program-level outcomes with access to federal student loans. That raises the stakes for institutions to understand how their programs will perform against emerging measures—and to make a commitment to act before those measures create financial consequences.

This cannot be delegated to a single office; it requires careful collaboration across departments and teams.

Finance, institutional research, academic affairs, enrollment and registration, financial aid, career services, IT, and executive leadership all hold pieces of the puzzle. Institutions need the ability to connect program data, student outcomes, workforce information, and financial implications into a coordinated institutional response.

That is the premise behind CampusWorks + Dynamic Campus’s OBBBA Readiness Services: providing presidents and chief business officers with a high-level perspective to help them understand their exposure, coordinate across institutional silos, and develop an actionable roadmap for responding to new federal requirements.

The broader lesson extends beyond any single piece of legislation.

The institutions best positioned for the next era of accountability will be those that can connect what they promise students with evidence of what students experience and achieve.

3. Building a Resilient Workforce: Redesign the Work, Not Just the Org Chart

Higher education’s workforce challenge is not new. NACUBO notes that workforce concerns have appeared among its Top 5 Business Issues every year since 2022, with institutions continuing to struggle both to recruit and retain qualified employees and to create workplaces where people feel supported and engaged.

The temptation is to treat every vacancy as a replacement problem: someone leaves, so the institution searches for someone else to perform the same job in essentially the same way.

But the persistent talent shortages facing colleges and universities create an opportunity to ask a more fundamental question:

Should the work itself still be done this way?

Before automatically replacing capacity, institutions can examine the processes surrounding the position and the specialized knowledge it requires. Where are employees spending time on manual entry, duplicative approvals, workarounds, and administrative tasks that add little value? What could be simplified, automated, centralized, shared, or eliminated? And where can human capacity contribute the most value to better serve students and support their success?

CampusWorks + Dynamic Campus’s Process Reimagine & Redesign approach helps institutions rethink processes around institutional priorities rather than simply digitizing outdated ways of working.

That does not eliminate the need for talent. It helps institutions use talent more intentionally.

When critical gaps remain, interim leadership and staff augmentation can provide specialized capacity without forcing institutions to rush permanent hiring decisions. Functional Managed Services can take that idea further by providing sustainable external capacity for institutional functions where specialized expertise or staffing is difficult to maintain internally.

The objective isn’t a leaner workforce. It is a more resilient workforce—one in which people have the capacity, tools, processes, and support to focus on their highest-value work.

4. Planning Amid Uncertainty: Move from Predicting the Future to Preparing for Multiple Futures

Perhaps the most important observation in NACUBO’s 2026 report is that uncertainty is no longer episodic.

It is part of the operating environment.

Enrollment shifts, demographic change, economic volatility, federal and state policy, labor-market disruption, emerging technologies, and changing student expectations can quickly alter assumptions that once anchored multi-year plans.

NACUBO argues that institutions need to move from planning for uncertainty to planning through it, including greater use of multiple scenarios, rolling forecasts, decision triggers, demographic and labor-market intelligence, and regular course correction.

That requires a different relationship with data.

Most institutions have no shortage of it. The challenge is turning fragmented information into timely insight—and then turning insight into mission-focused action.

CampusLens was designed around that challenge, bringing together AI, institutional data, and higher education expertise to help leaders identify patterns, surface risks and opportunities, and make better-informed decisions across areas such as enrollment, retention, career outcomes, and accreditation.

But technology alone isn’t the answer.

Planning amid uncertainty requires leaders to develop a habit of asking: What is changing? What could that mean for us? What indicators should we watch? And what will we do if our assumptions prove wrong?

The goal is not to perfectly predict the future. It is to reduce the amount of time between recognizing change and responding to it.

5. Leading Institutional Transformation: Turn Strategy into a System for Decision Making

NACUBO’s fifth issue brings the others together.

Institutions must address immediate pressures while simultaneously positioning themselves for long-term resilience. That requires difficult decisions about where limited resources will have the greatest impact—from technology and facilities to academic delivery, workforce capacity, and the student experience.

That is ultimately a strategy challenge.

Too often, however, strategic planning is treated as a periodic exercise: gather input, establish priorities, publish a plan, and revisit it during the next planning cycle.

Today’s environment demands something more dynamic.

An effective strategic plan should help leaders make choices. It should clarify what the institution will prioritize—and, equally important, what it will not. It should connect aspirations to resources, establish measurable outcomes, create accountability, and provide enough flexibility to adjust as conditions change.

CampusWorks + Dynamic Campus’s Strategic Planning services are designed to help institutions build that kind of actionable strategy: one grounded in evidence, informed by stakeholders, aligned around institutional priorities, and structured to move from planning to implementation.

Transformation rarely fails for lack of ideas. It stalls when institutions cannot translate ideas into priorities, priorities into decisions, and decisions into sustained action.

The Bigger Challenge for Higher Ed: Building Capacity to Adapt

NACUBO describes the top business issues of 2026 as interconnected—and that may be the most important takeaway of all.

Managing rising costs cannot be separated from workforce strategy. Workforce strategy cannot be separated from processes and technology. Technology and data increasingly shape an institution’s ability to demonstrate outcomes. And none of those investments can be optimized without a clear strategy for where the institution is going.

The institutions that emerge stronger will not necessarily be those with the largest budgets or the fewest challenges. They will be the ones that become better at seeing change, making choices, reallocating capacity, and acting before circumstances make those choices for them.

That is the opportunity facing higher education business leaders in 2026: not simply to navigate another difficult year, but to use today’s pressures to build institutions that are more focused, more adaptable, and better prepared for whatever comes next.

At CampusWorks + Dynamic Campus, we build enduring partnerships with colleges and universities to do exactly that—bring together strategy, technology, operations, data, and people to help institutions strengthen their capacity for what comes next.