Higher Education Website Trends 2026: 8 Shifts to Plan for

TL;DR: Higher education website trends in 2026

Three forces are converging on every US university homepage this year, and each one changes how web teams should budget for the next 18 months:

• Enrollment pressure is real but uneven. WICHE projects a 13% decline in US high-school graduates through 2041, but Fall 2025 enrollment actually grew 1.0% year over year, driven by community colleges and adult learners. The pressure is concentrated on tuition-dependent four-year publics in the Northeast and Midwest.
• The DOJ Title II rule just shifted. On April 20, 2026 — four days before the original deadline — the Department of Justice extended compliance to April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000+ residents and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities. The substantive obligation under WCAG 2.1 Level AA is unchanged.
• AI now mediates college discovery. Per EAB, 46% of high schoolers used AI tools in their college search in Fall 2025, up from 26% six months earlier. Roughly 78% of education-related Google searches now surface AI Overviews. The university website is no longer the first stop.

The rest of this article walks through what peer institutions are actually doing, what's getting harder, and a decision framework for Q4 web planning.

Higher education website trends in 2026: the short list

For readers scanning for the headline shifts, here are the eight higher education website trends shaping CIO and web-director conversations in 2026. Each is discussed in depth in the body of the article below.

The three forces meeting on every university homepage in 2026

University web teams have been operating under structural pressure for years. What's different in 2026 is that three independent forces are now hitting the same surface — the institutional website — at the same time.

Force 1: A slow-moving enrollment shift, not a cliff

The "enrollment cliff" framing has been part of higher-ed strategic planning since demographer Nathan Grawe modeled it in 2018. The underlying data is real. WICHE's December 2024 Knocking at the College Door report projects that the total number of US high-school graduates will peak in 2025 and then decline by 13% through 2041, with 38 states seeing reductions. AGB summarizes the demographic math plainly: 4.3 million US births in 2007 dropped to 3.6 million in 2024, a 17% decline that will work its way through the high-school graduation pipeline over the next 18 years.

But the cyclical numbers have been less alarming than expected. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's January 2025 correction to its Fall 2024 enrollment estimates retracted a widely reported 5% freshman decline after finding a methodological error. The corrected data showed undergraduate enrollment growing across all sectors. NSCRC's Fall 2025 Current Term Enrollment Estimates put total US postsecondary enrollment at roughly 19.4 million students — up 1.0% year over year, with undergraduate enrollment up 1.2%.

The honest read is that the pressure is unevenly distributed. Tuition-dependent four-year publics in the Northeast and Midwest, and small private colleges with thin endowments, are most exposed. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's December 2024 research projected up to 80 college closures over a five-year period in a worst-case scenario. Hechinger Report's closures tracker counted 28 degree-granting institutions closing in the first nine months of 2024 alone — nearly twice the 2023 pace — and 2025 added Limestone University, Northland College, Fontbonne University, and St. Andrews University to that list, alongside the merger of New Jersey City University into Kean.

What this means for web teams: the institutions where website investment matters most — the ones that need every yield point — are the same institutions facing the tightest Q4 budget conversations.

Force 2: A federal accessibility standard with a moving deadline

In April 2024, the Department of Justice finalized the Title II rule requiring all state and local government entities, including every US public college and university, to make web content and mobile apps conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The scope is wide: public-facing pages, student-facing applications, employee-facing portals, password-protected course content, and third-party content posted under contractual arrangements are all covered.

The original deadlines were April 24, 2026 for entities serving populations of 50,000 or more, and April 24, 2027 for smaller entities. Then, on April 20, 2026, the DOJ published an interim final rule extending those deadlines to April 26, 2027 and April 26, 2028 respectively. Inside Higher Ed reported the change the day after publication, with the American Council on Education confirming it had requested the extension.

The substantive obligation has not changed. WCAG 2.1 AA remains the standard. Section 504, state-level requirements, and existing case law all still apply. Washington State University's web team summarized the institutional response in guidance issued the same day as the rule change: "Do not let this extension slow your efforts toward full compliance." Academic medical centers face a separate, parallel obligation under HHS Section 504 rules with a May 11, 2026 deadline — that one was not extended.

