Faculty-Led AI at Scale: From UC Santa Barbara to the California Community Colleges
Release Date: 10/13/2026
Faculty-Led AI at Scale: From UC Santa Barbara to the California Community Colleges
Changing Higher Ed
At UC Santa Barbara, Kavitta Ghai recalls, students waited two days, on average, to get a question answered. For a student whose scholarship was just pulled or whose tuition is due tomorrow, that is too long, and at community colleges, she notes, most classrooms have no teaching assistant at all. She argues AI can now offer the round-the-clock support students have never had, if it is built and governed the right way. In this episode of the , speaks with , CEO and Co-Founder of Nectir. The conversation covers why faculty-led adoption works, how to guardrail AI at the course level, and how to...
info_outline
AI Guardrails for Universities: Why an AI Policy Needs a Tech Stack to Enforce It
Changing Higher Ed
Most AI risk at a university does not start with a hacker. It starts with a student, a faculty member, or a researcher copying something out of the learning management system and pasting it into a personal AI account, where every safeguard written into the institution's enterprise licenses no longer applies. In this episode of the , speaks with , Vice President of SLED (State, Local Government, and Education) at Island. The conversation covers the three AI issues facing presidents: academic integrity, compliance around sensitive data, and responsible AI use aligned with institutional...
info_outline
FIRE's 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: What Actually Moves a School's Score
Changing Higher Ed
Texas A&M holds a green light rating for its speech policies and still fell from 47th to 192nd in this year's College Free Speech Rankings. Harvard climbed from 245th to 71st without changing a single policy, a sign that how leadership responds to speech controversies matters more than what is written in the handbook. In this episode of the , speaks with , Chief Research Advisor at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The conversation covers the seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings and why institutions with strong written policies can still see their free...
info_outline
Washington Update: Title IV Risk, Neg Reg, and the Midterms
Changing Higher Ed
Student loan default and repayment rates have continued to be calculated through years of dormant collections, and some institutions could soon face single-year default rates high enough to threaten their Title IV eligibility. That risk is arriving alongside final OB3 rules, sweeping accreditation proposals from the AIM negotiated rulemaking, and midterm elections that will reshape every committee governing higher education. In this Washington Update episode of the , speaks with Tom Netting, President of TEN Government Strategies. The conversation covers the federal regulatory and political...
info_outline
How Gies Gives Every Junior a Live Client Project
Changing Higher Ed
Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog. In this episode of the , speaks with , Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it cost on the staffing, funding, and...
info_outline
Workforce Readiness: Why Higher Ed Struggles to Use Employer Support
Changing Higher Ed
Workforce readiness is usually framed as a funding and program-design problem. In some states and at some institutions, the funding and the employer willingness already exist, and what is missing is a structure on the institution's side that can take the offer and act on it. In this episode of the , speaks with , president of , a central Ohio technology firm building custom software for nonprofits, local governments, and growing organizations. The conversation covers where the public-private partnership between employers and institutions breaks down, and what leaders can change on their own...
info_outline
Diversifying Revenue Without Diluting Mission: Inside Rollins College's Innovation Triangle
Changing Higher Ed
Private colleges under enrollment pressure get told to diversify revenue. The venture that follows usually either fails to earn or drags the institution away from the academic identity families were paying for. In this episode of the , speaks with . The conversation covers how a tuition-dependent private structures a diversified budget model without compromising the curriculum that gives its degree value. Barnett walks through the Innovation Triangle, a three-part portfolio Rollins spent more than a decade and $200 million building. The parts run on deliberately different economics: a...
info_outline
Adult Learners: Redesign, Don't Just Recruit
Changing Higher Ed
Institutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers doing the damage are recent design decisions, not fixed features of higher education, and several of them cost almost nothing to remove. In this episode of the , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with , executive director of distance education at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. The conversation covers when adult learners stop being an enrollment...
info_outline
Reputation, Revenue, and the Cost of Silence in Higher Ed Communication
Changing Higher Ed
Most institutions in a crisis don't believe they're in one. The word calls up a scandal with a camera crew outside, and nothing on this week's agenda looks like that, so the answer is often no. In this episode of the , speaks with , founder and CEO of Red Banyan, a strategic communications firm built around high-stakes rapid response. The conversation covers why , and what that definition changes for colleges and universities. Nierman explains why the old instinct to stay quiet and avoid giving oxygen to a fire now cedes the battleground to whoever is willing to characterize your institution,...
info_outline
Why Is Enrollment Falling Short When Applications Are Up?
Changing Higher Ed
Applications keep climbing while the class comes up short. The gap sits in the phase most institutions treat as the finish line: what happens after the acceptance letter goes out. In this episode of the , speaks with , Vice President of Spark451, which he co-founded. is a Jenzabar company. The conversation covers why enrollment falls short when admissions and marketing are both performing. Drawing on twenty-five years in university marketing, branding, and enrollment marketing, McGetrick explains what Spark451's focus groups revealed about when families actually begin their due diligence,...
info_outlineAt UC Santa Barbara, Kavitta Ghai recalls, students waited two days, on average, to get a question answered. For a student whose scholarship was just pulled or whose tuition is due tomorrow, that is too long, and at community colleges, she notes, most classrooms have no teaching assistant at all. She argues AI can now offer the round-the-clock support students have never had, if it is built and governed the right way.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Kavitta Ghai, CEO and Co-Founder of Nectir. The conversation covers why faculty-led adoption works, how to guardrail AI at the course level, and how to measure whether AI improves student outcomes.
Ghai co-founded her company as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara and has worked with colleges and universities from Stanford's Graduate School of Business to the California Community Colleges. She explains why AI should draw on a course's own materials rather than the open internet, why student conversations with AI should stay private, and why an outright ban leaves students behind.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, provosts, boards, CIOs and faculty leaders deciding how AI should support students and who should control it.
Topics Covered
- "Time poverty": how long students wait for answers, and why it matters for persistence
- Community as the core value proposition of college
- The teacher's role as a "curiosity facilitator" in an AI-enabled classroom
- Why technology adoption works best when faculty choose it
- Grounding AI in course materials, and setting guardrails at the class and campus level
- The AI policy "sandwich": administrative standards, faculty classroom policy and student privacy
- Measuring AI's effect on GPA, motivation, retention and course success
Real-World Examples Discussed
- UC Santa Barbara's two-day average wait for students to get a question answered
- Hiring engineers and working out onboarding within 48 hours when UCSB went remote in 2020, with 20,000 students and faculty joining
- Studies of her company's tool that Ghai cites: a 20% GPA increase and a 36% boost in intrinsic motivation after one term in a published pilot, and a 7.5% average GPA increase at Los Angeles Pacific University among students who used it at least three times in a semester
- The California Community Colleges deploying AI to all 116 colleges with faculty-led adoption, as Ghai describes it
Kavitta Ghai's Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership
- Time is of the essence. AI can level the playing field so support no longer depends on whether a student can afford a tutor.
- Keep all three layers of AI policy in place, and choose a provider that meets the same criteria: student privacy, faculty-set guardrails and administrative standards such as FERPA, SOC 2 Type 2 and accessibility.
- Invest in training, professional development and ongoing support for faculty, staff, administrators and students. McNaughton notes the provider can be internal, such as the IT group, as long as it stays current.
Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/ai-for-student-success/
#AIinHigherEducation #StudentSuccess #HigherEducation #ChangingHigherEdPodcast