2026 Carnegie Conference
Higher Ed in Motion
Thank you for joining us for the 14th annual Carnegie Conference, a dedicated forum for Navigating the Now and Next in higher education. This year, our team of subject matter experts shared deep dives into the trends and data shaping our industry today. Explore the links below to access their presentations and start charting your path forward.
Additionally, if you have not already done so, please take five minutes to complete our conference exit survey. Your insights are appreciated!
Activating Your Experience: A Framework for Navigating Change
As we gathered to explore Higher Ed in Motion, we aimed to empower participants to take what they learned and experienced at the Carnegie Conference back into their changing environments with tools and frameworks to activate their learning. In this session, we introduced a model for navigating complex change for participants to consider throughout the conference. We returned to this model at the close of the conference to connect the dots and sent participants back to campus ready for action.
The Student at the Center of Personalization
Participants were challenged to re-evaluate their understanding of personalization across the student lifecycle. They explored how to craft authentic and impactful personalized experiences, grounded in the recognition that each student’s journey is unique. Participants left with tools and concepts to bring the individual student to the forefront of all institutional efforts.
Supporting the Full Student Journey: The Importance of Retention Marketing & Communications
This session explored the role of marketing after enrollment to boost persistence and engagement through lifecycle campaigns, audience segmentation, and journey mapping.
Carnegie Research Insights: Understanding Motivations and Barriers for Today’s Online Learners
The student profile for online learning is distinct from other higher education audiences and arguably less homogenous. One outcome of this reality is the need to have strategic, properly segmented outreach and enrollment efforts that speak to each online audience in an authentic way. In the fall of 2025, Carnegie explored online learning through a national study of more than 10,000 prospective and current online learners, as well as a secondary study of leaders in the online learning community. This session shared key results of this new research to better explain who is searching for an online education, how to best communicate with them, and how recent trends in the industry and nation will impact online learning for the coming decade.
Slate Track: Prompt Engineering 101 for Slate AI
Participants learned how to craft effective prompts that turned Slate AI into a powerful partner for analysis and engagement and walked away with practical techniques to save time and surface smarter insights.
Harnessing AI for Student Retention
This session explored cutting-edge AI-enabled retention strategies and featured insights from campus leaders, Carnegie’s student success experts, and technology innovators developing tools to support persistence, retention, and career outcomes.
From SEO to AI: The Future of Digital Discovery in Higher Ed
In this session, participants explored how to optimize content for AI, social, communities, and voice search while building strategies to ensure institutions remained findable in a fast-changing digital environment.
Students are Signaling: How to Listen and Act
This session explored the role of marketing after enrollment to boost persistence and engagement through lifecycle campaigns, audience segmentation, and journey mapping.
Slate for Student Success: Marketing to the Students You Already Have
In this session, participants learned how to leverage dynamic populations, branded campaigns, and event management to market to currently enrolled students. We explored practical strategies to deliver timely, personalized outreach that strengthened engagement, supported retention, and extended the impact of Slate well beyond admission.
Elements of AI Transformation
This session explored the key elements of AI transformation and introduced Carnegie’s framework for building an AI-empowered cabinet. Participants learned how a comprehensive AI strategy could move an institution from scattered pilots to scalable, systemic impact and ensure preparedness for both the present and the future of higher education.
To help institutions translate this framework into practical action, Carnegie also introduced ai-map.carnegiehighered.com — a research-based map of real-world AI use cases across presidential cabinets, designed to move AI from theory into daily institutional practice.
Success Beyond Retention: Building Student Readiness for Work & Career
This session explored people and technology-driven tools to most effectively prepare students for work and career post-graduation.
Beyond Reporting: Building a Culture of Data-Driven Decision Making in Enrollment
This session demonstrated how to move from collecting data to creating a culture where marketing and admissions teams used data daily to guide smarter enrollment strategies.
The Changing Landscape of College & University Enrollment: Understanding New and Evolving Regulations
This session distilled key insights from recent legislative and regulatory events to help enrollment professionals align recruitment strategies with federal mandates.
Your New Hub for Enrollment Data
This session showcased a one-of-a-kind Enrollment Dashboard that went beyond Slate reporting to provide a fast, dependable hub for tracking engagement, visualizing funnels, and monitoring performance. Participants gained insight into how this information could be configured and displayed to optimize communications and drive conversions.
The Creative Edge: Resolving the Tension Between Meaningful Human Experience and Institutional Scale in Online Enrollment Strategies (OES)
This session presented a strategic blueprint for success in the competitive OES environment, addressing market saturation and student journey fragmentation. Participants learned how to elevate human-delivered experiences, leverage authentic storytelling for differentiation, and deploy AI strategically to drive scalable efficiency. They walked away with a clear framework to strengthen their OES brand and gain competitive advantage.
Taking It Back to Campus: Managing Up for Impact and Influence
After two days of learning and community-building, this session helped participants synthesize the ideas they most wanted to pursue. It connected gaps and opportunities through the complex change model introduced on Day 1 and provided tools for impact and influence as participants brought ideas back to campus leadership and their teams.
Let’s Talk About What Comes Next
Our expert knowledge of higher ed has been forged over decades, from hundreds of client partnerships. And knowledge becomes power when it’s shared. Contact us to start the conversation about how we can help you thrive now and lead what’s next.
