November 2025 Signals

Hello there! 

As we enter a season of gratitude, I want to thank you for the ways you have shown up this fall. Whether through webinars, virtual roundtables, leadership cohorts, or the energy you brought to the SAIS Annual Conference, we hope you have felt equipped and encouraged in the work of advancing your school’s purpose. The conversations, questions, and insights you share continue to shape our collective learning community.

Before we move into this month’s Trend Tracker and Pulse Perspectives, here is a simple tool to use with your leadership team as you evaluate priorities and resource decisions:

Tool: Assess the Weight of a Challenge

As you manage daily demands with strategy, I invite your team to choose one current issue or opportunity and rate it on three dimensions:

Intensity: How significant or painful is this challenge when it shows up?
Rate: Low –> Moderate –> High

Frequency: How often does it occur?
Rate: Rare –> Intermittent –> Frequent

Density: How many people are affected?
Rate: Few –> Some –> Many

Where do these three ratings suggest we need to lean in, intervene, or reallocate time and attention? Where might we watch and wait, and where should we act now?

In this edition of the Trend Tracker, we highlight the following signals and trends. Within each area, a number of clickable resources are available. 

01 AI Assessment & Learning
02 AI Leader-Ready
03 Job Quality
04 Traps & Challenges
05 Strategic Alignment & Fail
06 Org Learning Culture
07 Dual Enrollment
08 Legal Enterprise Lens

Web Version Trend Tracker, November 2025

Reflecting real-time perspectives representing the voices in our association, we solicited feedback from SAIS CFOs | Business Officers and Academic & Division Leaders in October to complete a pulse survey focused on goals, risks, challenges, leadership, and professional growth. Some key findings include the following:

• Financial health is steady-to-strong, but rising operational costs and deferred maintenance remain the top financial risks driving budgeting pressure.
• Primary financial priorities center on enhancing fundraising, increasing enrollment, and increasing faculty/staff compensation—with many schools planning or exploring capital projects.
• Academic leaders continue to juggle time demands, staffing, and student needs, but the most dramatic year-over-year shift is the sharp rise in concern around adapting to rapidly changing technology, signaling a growing urgency to lead confidently in an AI-accelerated environment.
• Leaders report most effective team leadership practices as open communication, collaborative decision-making, and high visibility, indicating a continued emphasis on relational leadership.

See slide deck for full results.

Web Version Pulse Perspectives, November 2025

Take a deeper dive in the trends and perspectives discussed by registering for the upcoming webinars SAIS has designed to build capacity for you and your team. 

Additionally, seeing the annual conference in the rearview mirror, check out our February in-person conferences as you build capacity for your team through SAIS professional development opportunities.

• February 8-10: Academic Support & Student Well-Being Conference
• February 10-11: TransformED: Teaching & Learning Conference
• February 11-12: Independent School Brand Summit
• February 11-12: Designing Inclusion: A Mission-Centered Institute

Thank you for the gift of conducting research, collecting data, and designing tools and frameworks on your behalf. Reach out if we can help you scale your efforts to impact this generation of students.

Dr. Brett Jacobsen
SAIS President