|
Where higher education transformation leaders get their intelligence
62,836 verified .edu decision-makers across 3,933 institutions via EdTech Connect
In partnership with Mackey Strategies
| | |
🎯 The Short List
Your Website Isn't Where Students Are Looking Anymore Prospective students may never visit your website when they research your institution. AI assistants are increasingly the first stop in college research — and most university content isn't structured to show up there. The fix isn't complicated: clear, direct answers to the questions prospective students actually ask. If your site can't answer them, an AI won't surface you.
The Accessibility Deadline Isn't a Drill ADA Title II deadlines are no longer hypothetical. For most institutions, the compliance window is closing — and the gap between "we have a remediation project" and "we have a practice" is where the risk lives. Automated testing and editorial governance aren't expensive. Scrambling after a complaint is.
The Audit You've Been Avoiding The average university has accumulated decades of disconnected sites, tools, and platforms — most of them maintained by whoever built them. That fragmentation has a real cost: in student experience, in IT overhead, and increasingly in security exposure. A simple inventory of what you actually own is a better starting point than another platform purchase.
| | |
♿ Free Webinar: Making Web Accessibility in Higher Education Sustainable
Presented by Pantheon and New City
The April 2026 Title II deadline isn’t the finish line — it’s the starting gate. Most institutions are treating accessibility as a project; the ones that won’t get sued are treating it as a practice.
Join Kevin Basarab from Pantheon, Phil Pelanne from New City, and Jeff Dillon from EdTech Connect to learn how institutions are embedding WCAG compliance into daily operations — not recurring emergencies. You’ll leave with operational frameworks, real-world examples from dozens of higher ed projects, and platform strategies that scale across your entire web presence.
The institutions that figure this out now won't be scrambling in April. Will yours?
EdTech Connect webinars average 45%+ attendance. Join the higher ed leaders who’ve already registered.
→ Register: Mar 17, 11am PT
|
| | |
🎓 Free webinar: How UT Austin Is Building the Student Experience Hub for the AI Era
Presented by Modo Labs
Students don't experience your university as separate departments — but your digital tools treat them that way. Admissions is over here. Academics is over there. Finances somewhere else entirely.
UT Austin decided to fix that.
Join Steven Martin and Melody Ethley from UT Austin and Andy Umans from Modo Labs to show how MyUT evolved from a fragmented portal into a unified student engagement hub. You’ll leave with a concrete model for simplifying how students interact with your institution and a clear view of what AI-driven personalization looks like when it’s built on a solid foundation.
→ Register: Mar 19, 11am PT
| | |
🏛️ Voices That Matter
Online Education Isn't Borderless. It's Geographic.
by Jeff Dillon, Founder of EdTech Connect
More than 63% of fully online students enroll within their own state. That number should stop every enrollment leader cold.
NC-SARA data makes it undeniable: online education still follows geographic patterns — and most institutions are competing on the wrong map entirely. While you're chasing a national audience, a regional competitor is showing up more clearly in the search result. Or the AI recommendation. Or both.
"Online education isn't borderless. It's layered. And the universities that read that map correctly will own their regions."
→ Read the Full Strategic Memo
The U.S. Under Secretary of Ed Is Clear About the Plan. Are We?
by Pete Mackey, Ph.D., President & Executive Strategist, Mackey Strategies
At #ACEx2026, Under Secretary Nicholas Kent told a room full of higher ed leaders to finish moving through the five stages of grief — "to acceptance." Pete Mackey was in the audience.
His takeaway: this administration plans to use accreditation, federal funding agreements, and loan policy to enforce its agenda, and institutions still waiting for a dialogue that will never come are already behind.
"If you delude yourself into thinking you're in a dialogue with the federal government, you have lost before you started."
→ Read the Full Perspective
| |
🎙️The Podcast
Presented by SearchStax
Conversations with higher ed leaders doing the work, hosted by Jeff Dillon.
Ep. 76 - Fiona Hayes | CEO & Co-Founder of Viewpoint Simulations From clinical audiologist to scaling a simulation platform used by 30,000+ students at Harvard, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Fiona explains how the pandemic exposed a gap in experiential learning — and why educator-to-educator referrals beat any marketing budget.
| | |
📊 By The Numbers
92% of higher ed teams ignore "no-results" search terms. 64% never review their top on-site search queries.
According to 2025 research by the Chronicle of Higher Ed Studio and SearchStax, most institutions have no idea what prospective students, current students, and staff are actually trying to find on their websites — or that they're failing to find it.
