A Quick Look at Leadership Challenges for Higher Education in Online Education, AI, and International Student Regulations
The acronym ‘VUCA’ – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous – describes the culture of colleges and universities today as leaders face rapid, transformative changes in how educational programs are delivered. What are some of the biggest challenges caused by these fast-changing areas? Here, we briefly explore three major challenges: online and hybrid education, artificial intelligence, and international student programs.
Online and Hybrid Education
The exclusive use of online work during COVID has shifted to a more widespread hybrid pattern; however, excessive use of online systems continues to threaten the university environment. The loss of regular interaction with colleagues has been found in many settings to impede relationships needed for trust and open interaction, as well as productivity. (Williams, 2024; Omarov, 2024).
Cassidy (2025) reported the negative effects of online learning experienced by university faculty in Australia. She cited faculty views that their work had become undervalued as classroom teaching changed to reliance on recycled online lectures and Zoom tutorials. She stated further that budget cuts were driving colleges toward the extended use of online courses and pushing courses away from face-to-face interactions. As a result, faculty reported feelings of hopelessness and resignation, and students failed to develop a sense of belonging to the institution.
On the financial side, the implementation of hybrid education and operations requires costly investments in technological infrastructures and ongoing teaching and technical support to workers, students, and faculty. On a day-to-day basis, administrators, faculty, and students face problems of unreliable internet connections, software glitches, and hardware failures, as well as costs of access to online platforms and instructional support. Leaders have often been forced to find required funding through reappropriating funds from other sources.
Leaders are confronted not only with challenges of providing online resources but must find new ways of monitoring and ensuring the quality of work and educational products while maintaining commitment and positive work and learning environments. Assuring the privacy of student work and the accurate assessment of individual learning and work products present additional challenges (Gudoniene et al., 2025).
Artificial Intelligence
Faculty and administrators increasingly use AI systems to teach and manage their institutions and teaching. For example, administrators use AI systems for predictive analysis, strategic planning, budgeting, optimizing resources, conducting operations, and maximizing the efficiency of processes. In addition, the faculty must now teach students how to effectively and ethically use AI both in their college and university work and in anticipated post-graduation roles. Mabasa and Maluka (2024) contend that higher education institutions must provide leadership to address the changes required by digital transformation both for the performance of their students and institutions and, subsequently, the larger society. Variations in institutional missions must also be considered in applications of AI to such areas as academic affairs, legal compliance, and accreditation. (Read, 2025)
Administrators are also increasingly faced with the challenges of redesigning the complex structure of the overall institution, considering the relationships of the various systems of the physical plant and student support services, as well as the academic systems. An important resource is available from Katsamakas and colleagues (2024), who share a theoretical diagram of university subsystems and feedback loops that might be considered in a university-wide AI system. The diagram includes systems for teaching, learning, research, admissions, student advising, and alumni relations. The identification and introduction of such complex systems by any institution requires close collaboration of AI designers with university leaders and managers to identify the various subsystems, feedback loops, and their connections.
The Katsamakas group also noted that higher education institutions should monitor changes in the job market and quickly adapt student programs of AI education. As AI becomes ubiquitous in society, they contend that students should avoid competing head-to-head with AI developers and focus on learning skills that machines cannot do, such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, communication, collaboration, and management. Mabasa and Maluka (2024) recommend external partnerships of higher education leaders and managers with other institutions, both locally and globally, to share best practices and flexibility in addressing new trends.
An ongoing concern is the significant risks of academic integrity, as lower-achieving students may, through AI, appear to achieve more than they actually do. This mischaracterization of student achievement is viewed as posing a potential long-term risk to the reputation of the academic institution, as students upon graduation could be found to be less skilled than expected.
As leaders work to design and introduce new developments in various operations, the structures of ‘agile organizations’ provide a useful model. These models were introduced in the 2000s by software and computer companies such as Spotify as an approach to facilitate the functioning of project development teams, particularly digital projects, and such models for rapid change are now spreading throughout other organizations (Bouttell, 2023).
Agile organizations are characterized by short-term project development times, rapid response to user needs, multiple collaborative teams, and flexibility in management roles among team members (Gren & Ralph, 2022). Management and leadership functions may be shared by team members, are flexible, and interchangeable to meet the member skills required. Agile companies using team processes such as Scrum (a term borrowed from rugby, meaning moving the ball forward) feature having a ‘Scrum Master’ as team leader (Scrum Organization, 2025). Processes and procedures of agile organizations are expected to expand further into mainstream companies in the future.
Photo by Luis Desiro (Unsplash).
