Higher education is at an inflection point. Shifting funding and enrollment, along with rising demands for student success, are testing agility and prompting new approaches. At the same time, generative AI has moved from early experimentation into everyday use, redefining how institutions teach, support learners, and manage operations. These pressures signal a shift across higher education. In this evolving landscape, solutions like Microsoft Fabric in higher education are helping institutions connect data, apply AI at scale, and respond with greater agility.
As EDUCAUSE’s 2025 Top 10 IT Issues highlights, a leading priority is to build data-empowered institutions that use data, analytics, and AI to enhance decision-making, simplify workflows, and empower teams to improve student success.
Yet many institutions are still limited by siloed and inconsistent data spread across dozens of systems. Becoming data empowered takes more than new tools. It requires democratized data and insights, a clear strategy, and a culture that supports data-driven decision making.
A single, AI-powered platform can provide the secure foundation for unified data. It allows institutions to use AI in ways that are practical and measurable. It has the potential to connect disconnected systems and empower leaders, faculty, and staff with insights that create impact across many parts of the institution.
Building the foundation of a data-empowered institution
Becoming a data-empowered institution is not a one-time project but a continuous strategy that can transform how colleges and universities operate. Institutions that lead with data can:
- Drive institutional strategy with intelligent insights.
- Seamlessly govern and protect data across campus.
- Accelerate research workflows with generative AI.
While unified data and AI-powered insights are key enablers, institutions must also prioritize data security and governance to provide leaders with trusted insights for decision-making. With these fundamentals in place, data can become a trusted institutional asset that helps strengthen collaboration across teams and break down departmental silos. When data is managed as an institutional asset, leaders can make informed decisions and allocate resources where they’ll have the greatest impact.
Microsoft Fabric helps unify data and teams to apply AI at scale, enhance decision-making, and build trust in insights by breaking down silos, improving performance visibility, accelerating innovation, and promoting data security. With these capabilities, leaders can better align resources, support student success, and stay resilient in a rapidly changing environment.
Driving institutional strategy with intelligent insights
Higher education leaders face mounting pressure to make faster, smarter decisions amid enrollment shifts, funding uncertainty, and workforce changes. These challenges ripple across budgets, staffing, and student services, while siloed systems often fragment financial, enrollment, and student success data, leaving leaders with outdated or incomplete insights.
Microsoft Fabric offers a unified foundation to turn institutional data into a source of agility and confidence. By connecting systems and applying predictive analytics, leaders can model scenarios, uncover insights, and act on opportunities such as:
- Tracking shifts in applications and yield rates to redirect outreach and boost enrollment.
- Identifying early signs of attrition and activating support to keep students on track.
- Modelling how changes in enrollment, aid, or scholarships affect financial outcomes.
By transforming data into actionable intelligence, institutions move from reacting to challenges to anticipating them. With AI-powered insights, leaders can automate outreach, streamline reporting, and coordinate action across departments to support student success and institutional resilience.
Like many other schools, Xavier College was grappling with a complex network of platforms and IT products, with its data scattered across 130 disparate systems. The College migrated all current and historic student and staff data to Microsoft Azure in under seven months, consolidating multiple systems and eliminating the need to manage data separately.
Key considerations for leaders: Are your financial and operational models rooted in historical data, or do they anticipate and shape strategy?
Governing and protecting data seamlessly
Colleges and universities manage sensitive information across student records, financial data, medical research, and intellectual property. Rising cyberthreats and evolving compliance requirements can put this sensitive data at risk while fragmented security tools overextend IT and security teams.
By protecting sensitive information and addressing risks quickly, institutions can safeguard research, teaching, and operations while maintaining trust and compliance. Strong data governance helps promote responsible information use, supporting innovation and collaboration without compromising security.
These measures help institutions protect valuable data and maintain trust with researchers and partners:
- Automate checks and reporting to improve audit readiness and reduce manual effort.
- Demonstrate robust data protection to secure grants and renewals.
- Monitor and respond to threats in real time, minimizing disruptions.
As part of Oregon State University’s (OSU) commitment to innovative security protocols, they continue to both deepen and expand their cybersecurity posture. They’re using Microsoft Security Copilot alongside Microsoft security tools with the goal of elevating their proactive security measures, allowing analysts to focus on tasks that add greater value to the institution.
Key considerations for leaders: Does your institution have unified visibility across all data systems, or are gaps still creating risk and stretching your teams thin?
Accelerating research breakthroughs
Research breakthroughs frequently require accurate, connected data that’s ready to power new insights. Critical information is often scattered across disconnected systems, which can make it difficult for faculty and researchers to collaborate efficiently or uncover patterns that drive innovation. In many cases, valuable time is spent cleaning and cross-checking data instead of focusing on discovery.
When institutions build a strong data foundation, they can discover new possibilities. Unified, well-governed data allows researchers to ask better questions, explore trends faster, and collaborate across disciplines while giving leaders a chance to gain predictive insights to drive breakthroughs.
When data is connected and trusted, AI can take research further by automating routine analysis, revealing new patterns, and suggesting fresh directions to explore. With the right foundation in place, faculty and students have an opportunity to spend less time managing information and more time advancing knowledge, securing funding, and driving the institution’s long-term growth.
Using Azure OpenAI, researchers at Georgia Tech were able to analyze unstructured data to better understand the charging experience of electric vehicle (EV) drivers. The volume of information was substantial, but it was estimated that human experts would require 99 weeks to extract the salient data points, which wasn’t realistic. Azure OpenAI was pivotal in advancing the research.
Key considerations for leaders: Are your research teams able to quickly connect datasets across disciplines, or are insights still fragmented and slowing discovery?
Unifying teams and data to support student success
Data empowerment helps institutions maximize innovation and value across operations, instruction, and systems:
- Simplify faculty and staff workflows – Unified data and automation can help streamline administrative work and empower educators. AI-powered tools are being used to improve efficiency and free up time for more strategic tasks. At the University of Waterloo, an AI assistant is helping students navigate job searches more efficiently and access support, contributing to a more streamlined experience that aligns with the university’s focus on student success.
- Engage learners and alumni – With a strong focus on student success and social mobility, California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) is transforming higher education to meet the diverse needs of its students. By connecting siloed data and applying AI-powered tools, the university is streamlining processes and personalizing engagement across the student journey.
Becoming a data-empowered institution is a journey, not a destination. These five scenarios show how institutions can transform operations when data is unified, and AI is applied with purpose. The path to proactive leadership starts with unified data. Microsoft can help you move with confidence.
Download the Data-Empowered Institution e-book to see how leading institutions are putting these scenarios into action, and how your campus can take the next step.
Ready to learn more? Discover additional resources and tools to accelerate your data empowerment journey:
- Read the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study to see how leading organizations achieved 379% ROI with Microsoft Fabric, and how your institution can apply these insights to maximize the value of its data.
- Explore how Microsoft Fabric can help your institution securely unify data, enhance collaboration, and prepare your organization for the AI era.