For web teams, the extension is not relief. It is a longer runway to do the work properly. The institutions that treated April 2026 as a real deadline are now ahead; the ones that did not now have a window to catch up before April 2027.

Force 3: AI has reshaped how prospective students find universities

The most decisively documented force in this convergence is the one that did not exist eighteen months ago. According to EAB's Student Communication Preferences Survey released in February 2026 (n=5,000+ high-school students), 46% of students used AI tools in their college search in Fall 2025, up from 26% in Spring 2025 — nearly doubling in six months. EAB's Madeleine Rhyneer summarized the shift: "AI has, in a matter of months, moved from the margins to the mainstream of how teenagers explore colleges." A further data point from the same survey: 18% of students removed a college from consideration based on AI-generated responses.

The discovery layer above the website has also shifted. EducationDynamics' 2026 Marketing & Enrollment Benchmarks report found that roughly 78% of education-related Google searches now surface AI Overviews, and that "stealth applicants" — students who apply without ever inquiring — rose from 1% in 2020 to 9.7% in 2025. Inside Higher Ed's February 2026 deep dive on the topic, "To Reach Students, College Marketers Prioritize AI Visibility", documents how enrollment marketing teams are now optimizing not just for Google's blue links but for inclusion in AI-generated answers.

This does not mean the university website is obsolete — far from it. RNL's 2025 E-Expectations Study found that 45% of students used a digital AI assistant on a college website during their search, and post-chatbot behaviors included contacting admissions (29%), clicking deeper into the site (28%), and filling out an inquiry form (27%). The website is the conversion surface; AI is the discovery surface above it. Both need to be designed for, and both need to draw from the same underlying content.

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Where universities are actually investing

Looking across EDUCAUSE's research, vendor procurement data, and named institutional projects, four investment patterns are visible in 2025–2026. None of them are new. What is new is that they are now being budgeted together, as part of the same multi-year capital plan, rather than as independent line items.

Consolidation of fragmented site networks

EDUCAUSE's 2025 Top 10 IT Issues — the most cited annual benchmark of higher-ed IT priorities — places "cohesive digital ecosystems" in its top tier, framed by Susan Grajek as the difference between a digital garden and a digital jungle. The phrase is not metaphor. Major US research universities frequently operate hundreds of subsites across departments, schools, centers, institutes, and individual faculty pages. Each was created with good intent. Together, they create the governance problem.

Consolidation is rarely a single platform migration. It typically combines decommissioning unused properties, unifying design systems across remaining ones, and introducing shared content governance — three workstreams that were historically run in parallel by separate teams and are now being merged.

Governance modernization with formal AI oversight

Through 2024–2025, a recognizable institutional pattern emerged: a cross-functional steering committee co-chaired by the CIO and a senior academic leader, with authority over both AI procurement and broader digital governance. Documented examples from EDUCAUSE's 2025 Horizon Report include:

• California State University, Long Beach runs an AI Steering Committee co-chaired by the Provost and VP of Student Affairs, with two subcommittees covering academic instruction and business operations.
• University of North Florida established an AI Council co-chaired by the CIO and an academic dean, which developed a university-wide AI Strategic Plan aligned to institutional priorities.
• Southern New Hampshire University created a dedicated AI Policy Director role — a recognition that AI governance now requires senior, full-time accountability rather than committee work alone.
• University of Missouri publicly committed to an "AI-forward stance" that pairs faculty autonomy with explicit policies on student privacy and AI syllabus guidelines.

The governance pattern matters for web teams because every AI feature deployed on a university website — chatbot, personalization engine, content recommendation, search assistant — now needs to pass through this committee structure. Web teams that lack a working relationship with their institution's AI governance group will find their roadmaps stalling before procurement.

Accessibility remediation, structurally

The most operationally interesting accessibility model documented in 2025 came not from a flagship R1 but from Coppin State University, an HBCU in Maryland. As described in the EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, Coppin "implemented a streamlined software onboarding process, requiring all solutions to pass stringent security and accessibility assessments before integration." The process is explicitly tied to DOJ Title II compliance and runs as a single gate covering both cybersecurity and accessibility — the same governance check, applied to every new tool that touches the university's digital surface.

