A Call to Meet the Moment at NACUBO

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Keep calm and budget on.

That was the message that emerged from the 2026 National Association of College and University Business Officers annual meeting earlier this week, which comes amid the flurry of federal policy changes the Trump administration has advanced over the last 18 months. While many of those changes—which some critics described as a federal assault on higher education—will affect institutional bottom lines, speakers urged attendees to act based on reality, not political rhetoric.

“Now, things may change, and things may happen, but they don’t change until there is a new law or a new regulation. Please don’t react to what you see on X or TikTok or Instagram or Truth Social,” Liz Clark, vice president for policy and research at NACUBO, said in a session. “Please remember to react to what is actually in the Federal Register or enacted into law.”

Federal Policy Outlook

Some major federal policy changes, however, have already taken effect.

Recent shifts that merited attention at the conference included the new earnings test, the expansion of Pell Grants to workforce programs and changes to federal financial aid offerings.

In a main-stage session moderated by Inside Higher Ed, experts offered a mixed outlook on those changes.

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, described the expansion of Pell Grants to short-term workforce programs and the new earnings test as likely positives. But he cast the restrictions on student borrowing as a “big negative” that will likely force institutions to make hard choices, including possibly pulling back on some graduate programs.

Kara Freeman, NACUBO’s president and CEO, said the changes create “potential for an access issue.” While she noted that private lenders may step in to fill the gap amid lowered loan caps, those companies will look closely at credit history and other risk factors, which may leave some students unable to finance graduate programs.

Experts at NACUBO also discussed proposed changes on the horizon.

They were especially skeptical of a White House Office of Management and Budget proposal to rewrite uniform guidance for federal grants and hand political appointees sweeping power to approve such funding. The proposal also gives the federal government far greater latitude to terminate federal grants, including for the “national interest,” a term that OMB has not defined.

“They can terminate the grant at any time without any really formal appeal process,” explained Gil Tran, a former OMB official now working in grant management for the firm Attain Partners. He added that the undefined “national interest” criterion is likely subject to change based on the priorities of the administration in power, giving political appointees vast control over grant funds.

Barbara Cevallos, associate vice president and systemwide controller at the University of California, noted that such terminations could bring ongoing research efforts to a sudden halt.

“Maybe you have a project that’s been going on for five years, and you’re just getting to the point where you think you have results, and they decide it’s against the national interest,” she said. “This one is really terrifying to me.”

The proposal has garnered hundreds of thousands of public comments, far exceeding responses to prior revisions of federal grant rules. While OMB has proposed implementing the changes on Oct. 1, Tran suggested the likelihood of meeting that date is “50-50,” given the volume of comments.

How CBOs Are Using AI

Conversations around artificial intelligence also loomed large in Anaheim.

The discussions reinforced results from Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers, which found that while most CBOs see value in AI, they largely use it in their professional capacity rather than as part of an institutional initiative. Most respondents noted that AI investments at their university are in a pilot phase.

Many at the conference described using AI in self-guided, experimental ways to write emails or model budgets. But those who tapped AI at an institutional level noted time and cost savings.

Justin Barkhuff, director of enterprise applications at California Lutheran University, told the audience in a session on institutional investments in AI that California Lutheran has leveraged tools built in-house to help with academic interventions and improve scheduling processes.

For instance, Barkhuff noted that Cal Lutheran has created an AI tool to help schedule the work hours of student employees around their class hours, which may change as they add or drop courses. Rules regarding the maximum and minimum hours students can work add further complications to scheduling.

“We built an AI system that knows all the rules and knows all students that you supervise and their course schedules, and in a few seconds it spits out a proposed course schedule. We think that’s going to take a 36-hour-per-year, per-supervisor process, and cut that into two hours,” Barkhuff said.

Brett Pollak, executive director of workplace technology and infrastructure services at the University of California, San Diego, said his institution has used AI in admissions practices. Pollak noted that UC San Diego receives a vast number of applications each year and historically has hired temporary help to make sense of the large volume of transcripts sent in each year.

“We’re one of the most applied-to universities in the country, and as a result of that, we receive about 60,000 transcripts per academic cycle,” Pollak said. Transcript matching, or pairing transcripts with the correct applications, “by and large was a person-driven effort. So if you can imagine, three to five minutes per transcript for 60,000 transcripts coming in—it’s an inordinate amount of time.”

By investing in an AI tool and developing an algorithm for transcript-matching purposes, Pollak said the admissions office has been able to complete that work without hiring temporary help. He estimated that the results are 98 percent accurate.

But before going all in on AI, experts urged attendees to think beyond use cases. John O’Brien, president and CEO of Educause, said in a main-stage session that college leaders should first consider their infrastructure and avoid rushing into investments out of fear of being left behind.

“Work on AI governance, work on figuring out how to integrate AI into the curriculum effectively,” O’Brien said. “Work on ethics and putting in guardrails [so] when you’re ready to do AI all in, you’re going to be able to do it in a way that honors the traditions of higher education. Take a breath and really think about what we are going to need to move on AI as it takes shape.”