International Student Education
International educational programs typically require enhanced cultural awareness and revision of policies and operations by leaders, especially when staff, workers, students, and programs work together or move from one country to another (Bellner, 2022). Issues of translations of languages, revision of curricula, and government regulations regarding visa requirements and political issues may come into play. The introduction of institutional branch campuses in other countries may be seen as threatening to compete with and undermine existing local institutions (Ge, 2022). In short, international initiatives cannot be separated from overall developmental, economic, and political agendas active in the situation for all parties.
U.S. government policies on admitting foreign students to American universities are currently uncertain. The veritable flood of international students experienced by American colleges and universities during the years between 1980 and 2017 that offset demographic declines of students in the U.S. has stalled in recent years (Bound et al., 2021). Actions such as travel bans, visa restrictions, and perceptions by foreign students of an unwelcome environment in the U.S. have been estimated to result in as much as a 15% drop in international student enrollment and a potential loss of $7 billion in revenue for colleges (Unglesbee, 2025). These projected losses in international student revenues, occurring concurrently with continued demographic changes in the number of American traditional students and reductions in government revenues to higher education, may leave many public and private institutions experiencing major shortfalls of funds and threaten the viability of the institutions.
Implications
So, what are the implications of these current trends for leaders in higher education? Decisions about relative priorities and characteristics of online and hybrid versus classroom learning, recruitment of traditional versus non-traditional student populations, and the extent and characteristics of international student initiatives will need to be made collaboratively, involving all internal and external parties.
Academic deans and department heads may increasingly be responsible for seeking support from donors and endowments, as well as providing strategic planning for their own areas of responsibility. The program management approaches seen in agile organizations offer potential for use in designing and developing projects within the institution, with team members alternating as needed in leadership functions of agile teams.
Leaders will need to work closely with internal staff in identifying current and preferred institutional systems and feedback, and relationship loops for digital planning across the
institution. Overall, with emerging trends of increased complexity of organizations and the use of new technologies, collaborative and close interactions of leaders with all levels of staff in higher education are essential to running an effective institution.
References
Bellner, B.W. (2022, August 10). Global Leadership Competencies. Lead Read Today. The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/leadreadtoday/global-leadership-competencies.
Bound, J., Braga, B., Khanna, G., & Turner, S. (2021). The globalization of postsecondary education: The role of international students in the US higher education system (NBER Working Paper №28342). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w28342
Bouttell, L. (2023, February 26). Leadership vs. Management: The Critical Distinction That Drives Organizational Success. Quarterdeck Leadership Seminar. https://quarterdeck.co.uk/articles/are-leadership-and-management-different-a-review
Cassidy, C. (2025, February 19). Teaching to an empty hall: Is the changing face of universities eroding standards of learning? The Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/19/teaching-to-an-empty-hall-is-the-changing-face-of-universities-eroding-standards-of-learning
Ge (Rochelle) Y. (2022). Internationalization of higher education: new players in a changing scene. Educational Research and Evaluation,27(3–4), 229–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/13803611.2022.2041850
Gren, L. and Ralph, P. (2022). What Makes Effective Leadership in Agile Software Development Teams? In the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ’22), May 21–29, 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. ACJ New York, NY, USA https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3510003.3510100
Gudoniene, D., Staneviciene, E., Huet, I., Dickel, J., Dieng, D., Degrotte, J., Rocio, V., Butkiene, R., and Casanova, D. (2025). Hybrid Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability, 17(2), 756. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17020756
Katsamakas, E., Pavlov, O. V., & Saklad, R. (2024). Artificial intelligence and the transformation of higher education institutions [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08143
Mabasa, FD, & Maluka, HR. (2024). The complexities of higher education leadership and management in the digital era. Journal of Public Administration and Development Alternatives, 9 (2) 213–224. http://doi.org/10.55190/JPADA.2024.335
Omarov, J. (2024). The pros and cons of blended learning in higher education. International Journal of Education Technology. 04 (04) pp 01–07. THE PROS AND CONS OF BLENDED LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION | International Journal of Education Technology
Read, I. (2025, February). Balancing innovation and integrity: AI integration in liberal arts college administration. [2503.05747] Balancing Innovation and Integrity: AI Integration in Liberal Arts College Administration
Scrum Organization (2025). What is Scrum? The Scrum Guide
Unglesbee, B. ( 2025, August 1). 150K fewer international students this fall? That’s what one analysis predicts. | Higher Ed Dive https://www.highereddive.com/news/international-student-decline-fall-2025-projection/756500/
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