The Coppin model is notable because it solves a problem most universities recognize but few have automated: the right time to enforce accessibility is at procurement, not after deployment. Retrofitting accessibility into a third-party product that was never designed for WCAG 2.1 AA is significantly more expensive than rejecting it before purchase.

AI for recruitment and student success

The named US deployments are now well-documented:

• Georgia State University's Pounce chatbot — built with Mainstay, formerly AdmitHub, and operating since 2016. The original randomized controlled trial found a 21.4% reduction in summer melt. GSU's National Institute for Student Success was awarded a $7.6M Department of Education grant in January 2024 to scale chatbots into foundational math and English at GSU, Morgan State, and the University of Central Florida.
• Arizona State University's OpenAI partnership — announced in January 2024 as the first university collaboration with OpenAI. ASU's AI Innovation Challenge had activated approximately 700 internal AI projects by October 2025, and ASU expanded the partnership in 2025 to make ChatGPT Edu free to every ASU student, faculty member, and staff member.
• University of Michigan's U-M GPT, U-M Maizey, and U-M Toolkit — launched August 21, 2023, and the first major university to offer a custom-built AI suite to its entire community. By the end of its first academic year, U-M reported 34,000+ U-M GPT users and 1,692 custom "Maizey" agents created. Forty-nine institutions reached out to U-M for guidance on building their own.
• University of Florida's NaviGator AI — described in EDUCAUSE coverage as a self-service AI suite covering 30+ AI models (LLMs, embedding models, image generation, speech-to-text) available to faculty, staff, and students across the institution.

These are not press-release pilots. They are funded operational deployments with multi-year outcome data. They share two characteristics worth noting. First, every one of them was launched by an institution with deep enrollment scale or strong technical capacity — none was a small institution's first AI project. Second, every one is integrated with the institution's broader digital infrastructure, not bolted on as a standalone microsite.

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What's getting harder

Honest accounting requires noting what is moving in the wrong direction.

Content sprawl is outpacing governance

The Top 10 IT Issues frame this as "Restoring Trust" — a category in which EDUCAUSE found that public confidence in higher education dropped from 57% to 36% over the past decade, per the cited June 2024 Gallup poll. On the operational side, the same report flags "Administrative Simplification" and "Smoothing the Student Journey" as top-three issues. Both are direct symptoms of the sprawl problem. Prospective students do not care which subdomain a piece of information sits on; they need it to be findable and consistent. Current students experience the digital jungle through every broken cross-link between the registrar, financial aid, and academic department sites.

We have no rigorous public benchmark for the average number of subsites a US research university operates, and we will not invent one. What we can say from public Drupal Association case data is that multiple large US universities operate hundreds of distinct Drupal sites within a single institutional installation. The pattern is recognizable across CMS choices: the sites accumulate faster than any single team can govern them.

Decentralized governance, recentralized accountability

Most US universities operate a federated digital model — central marketing owns the homepage, but schools, colleges, departments, and faculty groups own their own sites. This model produces local autonomy and local quality control, both of which matter. It also produces the situation in which the central web team is increasingly held accountable for compliance, accessibility, AI policy, and security across properties they do not directly operate.

The April 2027 DOJ Title II deadline does not exempt subsites maintained by individual departments. Neither does the institution's AI governance committee. The structural answer is shared infrastructure — design systems, component libraries, automated accessibility testing, common CMS platforms — that lets central teams enforce standards without taking operational control. The structural answer takes years to implement.

Web team headcount is not growing

The data here is patchy. EDUCAUSE's 2025 Horizon Report cautions that the higher-education teaching and learning workforce is "already feeling overworked and burned out," and that the addition of generative AI is being experienced as "one more thing piled on top of endless responsibilities." Public reporting from Bryan Alexander, Inside Higher Ed, and Higher Ed Dive throughout 2025 documents layoffs at Michigan State, Kalamazoo College, Whitman College, and Bennington College, alongside broader budget cuts across the sector.

We will not put a number on web-team headcount changes because the public data does not support one. What we can say with confidence is that web teams are being asked to deliver consolidation, accessibility, AI governance, and modernization on roughly the same staffing they had three years ago — and often less.

