Diving into the 2026 EDUCAUSE Top 10 with BeyondTrust

Every year, members of the EDUCAUSE Top 10 panel pull together 15-20 topics they believe will be the most important technology issues facing higher education institutions. EDUCAUSE members then receive a survey with those topics and are asked to prioritize them into the annual Top 10 List.

With so many security challenges emerging in 2025, both related to humans and technologies, 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for higher education to address these challenges.

What is interesting about this year’s list is just how many of the Top 10 are human-focused, rather than discussing which technologies to adopt and how. Plus, we aren’t necessarily seeing a cohesive story from the EDUCAUSE Top 10 on how humans can / should use AI in a safe and productive way. But this is a storyline many of us are probably familiar with. Whether AI is being used for productivity, image and video creation, or something else, much of the roadmap still seems vague or unpredictable. And in many ways, the lack of specific technological or strategic direction of this year’s list reflects that.

Read on to explore key themes of EDUCAUSE’s Top 10 in 2026 and what it means for our schools in the coming year.

1. Collaborative Cybersecurity

Whether we want to admit it or not, cybersecurity is a team sport. It’s not just the responsibility of one person or team; it’s everyone’s shared responsibility. We all can likely think of areas where we know we can do better, whether in awareness, training, or directly helping to support the security team in some way.

As part of focusing on collaborative cybersecurity, we are reminded not to be part of the problem, but to be part of the solution that helps raise the standard when it comes to protecting our schools.

2. The Human Edge of AI

This topic focuses on empowering students, faculty, and staff to engage with AI tools. Using AI can be rewarding, especially when it comes to helping us do our jobs as students for conducting research or as faculty for becoming better facilitators.

However, AI must be adopted in a positive and strategic way. If misused, AI could negatively affect how today’s students are learning and, as a result, impact society in ways we may not even foresee yet. Plus, we’ve already seen significant security risks come from the misuse of AI. Research shows us that 75.1% of organizations have experienced one or more AI-related security breaches over the past 12 months. Finding the right balance between AI usability and safety will be critical for 2026.

3. Data Analytics for Operational and Financial Insights

Data analytics are critical everywhere, not just in higher education. The right data analytics can help schools better identify spending and enrollment patterns and uncover areas for cost savings.

Many higher education institutions have limited budgets when it comes to cybersecurity, so this third point can support security teams in helping them identify potential areas of overspend and streamline security controls. The cybersecurity teams in higher education need to operate as effectively and efficiently as possible.

4. Building a Data-Centric Culture Across the Institution

A data-centric culture involves expanding and improving data access, unlocking the full potential of data as a strategic asset. Many institutions have tons of data collected, some with significantly more data than others, depending on the school. While many of these institutions focus on protecting that data, fewer are focused on sharing it, or, in the words of this Top 10, making it a strategic asset.

If institutions invested more time collaborating and sharing some of their data, this could easily tie back to the concept of collaborative cybersecurity (item #1). Institutions sharing lessons learned, what worked, trends, or how they tackled some of their biggest cybersecurity challenges, could help peer organizations on their journey to improving security and resiliency.

5. Knowledge Management for Safer AI

When it comes to AI, many are focused on what they can do with it, while few are concerned with the potential risks, such as the cybersecurity issues mentioned earlier. Privacy issues around LLMs have bubbled to the forefront. Mitigating the risks of AI by integrating knowledge management into data governance, privacy, and ethics programs will be key as time goes on.

This year, we have begun to see a major focus around governance, compliance, and privacy for AI, the data that is pumped into it, and what happens to that data. I believe the next big piece to follow will be a deeper focus on the integrity of that data—continually validating if it is fact or fiction.

6. Measured Approaches to New Technologies

The market is oversaturated with claims and competing statistics when it comes to vendor technology. It’s no wonder many higher ed organizations struggle to align on the best technology investments. Being able to have clear cost, ROI, and legacy system assessments is critical, which is why it’s one of EDUCAUSE’s Top 10 priorities this year. I believe these measured approaches can also help build out collaborative cybersecurity (#1) and a data-centric culture (#4), as well as support stronger data analytics for operational and financial insights (#3), when it comes to helping other institutions pave their way.

