According to Gallup’s The State of Higher Education 2025 survey, nearly one-third of currently enrolled students have considered stopping out, primarily due to emotional stress, mental health challenges, and cost.
These persistent issues provide a glimpse into the systemic pressure on institutions to modernize, digitize, and operate more efficiently. Yet managing change in higher education is difficult. Universities must navigate deeply rooted traditions, distributed authority, and diverse stakeholder needs.
This article outlines strategies and solutions for leading sustainable transformation across people, processes, and technology.
Key takeaways
- Successful change management depends on visible, coalition-driven leadership that engages departments early and builds trust over time.
- Institutions must deliberately address cultural dynamics and decentralized governance. Top-down plans alone won’t deliver institutional buy-in.
- Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are a proven model for scaling change from the ground up across diverse institution types.
- Future-ready universities integrate strategic planning with operational infrastructure, enabling change to scale across people, process, and technology.
What is change management in higher education?
Change management is a structured coordination of people, processes, and technology to support organizational transitions. In higher education, the goals of change management range from adapting new curricula and implementing hybrid learning models to embracing technology rollouts.
Challenges of change management in higher education institutions
Faculty senates, committees, and deep cultural aspects built on consensus often prolong and encumber the process of managing organizational change in higher education. And then there are diverse and vocal students who bring their own expectations and advocacy.
This brings unique obstacles that differ from change management issues in the corporate setting:
- Faculty governance and bureaucracy. Shared decision-making can slow down reforms, especially when changes must pass through multiple levels of approval, debate, and procedural review.
- Stakeholder diversity. Initiatives must cater to diverse internal and external groups, such as academic staff, administrators, students, unions, trustees, and legislators. Each brings different priorities, timelines, and varying degrees of influence.
- Resistance and fear. Change, especially initiatives that revolve around optimization and automation, triggers fears of job displacement, loss of autonomy, and increased supervision.
Working change management models in higher education
Several successful models help leaders organize what can feel like an overwhelming task into defined phases of engagement, execution, and reinforcement:
1. Lewin’s change model (unfreeze → change → refreeze)
This model, developed by Kurt Lewin, a German-American psychologist, emphasizes the need to first “unfreeze” existing mindsets through dialogue and trust. Only after the institutional culture is prepared can the change be introduced and “refreezed” through new behaviors and policies. This model typically fits institutions with deeply rooted traditions.
2. Kotter’s 8-step model
The change model developed by Dr. John Kotter provides a sequential framework:
- Creating the urgency of change
- Building a guiding coalition
- Creating a strategic vision
- Communicating the vision
- Identifying and removing the obstacles
- Celebrating short-term wins
- Consolidating gains
- Anchoring change in the institutional culture
This model aligns stakeholders with a strong vision and involves leadership in every step, making it effective in decentralized environments.
3. ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement)
Created by Jeff Hiatt, the founder of Prosci, the ADKAR model proves useful for focusing on individual adoption. From faculty to frontline IT staff, this model helps leaders map where resistance is personal rather than structural and design interventions that meet people where they are.
In practice, successful institutions often blend these models into a broader implementation framework. What matters most is not strict adherence to any of the models, but rather how well these principles are implemented.
The change management process in higher education
A successful change management process follows a sequence of steps, from needs assessment to continuous feedback and adaptation:
Step #1: Assess the needs and create vision
Effective change management in higher education begins by detecting areas for improvement and outlining actionable solutions. This stage aligns leadership on goals, whether it’s improving technology equity, rethinking learning programs, or modernizing device workflows. Here’s a short checklist of tasks during this stage:
- Identify a diverse mix of stakeholders across departments, roles, and campuses.
- Run a gap analysis or pain point workshop to identify their pain points and priorities.
- Use those findings to create a vision and design a change strategy.
- Align the change strategy with metrics that reflect institutional success.
- Include milestones and validate the plan with the president, deans, and department chairs.
Step #2: Engage stakeholders
Good intentions from leadership sometimes result in additional burden on the staff, professors, and students, which means concerns should be addressed early. Shape your messaging strategy around their pain points and your solutions, address objections, and adjust the change implementation strategy where necessary.
Step #3: Implementation (top-down or bottom-up)
Implementation can follow two paths. In a top-down approach, university leadership communicates decisions through administrative channels and expects alignment across departments.
In a bottom-up approach, faculty departments and IT teams pilot new practices and technologies, and their success gradually builds momentum for institution-wide adoption.
Successful implementation combines both practices. A small pilot, backed by leadership and focused on individual departments, lets institutions test real-world conditions and gain more support for wider adoption.
Step #4: Training and support
Training should be role-specific, empathetic, and continuous. Work with IT teams and leadership to build training modules for faculty, students, and administrators. Ask the most influential and open-minded individuals, known as “change champions,” to help stakeholders with adoption.
