Making the Case for Technology To Drive Higher Ed Enrollment

Arguing for IT Spending in the Face of a Shrinking Budget

It can feel like a fool’s errand to ask for more IT department dollars when the overall pool of cash on campus is shrinking. After all, departments such as admissions and recruiting can say their efforts lead directly to tuition payments. Learning offices and individual colleges can say spending leads to better student retention and outcomes, garnering tuition and, eventually, donations. Public safety office budgets can save lives and cut down on loss, researchers need more money to compete for increasingly scarce grant dollars, and on and on.

The beautiful thing about asking for IT spending, though, is that it is one of the only solutions that can help answer each one of those challenges.

At the end of the day, enrollment is still the machine that runs higher education, and in both the short and long term, increasing the number and quality of enrollees and the rate at which they graduate makes the bottom line look better.

RELATED: Here’s how technology can convince students of the value of a higher ed degree.

IT spending can also be directed toward the infrastructure that makes everything else on campus possible. No department will be working at its best with erratic Wi-Fi, limited storage or insufficient computing power. And with every new artificial intelligence tool that comes onboard at a university, the infrastructure is tested even more.

That’s why we’re seeing an increased interest in Wi-Fi 7 to ensure students, faculty and staff can stay online no matter where they are; it’s why microgrids and advanced power and cooling solutions are making their way to campus as well. Without the backbone to make the newest chatbot or slickest learning management system run properly, spending on those tools is a waste.

Identifying Wasteful Spending Frees Up Money for Important Projects

One other way to get more money to spend? Stop sending so much of it out the door in the first place. IT decision-makers will make fast friends with their finance office if they can show how they’re spending less money, especially if that comes alongside an ask for additional investment.

Our team at CDW has been able to find cost savings in a number of places through our years working with higher education partners, but the most straightforward one in the entire tech stack usually comes via asset management.

Evaluating app use should be an ongoing process but, for reasons outlined above, university IT departments aren’t always well equipped to do that. Couple that with rogue applications that are no doubt on campus somewhere, purchased years earlier or without IT’s involvement. An app 10 people are using that you’re paying $3,000 a year for is obviously a bad deal, as well.

Doing a self-audit of all the platforms you’re using is a great way to identify savings, and engaging with CDW’s Strategic Application Modernization Assessment can maximize those savings.