The legacy CMS conversation is more nuanced than the trade press suggests

Among large US research universities, Drupal is the dominant CMS. The Drop Times' analysis of QS-ranked US universities found Drupal powering roughly 35% of those institutions' main sites, with WordPress at 18% and a long tail of proprietary platforms collectively below 10%. The Drupal Association's own data, repeatedly cited in agency analyses, indicates that the majority of top-100 US universities operate at least one Drupal site within their broader digital estate. Among the long tail of regional comprehensives and community colleges, WordPress is more common, and proprietary platforms purpose-built for higher education — Cascade CMS from Hannon Hill, and Modern Campus CMS (formerly OU Campus / OmniUpdate) — retain meaningful share among institutions that prioritize purpose-built editorial UX.

Each of these platforms has institutions that are well-served by it. The CMS conversation universities are actually having in 2026 is less about which legacy platform to migrate off, and more about how to handle three near-term technical events: Drupal 7's extended support ended January 5, 2025; Drupal 10's end-of-life arrives December 9, 2026; and Drupal CMS 2.0 launched January 28, 2026 with a visual page builder, native AI capabilities, and recipe-based integrations. For Drupal-using institutions, the practical question is sequencing those events with the April 2027 accessibility deadline. Universities running Drupal 10 will be doing two migrations and one compliance project in overlapping windows.

What's working: patterns from peer institutions

The institutions that appear to be making real progress share a recognizable pattern. They are doing unglamorous foundational work — the kind that is easy to deprioritize in a flat budget cycle but expensive to skip — before they attempt the visible modernization projects. Four patterns are worth highlighting.

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is a recent example. UTC operates a multi-site Drupal platform serving prospective students, current students, faculty, and administrative departments. After six years of organic growth, the platform had accumulated enough technical debt that every release was taking two to three hours, the codebase included six years of unused themes loading on every page, and site errors were going undetected until visitors reported them. We replaced UTC's deprecated release tooling (Acquia BLT) with an automated GitHub Actions workflow, audited and cleaned the codebase down from ten active themes to three, deployed Sentry for real-time error monitoring, and transitioned the team to run the new infrastructure independently through weekly knowledge-transfer sessions.

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The headline metric is that publishing time dropped from 2–3 hours to roughly 15 minutes, with no external dependency. The structural outcome is that UTC's web team is now positioned to absorb the next round of work — accessibility remediation, AI integration, content consolidation — without the foundational platform getting in the way. A university that cannot push a release in fifteen minutes cannot credibly do any of the other three. Read the full UTC case study →

A decision framework for the next 12–18 months

For web team directors briefing a CIO this Q4, three questions can structure the conversation more productively than a feature-by-feature roadmap.

1. Which deadlines are you actually optimizing for?

The 2026–2028 window contains at least four hard dates that affect web budgets:

• December 9, 2026 — Drupal 10 end-of-life. Universities running Drupal 10 must migrate to Drupal 11 by this date or operate unsupported software.
• May 11, 2026 — HHS Section 504 deadline for healthcare-funded entities, which covers most academic medical centers.
• April 26, 2027 — DOJ Title II compliance for large entities (50,000+ population), which covers most US public universities.
• April 26, 2028 — DOJ Title II compliance for smaller entities.

A roadmap that treats these as separate projects will run into resource conflicts. A roadmap that sequences them as a single, twelve-to-eighteen-month modernization program — platform upgrade, then accessibility remediation, then AI integration on top — is significantly more efficient.

2. What's your foundation actually rated for?

Before any visible modernization, an honest internal assessment is worth running. Three questions: How long does a release currently take? How quickly can the team detect and roll back a broken deployment? How much of the codebase is still being used? If the answers are uncomfortable, the foundation is the first investment, not the last one. The UTC engagement above is one example of what that work looks like; every university's specifics will differ.

3. Who governs AI on your public-facing surface?

The AI conversation is too often framed as a procurement question — which chatbot vendor, which personalization engine, which AI search overlay. The harder question is governance: who approves AI features that touch prospective students or the public, what data they have access to, how the institution's brand voice is maintained, and how outputs are evaluated for accuracy and accessibility. Universities that can answer those four questions in writing are ready to deploy AI at scale. Universities that cannot will benefit from establishing the governance answer before the procurement question.

