By Alexis Kerney April 13, 2026
Higher Education 2026: Why Finance Must Become the Strategic Operating System
Colleges and universities currently are having to adjust to a changing financial environment: shrinking margins, volatile enrollment, accelerating retirements, and rising expectations for AI-enabled decision making. The Tambellini Group’s 2026 Higher Education Predictions details that these forces are not isolated disruptions — they represent a systemic reset of how institutions mustoperate, govern, and invest .
The institutions that remain resilient will not treat these challenges as technology upgrades. They will treat them as a mandate to redesign the finance operating model.
The Shift: From Enrollment Growth to Margin Discipline
Higher education finance is experiencing a once in a generation shift. With demographic changes enrollment growth can no longer be assumed. Instead, leaders are being forced toward margin-drivendecision-making — scrutinizing which programs, initiatives, and investments are financiallysustainable and which arenot.
This shift has revealed that most institutions lack a unified financial foundation capable of connecting close, planning, forecasting, reporting, and analysis into a single, trusted view of performance.
Without that foundation, margin management becomes reactive, slow, and politically difficult.
Modernization Is No Longer Optional — But It Is Fragmented
Tambellini highlights that institutions are now splitting across three unavoidable paths: full ERP replacement, incremental modernization, or survival-mode investment. What’s is no longer viable is to do nothing.
At the same time, workforce retirements are draining institutional knowledge, making legacy systems increasingly fragile. Modernization is being forced not by ambition—but by operational risk.
The challenge for leadership is How do we modernize finance without destabilizing the institution or over-committing scarce resources?
AI Raises the Stakes — and the Risk
AI is accelerating expectations for speed, insight, and automation. But Tambellini warns that data fragmentation, weak governance, and shadow AI usage are becomingdelimiters . These challenges hinder innovation, prompting institutions to respond by introducing privacy, IP, and cost control risks.
The gap between experimenting with AI and operationalizing it safely is widening. Institutions without a trusted financial data foundation will struggle to move beyond pilots while exposing themselves to escalating privacy, IP, and cost-control risk.
The Imperative: Finance as the Institutional Financial Foundation
Finance is evolving at a rapid pace.
It is mission critical that it become:
- The single source of financial truth
- The governed foundation for planning, reporting, and analytics
- The secure, auditable foundation for AI-assisted decision making
OneStream Software was built to meet this moment. The unification of close, consolidation, planning, forecasting, and reporting on a single, extensible platform with a unified data model allows institutions utilizing OneStream to:
- Manage margins with confidence
- Modernize at their own pace—without all-or-nothing ERP risk
- Reduce dependence on fragmented BI tools and spreadsheets
- Establish a governed foundation for AI and future user experiences
Bottom Line
The institutions that thrive in 2026 and beyond will be those that treat finance as a strategic operating system — not a back-office function.
Those institutions will be better positioned to protect their mission, withstand volatility, and build sustainable capacity for innovation.
Finance is no longer just about reporting the future.
It is critical that Finance is shaping the future.
