Three trends community college leaders should keep on the radar in 2026

If you are leading a community college right now, you have probably noticed something. The ground is moving under our feet, but not always in predictable ways. Here are three trends I believe higher education leaders, especially rural leaders, should have firmly on their radar this year, along with a few practical ways to go deeper.

1) GenAI is moving from a “tool” to “infrastructure” (and it's forcing assessment and policy decisions)

The AI conversation in higher ed has shifted. This is no longer just about whether students use AI or whether faculty like it. The real leadership challenge is governance. What are the rules, how do we teach with it, how do we protect privacy, and how do we design assessments that measure learning in an AI-saturated world?

EDUCAUSE’s 2025 AI Landscape Study emphasizes the need for institutional strategy, policy, and leadership alignment, especially given uneven capacity across institutions. The 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report also frames AI as a major driver reshaping teaching and learning practices and the decisions institutions will need to make about instructional design and academic integrity.

Ways to dive deeper (and act):

• Review EDUCAUSE’s AI Landscape Study and Horizon Report with your cabinet, then identify 2–3 “must-answer” policy questions (e.g., approved use cases, data and privacy guardrails, and faculty training expectations). 
• Start small but concrete by piloting a handful of AI-resilient assessment approaches (e.g., oral defenses, in-class application tasks, annotated reasoning). EDUCAUSE’s GenAI action planning resources are a useful roadmap. 

2) Enrollment is rising in places, but demographics are still tightening (so planning needs to be more regional and more flexible)

Nationally, postsecondary enrollment has shown improvement, and community colleges have been a major driver of that rebound. In spring 2025, community colleges saw the largest undergraduate gains among sectors (+5.4%). At the same time, leaders are staring down the “demographic cliff” era, where the number of traditional-age students declines after the peak high school graduating cohorts. What matters most for strategy is that this is not a uniform national problem. It is highly regional, and rural areas can be hit harder depending on migration patterns and local labor market dynamics. 

Ways to dive deeper (and act):

• Pull your own last 5–10 years of enrollment by age, modality, and program type, and compare it to regional demographic projections (the “cliff” shows up differently by county and region). 
• Treat adult learners as a core growth strategy, not a side project. Build schedules, advising, and short-format pathways that match working lives (because many students are coming back for economic reasons). 

3) Workforce education is expanding fast, especially short-term and noncredit, but quality, data, and finance models are lagging

Students and employers want faster, job-aligned training. We are seeing growth in short-term credentials and increased attention to noncredit workforce programs. But there is a big leadership challenge hiding in the good news. Noncredit workforce education often lacks consistent national data, consistent student supports, and consistent quality/ROI transparency. Lumina’s 2025 brief flags that the noncredit workforce landscape is shifting rapidly, while also pointing out that national reporting and clarity about outcomes still lag. 

Ways to dive deeper (and act):

• Inventory your short-term and noncredit offerings and ask three blunt questions: Who enrolls? What do they earn after? And what supports do they need to complete? (If you can’t answer those, that’s the project)
• Use a “stackability” lens: ensure short-term programs map cleanly into credit pathways where appropriate, and build employer feedback loops that actually change curriculum. National conversations on community colleges as workforce engines are increasingly focused on speed, alignment, and adaptability. 

Closing thought

None of these trends is abstract for rural colleges. AI, demographics, and workforce training are all showing up as daily operational decisions, staff time, program design, student supports, and how we tell our story to policymakers and funders. RCCA will keep tracking these issues and lifting up rural examples that show what’s working (and what needs fixing).



If you are seeing something on your campus that fits one of these trends, good, bad, or “we didn’t expect that,” send it my way. Those real rural stories help all of us lead better.

If you are in Washington, D.C., for ACCT’s National Legislative Summit, we hope you will join us for Rural on the Rocks, RCCA’s informal networking event for rural college leaders and partners.

• Date: Monday, February 9, 2026
• Time: 4:30–5:30 p.m. EST
• Location: Marriott Marquis conference hotel (room and location to be announced)

Rural on the Rocks is an opportunity to connect with peers, share what is happening on your campus, and help ensure rural community colleges remain visible and influential in national policy conversations.

We look forward to seeing many of you there and to sharing more board voices in future issues as our monthly Board Column series begins in February.

More details coming soon!



Christopher Breitmeyer

President, Rural Community College Alliance (RCCA)