Building the digital campus: growth in a shrinking landscape 

US universities face a difficult moment. Changes in public perception, shrinking cohorts, uncertain government support, and anxieties about AI disruption all contribute to an environment of greater industry uncertainty than any in living memory. 

Leaders and friends of higher education are grappling with the implications of this moment; there will be no total solution. No one vendor or practice will upend politics and demography. But technology and organization can help. These compounding challenges make any response addressing all dimensions at once especially appealing.  

The moment has come for a dramatic change to the face and voice with which the university greets its audience, its digital identity. To show why and how, let’s quickly define the university, describe some common challenges, and propose a few solutions that are feasible right now. 

The university and its discontents 

A university has three primary work products: 

1. Knowledge inferred to paid students 
2. Knowledge produced by faculty and graduate producers 
3. Network effects – approximately the university’s position within the nexus of alumni, professional, research, and athletic associations, venture capital arms, and private and public sector collaborators 

Teaching and learning – The shrinking cohort  

Product 1, the student outcome, is centered in teaching and learning along with the subsidiary components of student experience (dorms, gyms, advisors, etc.). This is a revenue-generating but shrinking business, and more competition for cohorts means less profit from students to subsidize other activities. 

Research – The monetization gap 

Product 2  is composed of the work of researchers and graduate students, with the university as the home and funding vehicle for research. But the business case is challenging. Imagine a media company that produces for a global audience of experts but does not own the media it produces. Similarly, a university produces knowledge, often possessing intrinsic but not commercial value. Despite investing billions, institutions struggle to capitalize on this expense because intellectual property is partially retained by researchers and further diluted through the process of commercialization. Research is expensive, and external funding cuts threaten to blow holes in university budgets. 

Network – The perception risk 

Product 3  is a cumulative result of the parasocial relationships formed around the university’s constituents, including current students, alumni, faculty, government, and private partners hoping to leverage the school’s attendant human and knowledge capital. The value of the network explains why donors drop $100M to name buildings and centers, why people sue to access top schools, why it is so useful to be a Trojan in LA, a Wolverine in MI, and a Longhorn in TX. Network effects are vulnerable to public perception. As the perception of a school diminishes, so does the value of its buildings, centers, and affiliations.  

Problem statement 

A university produces by association and struggles to capitalize its output. The value of diplomas and research both draw on the network’s dynamism and expansiveness. However, though they move together, each product is independent, with separate constituents, missions, and interests. 

Now, schools must somehow engage all fronts at once while spending fewer resources on each. 

Catalyzing question 

How can universities unify activities and constituencies to maximize the potency of network effects, public perception, and the lifetime value of investments in research, student and faculty acquisition, financial aid, collaborations, and brand equity? 

Proposal 

Again, there is no total solution. Our goal is to play a role in filling the vacuum facing our partners, helping to identify strategic alignments, offering shared technical solutions, and driving successful adoption. 

From a digital perspective, a university domain today is broken into endless and duplicative fiefs. Each school, activity, and constituency is addressed with its discreet tool. This reflects an important reality of governance: authority and funds are distributed across schools and stakeholders. Critical for independent research, the effect of this diffusion on the digital identity is to degrade the university’s ability to connect its participants with its activities, with each other, and to isolate the contributions of the institution from view. As schools have Facilities teams managing the shared campus, they now require a single digital campus to successfully connect their many audiences and address this AI moment.

Tools exist today to overcome this limitation and unite the many voices in which the university whispers, constantly yet invisibly transforming disciplines, into a bold, challenging, lucrative, and influential contribution to the public sphere. How? The leap is to consolidate on one platform that allows institutions to: 

• • • • • Collapse silos so attention gained by each agent accrues to the benefit of the network (analogize the power of YouTube the platform vs a single blogger) 

• • • • • Consolidate the brand experience (and centralize administration) to offer consistency, connection, and economies between activities 

• • • • • Unify virtual and in-person interactions to maintain contact, drive engagement, and expand the addressable audience 

• • • • • Combine delivery of formal and informal learning activities and the data they generate, creating a funnel of prospective paid interactions 

• • • • • Capitalize the back-catalogue to maintain attention and grow the platform on which new content is shared (an address by Feynman, for instance, is evergreen) 

• • • • • Centralize and act on data gathered from all activities on the shared platform 

• • • • • Vectorize the sum output in a protected fashion, flipping the university from a victim of AI theft and disruption to an AI-enabled engine of collaboration, knowledge production, and content creation

Together, these attainable steps offer a path to a digital campus capable of supporting and monetizing ongoing relationships with every node of the network, helping constituents enjoy the dividends of ongoing association. Bearing in mind that content is a derivative product of both teaching and research, accessing and discovering that content is a core value proposition for participation in university life. Joining remotely in the life of the mind is not like joining in person, just as Disney+ is not Disney World. Yet this symbiosis offers the rare possibility of accelerating every core activity of the university at once, expanding markets, and maintaining the university’s claim on the attention, giving, and influence of those remarkable people it churns into the world.  

The commercial perspective 

Fusing experiences that are today separated (virtual/on-site, formal/informal, free/paid, open/exclusive) is a prerequisite for taking advantage of the possibilities of AI, offers a broadly applicable data source on individuals and their interests, and creates paths for those individuals to deepen their commitments to the institution. Driving viewers to consume every athletic event, offering certificates to those who coincidentally consume enough free content, aligning gift requests with singular occurrences based on individual interests, promoting competitiveness, and connecting researchers with well-aligned projects; once enabled, the opportunities are endless.  

Consider how a university might apply a shared and integrated experience to improve the returns on the following partial list of activities: 

• Free events - academic events are a sunk cost and often open to the public, yet they are underattended because today they are difficult to promote to alumni and students, difficult to join virtually, and yield no usable analytics 

• Cultural products – concerts and athletics are likewise sunk costs that, with notable exceptions, typically reach a tiny percentage of most schools’ audiences before disappearing into the ether, and again, yielding no usable participant data 

• Continuing education – a potentially lucrative way to leverage the alumni network, create a pipeline of on-campus applicants, and foster private partnerships for workforce development. Today, continuing education offerings are largely siloed from the free channels in which prospects shed data demonstrating interest and aptitude 

• Privileged recruiting – the role of connecting students and employers is a recognized value to both audiences, yet one without a consistent framework for analysis and monetization 

• Alumni development – targeting with sparse data is difficult (typically Discipline/Degree/Class). The implications of detailed analytics recording and scoring every interaction, event, and video touch during an entire lifetime of association are transformative. For example, promoting content and gifts to relevant viewers based on the retirement of a notable professor or delivering personalized fundraising prompts inline during a distinguished lecture series 

• Gamified campus – Once a single platform serves as a vehicle for all activities, participation can be gamified. The most powerful proxy for future giving is engagement, and the most powerful stimulus to engagement is measurement and competition, but accurate measurement is only possible when activities live in a shared space 

• AI – The size and security of the knowledge base are essential. No university can own or secure its AI future without centralizing the repository of its content. Meanwhile, the usefulness of a generative agent is limited by the scope and quality of its training set, making centralization key to realizing value 

The digitally transformed campus is an omnidirectional improvement: a bold but ultimately low-risk attempt to, all at once, cut costs by reducing duplication and inefficiency, raise revenue by amplifying and monetizing existing activities, address new audiences, and reassert control over the image and narrative surrounding the university. If we aim to grow when so much else is shrinking, we may just end up ahead.