Where Vardot fits

We are a Drupal Diamond Certified Partner and a Gold Sponsor of the Drupal AI Initiative, with more than 200 launched platforms and a 4.9/5 Clutch rating. Our higher-education work spans clients including Georgetown University in Qatar, The American University in Cairo, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

The Vardot Delivery System — Align, Blueprint, Accelerate, Assure, Operate — is how we sequence the kind of multi-year modernization the next eighteen months call for. We help universities consolidate fragmented site networks, remediate accessibility at the platform level, integrate AI responsibly into the content layer, and equip in-house teams to operate the result independently.

For deeper reading on adjacent topics: our guide to 10 Questions for Evaluating a Higher Ed Drupal Migration Partner covers the procurement-side conversation in detail, and Drupal for Universities: AI-First CMS walks through the architectural pattern for treating AI as a service layer rather than a vendor product.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Enrollment data

• Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates, 11th edition, December 2024. https://www.wiche.edu/knocking/key-findings/graduates/
• National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, "Methodological Error Affecting Preliminary Fall 2024 Higher Education Enrollment Reports," January 13, 2025. studentclearinghouse.org
• National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Final Fall Enrollment Trends, January 2026. nscresearchcenter.org
• Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), "The Enrollment Cliff," Trusteeship. agb.org
• The Hechinger Report, "Tracking College Closures." hechingerreport.org
• BestColleges, "Closed Colleges: List of Closures, Mergers, and Trendline" (citing Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia research by Kelchen, Ritter, and Webber, December 2024). bestcolleges.com

DOJ Title II and accessibility

• Federal Register, "Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities," 89 Fed. Reg. 31320, April 24, 2024. federalregister.gov
• Federal Register, "Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability," 91 Fed. Reg. 20902, April 20, 2026. federalregister.gov
• Inside Higher Ed, "DOJ Extends Web Accessibility Deadline," April 21, 2026. insidehighered.com
• Washington State University Web Communication, "Guidance on the DOJ's Extension of Accessibility Compliance Dates," April 20, 2026. web.wsu.edu
• Jackson Lewis, "DOJ Extends Public Entities' Compliance Deadline for ADA-Related Website Accessibility." jacksonlewis.com

EDUCAUSE research

• EDUCAUSE Review, "2025 EDUCAUSE Top 10: Restoring Trust," October 2024. er.educause.edu
• 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, Teaching and Learning Edition, EDUCAUSE, 2025. educause.edu

CMS market data

• The Drop Times, "Which CMS Powers the Top US University Websites? A Comprehensive Analysis." thedroptimes.com
• Drupal.org, "Drupal CMS 2.0 is here: Visual building, AI, and site templates transform Drupal," January 28, 2026. drupal.org
• Drupal.org, Core release schedule. drupal.org

AI deployments and college search

• EAB, "Nearly Half of High School Students Now Use AI in College Search," February 25, 2026. eab.com
• EducationDynamics, 2026 Marketing & Enrollment Benchmarks, cited via Insight Into Academia. insightintoacademia.com
• Inside Higher Ed, "To Reach Students, College Marketers Prioritize AI Visibility," February 13, 2026. insidehighered.com
• Ruffalo Noel Levitz, "How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping College Planning." ruffalonl.com
• Mainstay, "Georgia State University Chatbot Supports Every Student." mainstay.com
• Georgia State University News, "National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State Awarded $7.6M to Study Benefits of AI-Enhanced Classroom Chatbots," January 11, 2024. news.gsu.edu
• OpenAI, "Personalizing education with ChatGPT." openai.com
• ASU Enterprise Technology, "ASU and OpenAI expand collaboration." tech.asu.edu
• University of Michigan, ITS News, "ITS debuts custom artificial intelligence services across U‑M." record.umich.edu

Vardot client case studies

• Vardot, "Case Study: American University of Cairo." vardot.com
• Vardot, "Georgetown University: A Swift Student Journey." vardot.com
• Vardot, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Drupal Modernization case study (forthcoming).

This article reflects research conducted in May 2026. Where federal regulations, enrollment data, and AI deployment outcomes are referenced, links point to primary sources for verification. The DOJ Title II compliance landscape in particular is evolving; check the Federal Register for the most current guidance.