Keep training sessions easy to access, short, and repeatable. For example, when implementing a technology change, combine live demos with video walkthroughs. Supplement senior professors with printed materials.
Step #5: Continuous feedback and adaptation
Create a central feedback channel and a weekly feedback digest. Leadership should continuously respond to challenges and explain what has been changed, adapted, and refined based on everyone’s feedback. This helps stakeholders feel heard and accept the change more willingly.
Leading change in higher education: Trust, emotion, and institutional culture
Change becomes lasting when leadership and culture move together. That requires understanding emotions and recognizing what people value, fear, and resist.
The role of a change leader
Who is a change management leader in higher education? It’s not only the president, but also deans, department chairs, and faculty champions. Change leaders should be sponsors of trust and momentum. As formal authority is distributed across committees, boards, and faculties, successful leaders must influence through presence, credibility, and consistency. That means:
- Enabling chairs, deans, and professors to be co-leaders in the rollout
- Admitting when plans evolve and being transparent about why
- Listening actively to concerns
- Showing up visibly throughout the change
Prosci’s global research shows that active, visible sponsorship is the single most important factor in successful change. The absence of it is the biggest predictor of failure.
Impact of sponsor effectiveness on meeting change objectives
Source: Prosci
Culture and trust
Culture is the unwritten logic behind how work flows, who holds influence, and how formal decisions are interpreted in daily practice.
Going against that logic will unlikely make change effective and long-lasting. Successful leaders engage trusted individuals early and allow local units to shape how they adopt change.
A proven approach is to build Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). These are cross-functional groups consisting of faculty, administrators, and staff. PLCs refine teaching strategies, pilot initiatives, redesign student support processes, and troubleshoot institutional pain points, such as equity concerns when introducing new tech.
PLCs operate through shared inquiry, experimentation, and mutual accountability, adapting change to institutional needs and making the process more inclusive and effective.
A 2024 study on innovative higher education found that PLCs serve as effective vehicles for culture change across research-intensive, regional, and rural institutions. They build trust and break silos, making new ways of working feel familiar, legitimate, and sustainable.
Reducing change friction
Day-to-day friction can undermine even the most well-intentioned and best-designed initiatives, especially when new technology is involved. If the rollout of digital tools, hardware updates, or new devices creates a support ticket backlog and delays in issue resolution, it sparks skepticism and fuels resistance.
To address this, more institutions are now investing in physical systems, such as smart lockers, to simplify device management and reduce the burden on IT teams.
Smart lockers are self-service storage and distribution units that allow students, faculty, and staff to pick up, return, or exchange devices without submitting tickets, waiting in lines, or depending on help desk hours. And because every interaction is logged, IT teams maintain visibility and control, without micromanaging the process.
Across more than 20,000 institutions using LocknCharge FUYL Smart Lockers, the benefits show up in time, cost, and efficiency gains that matter to IT and leadership alike:
- Device swap time drops from 30 minutes to under two minutes, allowing students and staff to resume work without bottlenecks.
- The volume of support tickets tied to device access, loaner logistics, and lost or broken equipment drops by 50% due to self-service check-ins/outs.
- IT teams report up to 350 hours saved annually in device handoffs and issue resolution.
- On device swaps alone, IT teams save $15,500–$16,000 annually (at a fully burdened IT labor cost), alongside improvements from reduced ticket volume, fewer disruptions, and fewer device losses.
Additional reading: For proven strategies on engaging staff during institutional transitions, see our guide on managing change in the workplace.
Strategic change management in higher education for the future
As public confidence in U.S. higher education continues to decline, institutions must align strategic initiatives with both societal expectations and technological advancement.
Public confidence in higher education in 2015–2024
Source: Deloitte
Strategic planning and change management must support innovation and address real-world pressures on the higher education system. Key areas of innovation include:
- Increasing the flexibility of learning programs to align degrees with workforce needs
- Emphasizing applied, real-world competencies that accelerate career readiness
- Redefining institutional roles to reflect emerging demands in digital technology and technology-integrated operations
- Adapting to changing structures of leadership, where decision-making is more distributed and collaborative across departments, faculties, and administration
- Embedding hands-on learning and external partnerships into the curriculum through research projects and collaboration with corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies
- Expanding modular, stackable programs and microcredentials to support flexible, career-aligned learning and empowering students to build qualifications incrementally as industries evolve
Final takeaways
- Empower change leaders to act as visible sponsors and coalition builders rather than policy enforcers.
- Integrate cultural awareness and faculty engagement early to reduce resistance and foster shared ownership.
- Build professional communities and conduct department-level pilots to scale transformation efforts.
- Align strategic initiatives with workforce demands and emerging societal trends.
- Pair strategic vision with infrastructure that removes daily friction from tech rollouts.
See how LocknCharge FUYL Smart Lockers help universities automate device loaners, repairs, and deployments, turning bottlenecks into scalable and trackable self-service workflows.