7. Technology Literacy for Future Workforce

This priority focuses on supporting discipline-specific technology training and education to enhance student success with in-demand technology skills. This piece is critical in preparing our younger generation and arming them with the tools to be successful. Already, AI is beginning to exert a prominent role in how courses are taught. As institutions evolve their curriculum, it will be important for them to teach courses that support the growth, knowledge, and usage of AI. It should be all about how this technology can help someone do their job—not replace them.

8. From Reactive to Proactive

This point is all about using data for scenario modeling, forecasting, and predictions to strengthen institutional agility and planning. There’s no magic wand to be waved to make this happen. Each institution needs to consider what it would look like to move from a reactive approach to a proactive one. Often, the challenge isn’t a lack of willingness to be proactive, but instead, needing the data to get it right.

By being proactive, higher education teams can head off many pitfalls before they happen, whether that involves security gaps or user awareness. Reactivity in cybersecurity, specifically, tends to mean something has already happened (i.e. an incident), and now the team must respond to it. This type of reactivity tends to be far more costly and risky than just correcting an issue before anything actually happens.

9. AI-Enabled Efficiencies and Growth

This 9^th point underscores the importance of using AI, robotic process automation, and other analytic capabilities to reduce operational costs, streamline processes, and improve strategic and business decision-making. But again, we need to ask if we’re enhancing humans or replacing them. It’s about finding that balance of working with the technology, rather than working for it.

10. Decision-Maker Data Skills and Literacy

This final top 10 point is focused on enhancing the value of institutional data by training and equipping decision-makers to properly use and interpret it. In my opinion, this Top 10 is all about current trends and skills.

With search engines, AI tools, and social media at their fingertips, many students are turning to instant data to make decisions, versus tuning into their own logic and self-driven thought processes. Instead, we need to focus on enabling, teaching, and fostering self-help. Teaching a rising generation of students how to research and analyze data can empower them with the skills to make sound decisions.

The 2026 EDUCAUSE Top 10 especially focuses on how humans can use data and AI, painting a picture of where we’re already headed this year in our priorities. But when you look across the Top 10, nothing is the perfect answer to the complexity and nuance of addressing the technology challenges in higher education. In fact, a lot of questions are left unanswered: which technologies and strategies should we implement to protect the rapid growth of AI across higher education? How do we parse out data in a way that makes sense for teams that already have many priorities on their plates? And how do we continue to mature cybersecurity approaches as these massive changes related to data and AI are already happening at our schools?

Here are a few practical places to start:

• Focus on the fundamentals. Regardless of which new technologies come our way and the uncertainties that accompany them, it’s crucial to focus on cybersecurity fundamentals such as enforcing the principle of least privilege everywhere, and improving zero trust maturity.
• Measure successes over time. The theme that kept showing up on this list was the importance of collecting and leveraging data to use resources in a smarter and more effective way. However, not everyone is a data expert, so it’s important to establish technology that makes it simple and clear to draw conclusions from the data, especially when it comes to cybersecurity.
• Break down silos. This top 10 list brought up a few points about collaboration between teams, and even different schools. But to start making that collaboration a reality, schools need to assess technology that will provide clarity and visibility that translates across teams.

BeyondTrust’s privilege-centric identity security solutions, including robust Privileged Access Management (PAM), equip teams with the actionable data and effective tools needed to secure every identity, everywhere—without slowing productivity.

As schools work to enact many of the technology recommendations we’ve discussed, identity security gaps such as entitlement sprawl, standing privileges, shared credentials, and unmanaged third-party access will only continue to multiply.

BeyondTrust’s privilege-centric identity security enables higher education organizations to address risk while also meeting key outcomes. We tackle cybersecurity challenges inherent with rapid technological change by:

• Centralizing identity governance to establish consistent controls and eliminate duplicate / unneeded accounts
• Providing a single view of all identities, from across all directories and domains, to help teams find and protect hidden privilege pathways that could enable lateral movement from one domain to another
• Protecting data and research to help meet strict privacy, grant, and public sector requirements

Learn more about how BeyondTrust’s solutions support higher education institutions.