Campuses are reporting record enrollment while their admissions teams still verify identities and evaluate transcripts by hand. A new survey of higher education leaders shows exactly where the gains are waiting.

Key Takeaways

•  In an August 2026 survey of 40 higher education leaders, 70% named staffing and workload as a major admissions challenge.

•  65% said transcript and credit evaluation is largely manual, and 62.5% said applications take 3 to 14 days to process.

•  72.5% lack 24/7 or after-hours applicant support, and 52.5% still rely on manual identity verification. Only 15% use automated verification.

•  65% reported more application or financial aid fraud in the past two years, yet 65% also call human review of AI outcomes highly important.

Record Enrollment Is Landing on Offices Built for Less

Higher education has spent years worried about enrollment. This fall the worry has a happier twist. Inside Higher Ed’s September roundup of the year’s enrollment wins described institutions reporting record enrollments and notable turnarounds, and statewide reports from public community colleges and universities point the same way. More applicants, more transfers, and more returning students are good news by any measure.

They are also a stress test. Admissions, registrar, and financial aid offices are the front door for every one of those students, and many still run on processes designed for much lower volume. A new survey from the automation company EDMO, released September 29, 2026, shows how large the gap between demand and capacity has become, and how much room there is to close it.

The survey has limits, and they should be stated up front. EDMO queried 40 higher education leaders in August 2026, spanning public universities, private universities, and community colleges, with respondents including CIOs, vice presidents, vice provosts, registrars, and directors of admissions, enrollment, records, and technology. EDMO sells automation, and the sample is small. The findings are best read as a detailed snapshot from people close to the work, and the patterns they describe line up with what many campuses say privately.

Record enrollment is good news that lands on offices built for lower volume.

Where the Work Is Piling Up

Seventy percent of respondents named staffing and workload as a major admissions challenge. That is the headline, and everything else in the report flows from it. Sixty-five percent said transcript and credit evaluation remains largely manual. Sixty-two and a half percent said applications take between three and fourteen days to process. For an applicant comparing offers, a two-week wait is long enough to lose to a faster campus.

Responsiveness shows the same strain. Seventy-two and a half percent of respondents said their institution lacks 24/7 or after-hours applicant support, and 47.5 percent said average response times fall between two and twenty-four hours. The questions driving that traffic are not complicated: where is my application, and which documents do you still need. These are the easiest questions to automate and the ones prospective students most often ask outside business hours.

Only 47.5 percent of leaders rated their institution’s automation maturity at three out of five. The barriers they cited are familiar. Sixty-five percent pointed to budget constraints, and 62.5 percent pointed to change management and staff readiness. In other words, the obstacle is rarely a lack of belief in the tools. It is money and bandwidth to implement them.

The Fraud Problem Makes the Case Sharper

The survey’s identity findings may be the most urgent. Fifty-two and a half percent of institutions rely on manual identity verification, and only 15 percent use automated systems. At the same time, 65 percent said they experienced increased application or financial aid fraud over the past two years.

Those two numbers describe the same pressure from opposite sides. Fraud schemes, including fabricated applicants designed to collect financial aid, are scaling with automation and AI tools. Institutions that verify identity by hand are defending a growing perimeter with a small team, and the issue has drawn attention in Washington as well. Automated identity verification gives admissions and financial aid offices a way to spend human attention on the cases that need judgment and let software screen the rest.

Automation With a Human in the Loop

It would be easy to read a report like this as a prelude to cutting staff. The respondents do not. Sixty-five percent considered human review of AI outcomes highly important. The attitude that comes through is that automation should absorb repetitive work, such as status inquiries, document checks, first-pass transcript matching, and identity screening, so that counselors can spend their time on the conversations that decide whether a student enrolls.

That framing matters for campus buy-in. A registrar worried about replacement will resist. A registrar who sees a backlog of transcript evaluations shrinking, and a team free to handle exceptions, becomes an advocate. The most successful projects tend to start with one painful process, show a measurable result, and expand from there.