That gap has a cost. Every unanswered search is a frustrated student, a missed enrollment signal, or a service failure that never gets reported. The data is sitting right there in your analytics. Most institutions just aren't looking at it.
That's not a search problem. That's a missed enrollment conversation hiding in plain sight.
| | |
📖 Essential Reading
Presented by Pantheon
Research and analysis that's shaping decisions at the institutional level.
Cornell's Bet on the Returning Adult
An Ivy League institution is finally moving into territory most regional universities have occupied for years. Cornell's first fully online, part-time Bachelor of Professional Studies — launching in 2027 at $925/credit — is designed for working adults, community college transfers, and incarcerated learners. Whether it becomes a model for access or a cautionary tale about brand dilution will depend on execution. | Mirage News
Penn Raises Tuition Again — But Buries the Real Story
Penn approved a 3.7% tuition hike to $63,204 — in line with peer Ivies — while simultaneously expanding financial aid to a record $328 million. The subtext: federal funding cuts are quietly reshaping how elite institutions think about affordability, and Pell Grants are now a front-line concern. | The Daily Pennsylvanian
Georgetown Goes All-In on Gemini
Georgetown is betting that handing every student and faculty member access to Gemini counts as an AI strategy. Faculty aren't convinced — and they may have a point. AI is being embedded into core curricula in both the College of Arts & Sciences and McDonough School of Business by Fall 2026. | The Hoya
UW and Microsoft Rewrite the University-Industry Playbook
With Washington state facing a shortfall of 600,000 credentialed workers by 2032, UW and Microsoft are co-developing AI courses, expanding graduate research, and building community literacy programs. Brad Smith called compute access the new library — and committed real money to back it. | University of Washington
|
🛠️ Companies Worth Watching
Tech solving real operational problems — not just riding the hype cycle.
⭐FEATURED: WaitWell | Queue Management & Appointment Scheduling
Student services lines don’t just frustrate students — they’re invisible to administrators until something breaks. WaitWell replaces physical queues with mobile check-ins, self-serve scheduling, and real-time service data so advisors and staff can finally see bottlenecks and fix them.
Orbit Media Studios | Web Strategy & Content Optimization
Most university websites were built to impress, not convert. Orbit Media brings data-driven content strategy and UX research to higher ed web teams that need pages to move prospective students from interest to application.
AKIPS | Network Monitoring & Infrastructure Visibility
Campus IT teams are accountable for network uptime across thousands of devices — but most monitoring tools slow down right when you need them most. AKIPS handles high-volume polling without degrading performance, giving infrastructure teams fault detection they can act on before the help desk lights up.
InfoReady | Research & Award Management
Limited-submission grants and internal funding competitions run on spreadsheets and email threads until something falls through the cracks. InfoReady centralizes the entire workflow — from application intake to reviewer scoring to reporting — without requiring IT to set it up.
→ Review 1,087 Software Listings
| | |
🤔 Ask The Signal
"We're being asked to show AI ROI, but we don't even know how to measure it. How do we justify continued investment?" — Anonymous VP of Finance, Large Public Research University
You're in good company — a 2026 EDUCAUSE study found that of the institutions actually measuring AI ROI, most respondents said they were "not sure" how they were doing it. Stop trying to isolate AI as a line item. Tie it to outcomes leadership already tracks: advising caseloads, staff hours saved, enrollment yield.
Pick two or three workflows, establish a baseline, and report on those. A narrow claim you can defend beats a broad one you can't. And per Ellucian's March 2026 AI Survey, only 48% of institutions even have a dedicated AI budget — meaning most are burying costs inside broader tech spend and making the ROI problem impossible to solve.
| | |
📶 About The Signal
The Signal is the essential intelligence briefing for higher education's transformation leaders. Delivered monthly to 62,836 verified .edu decision-makers across 3,933 institutions, The Signal provides the strategic context, tactical insights, and technology intelligence needed to navigate the sector's most consequential period of change, the 2026 enrollment cliff and the AI-driven reimagination of the student experience.
🔔 About EdTech Connect
EdTech Connect is a software comparison platform for higher education, powered by verified adoption data from 4,011 colleges and universities. The platform helps institutions research technology solutions backed by peer benchmarks and real-world deployment patterns. EdTech Connect publishes The Signal newsletter, produces EdTech Connect podcast, and hosts webinars that connect technology vendors with CIOs, digital directors, provosts, and marketing leaders navigating higher education's transformation.
Know a colleague who needs this intelligence? Forward this email
Reach 62,836+ verified .edu decision-makers. Sponsorship opportunities available.
Stay signal. Cut the noise.
— Jeff Dillon, Founder
| | | | |
