The past few months have been challenging for our industry. Rapid shifts in federal policy, reductions in research funding, staffing cuts at the Department of Education, and a political climate in Washington that has grown increasingly skeptical of higher ed have created a volatile and uncertain environment for colleges and universities. 

At a time when institutions need stability to plan for the future, the ground keeps shifting beneath them. In this week’s issue, we look at three areas where these pressures are showing up most clearly: building resilience in institutional operations, sustaining student trust in higher education, and navigating financial-aid challenges in an unstable federal landscape. 

After reading today’s issue, share your thoughts in the comments about how your institution is building resilience in its operations! 

Institutional Resilience 

From EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Institutional Resilience in Uncertain Times | EDUCAUSE Review 

Higher education institutions are continuously navigating uncertainty and change. Identifying strengths and gaps in institutional resilience is a critical first step in building the capacity to anticipate, respond to, and adapt to future challenges—even unexpected ones. 

Our Thoughts

I wrote about the EDUCAUSE Resiliency Framework back in Issue 69, so I appreciate this QuickPoll for adding concrete data to the conversation. After reading the self-reported results of the survey, we see that institutional resiliency is middling and uneven. A slim majority of respondents described their institutions as only somewhat resilient, and about one in three reported little to no resilience. Only a small fraction called their campus extremely resilient. Taken together, these results suggest resilience is not yet embedded in daily planning and decision making and more resiliency practices should become routine across divisions.  

I’m not sure why, but I was a bit surprised to see that the biggest obstacles to institutional resiliency are still siloed decision making and limited cross-organizational collaboration. Given the pressures facing higher education, I had hopes that those barriers were starting to crumble with the sector’s increased focus on holistic student success. Yet perhaps IT feels these effects most acutely, since it sits at the intersection of every unit and carries the responsibility of connecting policy, process, and platforms. The recent CTO/CIO survey from Inside Higher Ed supports this notion, underscoring the strain of coordinating AI, data, and security with limited resources.  

So, what can leaders do now? I’d say start by embedding resilience into everyday work, no matter how small. While respondents were most confident about responding to cyber incidents, natural disasters, and technology failures, confidence dropped sharply for chronic pressures like budget constraints, staffing shortages, and turnover. That gap suggests it’s time to expand tabletop exercises beyond emergencies to scenarios such as enrollment downturns, program teach-outs, and multi-month vacancies. Resilience grows when practice is frequent, ownership is shared, and decisions are made with the whole campus in mind. If we build for chronic risks with the same discipline we bring to incident response, confidence can move from “somewhat” to something much more durable. 

Student Trust in Higher Education 

From Decoding Student Trust | Inside Higher Ed 

The 2025–26 Student Voice survey finds that students tend to trust their institutions, but affordability is sowing doubt.    

Our Thoughts

What stood out to me in this Student Voice snapshot is how clearly trust maps to affordability. Students in community colleges and public four-years report higher trust than peers at private nonprofits, and that should not surprise anyone who has been living enrollment and financial aid for the past few years. When cost looms large in family conversations, institutions that feel more affordable tend to feel more trustworthy. Broader polling points the same way. Americans express greater confidence in two-year colleges than in four-year institutions on dimensions like affordability, quality, and the student experience, which reinforces the idea that trust and price are now intertwined in the public mind. 

The less comfortable finding is that trust declines for many students after they enroll. About one in three say their trust in higher education has decreased since starting college. That erosion likely reflects a mismatch between expectations and lived experience, especially around career outcomes. In this same survey, increased attention to job placement and career outcomes was the second most-cited way to build trust, just behind affordability. Strada’s recent research also shows that people perceive college as too expensive and often misjudge true costs, which heightens anxiety about the payoff and amplifies doubts when the path to work is hard to see. 

One practical takeaway for me was we should be treating affordability and employability as a pair. If students believe they can afford to start and finish, and they can see a pathway into meaningful work, trust follows. That does not require abandoning a broad education. It does require visible career services, more paid work-based learning, and program pages that show outcomes in plain language. Clear steps, consistent policies, and on-time communication are small trust moves that add up, especially for first-generation students and families who are navigating this for the first time. If we want students to believe our expertise is worth the investment, we should make the cost legible, the experience coherent, and the path to work unmistakable.  

One more note for context. National confidence in higher education ticked up this summer after several down years, but it remains fragile. Students’ responses here help explain why. Trust grows when price and pathways make sense, and it falters when they do not. The work ahead is not only to defend the value of college in the abstract. It is to make the daily experience of paying for and progressing through college feel worthy of that trust. 

Financial Aid Future Challenges     

From Is Turmoil in Washington Straining the Financial-Aid System? | The Chronicle of Higher Education 

More institutions are reporting disruptions with the Office of Federal Student Aid’s operations.  

Our Thoughts

If you felt like federal aid “glitches” used to live behind the scenes, this NASFAA snapshot makes it clear that we are past that point. What began as back-office friction has become a student-facing problem. More than half of aid offices now report problems with federal call centers, nearly half report issues with NSLDS, and overall complaints about the Office of Federal Student Aid have jumped in just the last few months. Students are struggling to get answers from federal channels and are turning to campuses to triage everything from eligibility questions to missing records, which means more one-off anomalies and hours of staff time to unwind them. 

As a first-generation Pell student, the most frustrating aspect of this will be how uneven the impact of delayed aid will be felt. First-gen and Pell-eligible students, as well as student parents who rely on refunds to cover off-campus rent or childcare, are most exposed to timing failures. A missed disbursement is not a paperwork nuisance for these students. It can be the difference between attending and stopping out.   

We already know that three in five students experience food or housing precarity while enrolled, which directly impacts their ability to succeed. NASFAA also warned last year that disbursement delays disproportionately harm the most vulnerable students. That’s why emergency aid and predictable cash flow are so critical in the first weeks of a term. Right now, the student aid system is marked by noise and a dash of chaos. While we can’t fix federal bottlenecks, we can plan around them, soften the impact where possible, and do our best to protect the students most at risk.