The Funding Signal From California

Institutions are not waiting on a single funding source, but one large signal is worth watching. The California Community Colleges system has requested $195 million in its 2027-28 budget for a coordinated AI strategy across its 116 colleges, with roughly $100 million for technology infrastructure, $40 million for AI professional development, and the remainder for competitive grants that let campuses pilot their own projects. The system’s argument is that without a deliberate strategy, colleges will adopt AI unevenly and students will face disparities in access, capacity, and cybersecurity.

The request has not been appropriated, and legislative review will take months. Even so, it shows where the conversation is going: from isolated campus pilots toward shared infrastructure and shared training. Admissions and enrollment operations are an obvious early use case, because the volume is high, the questions repeat, and the results are easy to measure.

Who Makes These Decisions

Admissions automation does not belong to one office. The registrar owns records and transcript evaluation. The admissions director and the enrollment management vice president own the applicant experience. The financial aid director owns fraud exposure on the aid side. The CIO or IT director owns integration, security, and the vendor relationship. A provost often weighs in when changes touch academic policy such as transfer credit.

That is a committee, and the committee is the buyer. Companies selling into this space who reach only one of those roles tend to stall when another raises a concern. The more effective approach is to understand how each role evaluates the same tool: the registrar asks about accuracy, the CIO asks about security, financial aid asks about fraud detection, and admissions asks about response time. College Data’s FAQ answers common questions about how its higher education lists work, which helps when you are mapping a buying team.

What the Pipeline Looks Like From Here

Admissions volume is connected to what happens before and after. Students arriving this fall were shaped by K-12 systems that are showing early signs of recovery, including sizable K-8 reading gains in new NWEA data, which we examined in our K12 Data analysis. Strong early literacy tends to show up years later in readiness and persistence. Meanwhile, universities are rethinking teacher preparation as well, as Arizona State’s launch of a three-year teacher degree, covered by K12 Talent, shows how admissions and program design now move together.

A Practical Starting Point for Campus Leaders

For a campus that wants to act without waiting for a system-wide initiative, the survey suggests a sequence. Start with applicant status and document requests, since those inquiries are frequent, repetitive, and low risk to automate, and add after-hours coverage. Move next to transcript and credit evaluation, measuring processing time before and after. Layer in automated identity verification where fraud exposure is highest, typically in financial aid and online programs. Keep human review at the decision points and say so publicly, which builds trust with staff and with applicants.

Budget remains the constraint 65 percent of respondents cited, so it helps to frame the case in terms the business office understands: days saved per application, hours returned to staff, fraud losses avoided, and applicants retained because they got an answer at 9 p.m. instead of the next afternoon.

What Vendors and Service Providers Should Do Next

For companies serving higher education, the opportunity is to meet buyers where they already are: understaffed, growing, and cautious. Lead with a narrow, measurable use case. Offer evidence from institutions of similar size and type. Be candid about human oversight and data security, because both are on the evaluation checklist. And plan outreach around the buying committee, not a single champion.

Timing favors early movers. Campuses are building next year’s plans now, and budget conversations are open. College Data maintains verified contacts for registrars, admissions directors, enrollment management leaders, financial aid directors, CIOs, and provosts at colleges and universities nationwide, so you can reach the full buying committee while the plan is still being written.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did the EDMO 2026 admissions automation survey find?

In an August 2026 survey of 40 higher education leaders, 70% cited staffing and workload as a major admissions challenge, 65% said transcript evaluation is largely manual, and 72.5% lack after-hours applicant support.

How many institutions use automated identity verification?

Only 15% of surveyed leaders reported using automated identity verification, while 52.5% rely on manual verification, and 65% reported increased application or aid fraud in the past two years.

Does admissions automation replace staff?

Respondents describe it as support for staff. 65% called human review of AI outcomes highly important, and the use cases that lead are status inquiries, document checks, and identity screening.

About the Author: Charlie Isham is the Founder and CEO of K12 Data, Inc., which operates K12 Data, College Data, and K12 Talent. He has spent more than 15 years building education data infrastructure and has watched how schools, colleges, and the companies that serve them buy for over a decade. He is based in Encinitas, California.

Keywords: college email lists, higher education contact list, university mailing lists, registrar email list, admissions director email list, enrollment management email list, financial aid director email list, community college CIO email list, provost email list, higher ed decision makers, buy college email list, higher education marketing database