And yet, for many presidents, provosts and chief academic officers standing at the podium this month, a central question remains: Are we leveraging AI effectively to both empower students and evolve how our institutions operate?
This is both the challenge and the opportunity facing higher education, as headlines increasingly reflect parents and students questioning whether college is financially worth it.
Public trust in the value of a degree is eroding in ways that no commencement speech can fix.
Higher education is not unaware of these pressures. Institutions are actively working through plans to better prepare students while also optimizing their own operations.
A UNIVERSAL AI STUDENT EXPERIENCE
But then, many paused.
Recent survey data points to the downside of this wait-and-see approach. Among 361 college students surveyed earlier this year, only a small minority described their institution as clearly supportive or strategically aligned in its approach to AI. Most described something else entirely: inconsistency, where encouragement to use AI varies by department, even by course, with no shared institutional approach.
Across every discipline, from the humanities to STEM, students are entering a labor market being reshaped by a technology that was largely absent from their freshman syllabus just four short years ago. Against this backdrop, closing these gaps is critical to ensuring every student has a consistent, meaningful experience with AI.
OPTIMIZING AI TO ENHANCE INTERNAL PROCESSES
Providing students with an AI-enabled experience is only part of the equation. Equally important is using the technology to transform how institutions work.
Ironically, the institutions seeing real results are not starting with AI, they are starting with a core problem.
Take enrollment. For most prospective students, the application process is fragmented and intimidating: multiple systems, unclear requirements, real anxiety around financial aid, and admissions counselors managing more applicants than they can meaningfully engage. Students go quiet, and institutions often lack the visibility to respond in time.
Start there, and something uncomfortable happens. AI stops being a general solution and starts exposing specific problems. The financial aid question a chatbot answers at midnight reveals how confusing the process was to begin with. The workflow you try to automate turns out to require 11 steps just to update a student record.
At many institutions, the student experience with digital services reflects approval chains and workflows built for a different era. They were never overhauled because the cost of change felt higher than the cost of continuing.
AI does not eliminate that debt. It makes it visible, and impossible to ignore. And that is the opportunity. Institutions willing to use this moment as a forcing function, to honestly evaluate whether each process truly serves students and faculty, are the ones that will emerge stronger.
LOOKING AHEAD
The class arriving on campus this fall will spend four years in an environment shaped by decisions being made right now. They will graduate into a workforce where AI fluency is no longer a differentiator but a baseline expectation.
Institutions that connect their AI investments to the outcomes that matter — students who enroll, persist, graduate and build meaningful careers — will define the future of higher education.
Those that remain in a field-of-dreams mindset, waiting for value to emerge from tools not strategically deployed, may spend the next decade trying to catch up.
The views expressed are the authors' alone and do not necessarily represent those of KPMG LLP.
Quimby Kaizer is the principal national education sector leader for the professional services company KPMG LLP.
Saravanan Subbarayan is the managing director and national technology leader, higher education sector, for KPMG LLP.
