Students Remain Higher Ed’s Cybersecurity Weak Link
Students Remain Higher Ed’s Cybersecurity Weak Link
Publish Date: 2026-06-09 03:02:00
Source Domain: www.insidehighered.com
Just 22 percent of chief technology officers say students at their institution receive adequate cybersecurity training, according to Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 Survey of Campus Chief Technology/Information Officers. By comparison, 68 percent say faculty and staff receive adequate training. Another 70 percent say their institution’s leadership prioritizes cybersecurity investments.
Students constituting a gap in their institutions’ cybersecurity ecosystems is nothing new. In last year’s survey, just 26 percent of CTOs reported requiring student cybersecurity training, versus 79 percent for faculty and 86 percent for administrative staff.
More on the Survey
On Wednesday, June 10, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a free webcast featuring expert panelists to discuss the survey findings and what it takes to lead on technology in today’s rapidly shifting postsecondary landscape. Register for that conversation here, even if you can’t attend live.
Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 Survey of Campus Chief Technology/Information Officers was conducted by Hanover Research. The survey included 130 technology leaders, mostly from public and private nonprofit institutions, for a margin of error of eight percentage points. Download the full results here.
But cybersecurity threats to higher education are only increasing, as the recent attack impacting the Canvas learning management system underscored. And artificial intelligence promises to accelerate this trend. Convincing phishing attacks, for instance, are much easier to draft, personalize and deploy at scale with AI. Agentic tools represent new risks. And models have also been used to discover and weaponize “zero-day” vulnerabilities—those previously unknown to developers—in software systems. This spring, AI giant Anthropic said it was withholding its own Claude Mythos model from public release due to its unprecedented ability to exploit such weaknesses. That reportedly…
