Every period of rapid change exposes a mindset divide.
Those who operate from abundance move forward with intention, confidence, and clarity. Those who operate from scarcity cling to familiar structures, optimize for short-term protection, and slowly erode the very outcomes they are trying to preserve.
By 2026, artificial intelligence will be deeply embedded across higher education. Yet the most consequential failures will not be technological. They will be strategic and cultural. Many campuses will get the future wrong, not because they lack tools, but because they misunderstood what actually drives student success.
What follows are the most common and costly mistakes institutions will make by 2026 if they fail to connect dining, belonging, and retention into a single operating system.
One: Continuing to Lead From a Scarcity Mindset
Many campuses will continue to make decisions rooted in fear rather than possibility.
Scarcity thinking shows up in defensive budgeting, risk avoidance, and the belief that resources must be tightly controlled rather than intentionally deployed. By 2026, institutions trapped in this mindset will use AI primarily to cut, reduce, and restrict.
What they will miss is that scarcity thinking undermines community. It signals to students that access is conditional, support is limited, and belonging must be earned.
Campuses that fail to shift toward predictable abundance will struggle to build trust, stabilize enrollment, or improve persistence.
Two: Discounting Face to Face Interaction and Over Automating Relationships
Many institutions will assume that automation is inherently modern and therefore inherently better.
By 2026, campuses that over automate student to student and student-to-service interactions will see a quiet erosion of connection. Self-service kiosks will replace eye contact. Chatbots will replace conversation. Apps will replace hospitality.
Students will experience efficiency without warmth and convenience without care.
The result will not be dissatisfaction with services. It will be a deeper sense of isolation.
Belonging is built face-to-face. Campuses that discount this truth will pay for it in retention.
Three: Treating a Food Service Contractor as a Trusted Independent Advisor
One of the most consequential missteps campuses will continue to make is relying on a food service contractor for independent strategic guidance.
Contract partners bring valuable operational expertise, and in many cases, express a strong intent to serve students well. But their fiduciary responsibility is to their stockholders. That structure can naturally shape recommendations towards what is in the best interest of the food service contractor’s bottom line, rather than what is most aligned with an institution’s unique culture, long-term goals, and student success outcomes.
For that reason, campuses benefit from clearly separating the development of an independent strategy, mapping a course forward, and “steering the ship” from contracted execution. By 2026, institutions that establish this distinction will be better positioned to design dining programs around belonging, retention, and lived student experience, while still leveraging contractors effectively to deliver at a high level.
Four: Addressing Food Insecurity Administratively Instead of Experientially
Many campuses will continue to treat food insecurity as a compliance issue rather than a lived experience.
They will build programs, eligibility criteria, and reporting structures while students quietly opt out due to stigma and shame.
Addressing food insecurity administratively keeps the problem visible on paper and invisible in practice.
Institutions that fail to implement experiential solutions rooted in predictable abundance will continue to see anxiety, disengagement, and academic disruption tied directly to food access.
Five: Relying on National Benchmarking Instead of Their Own Students’ Lived Experience
By 2026, campuses will have access to more benchmarking data than ever.
Many will mistake national averages for insight.
Benchmarking can be useful, but it is no substitute for understanding the lived experience of your students on your campus. Over-reliance on external comparisons will lead institutions to miss local patterns of loneliness, disengagement, and unmet need.
Your students are not average. Their experience is the data that matters most.
Six: Misdiagnosing Retention as Primarily Financial or Academic
Perhaps the most expensive mistake campuses will continue to make is assuming low fall-to-fall retention is driven primarily by financial pressure or academic difficulty.
By 2026, institutions that fail to recognize belonging as a core retention driver will forgo millions, and in some cases tens of millions, of dollars in lost tuition, room, and board revenue.
Students do not leave only because college is hard or expensive.
They leave because they feel invisible. Disconnected. Unknown.
When students do not form friendships, routines, and a sense of place, they disengage.
Seven: Failing to Connect Dining to Retention and Persistence
Even as evidence mounts, many campuses will continue to treat dining and retention as separate conversations.
By 2026, institutions that fail to connect the dots will continue to invest heavily in recruitment while leaking students out the back door.
Dining is the most consistent, daily point of contact between students and the institution. When designed intentionally, it stabilizes routines, fosters connection, and anchors belonging.
Ignoring this relationship is not neutral.
It is costly.
Eight: Scapegoating Meal Plans Instead of Fixing Mediocre Dining Programs
By 2026, many campuses will continue to blame meal plans for student dissatisfaction when the real issue is the quality, variety, relevance, and experience of the dining program itself.
Meal plans are an easy target. They are visible, financial, and poorly understood. When dining lacks energy, responsiveness, or connection to student life, the structure of the plan becomes the scapegoat.
This misdiagnosis allows institutions to avoid the harder work of redesigning food, spaces, schedules, hospitality, and engagement. It confuses the container with the content.
Strong dining programs make meal plans feel valuable, flexible, and intuitive. Weak dining programs make any meal plan feel restrictive, regardless of price or structure.
By blaming meal plans instead of addressing program mediocrity, campuses delay meaningful reform and continue to frustrate students.
Nine: Investing Hundreds of Millions in Housing While Wrapping Residential Life Around Mediocre Dining
By 2026, some campuses will continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in new residence halls while leaving the campus dining program fundamentally unchanged.
These institutions will build beautiful buildings, modern amenities, and attractive rooms, then wrap residential life around a dining experience that lacks energy, relevance, flexibility, or community.
This is a structural mismatch.
Residential life does not succeed on architecture alone. It succeeds on daily experience. Dining is the primary daily experience that anchors residential patterns, shapes routines, and determines whether students leave their rooms and engage with one another.
When dining is mediocre, even the best housing struggles to deliver on its promise. Students retreat to their rooms. Isolation increases. Common spaces underperform. The return on capital investment quietly erodes.
Campuses that fail to align residential life investments with a strong, intentional dining program will discover that bricks and mortar cannot compensate for a weak social core.
Ten: Turning a Blind Eye to the Variety Paradox
By 2026, some campuses will continue to assume that offering more choice automatically leads to greater satisfaction.
In reality, the opposite is often true. Excessive, poorly curated variety overwhelms students, increases decision fatigue, and diminishes perceived quality. This phenomenon, known as the variety paradox, results in dining programs that look expansive on paper but feel confusing, inconsistent, and emotionally unsatisfying in practice.
When variety is not intentionally organized through SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™, students struggle to form routines, favorites, and social habits. Choice becomes noise. Satisfaction declines. Connection weakens.
This paradox is explored in greater depth in The Social Architecture Digest, where the relationship between choice, belonging, and behavioral outcomes is examined through the lens of lived campus experience. Leaders who want to understand why “more” so often produces less should review David Porter’s post on the variety paradox at porterkhouwconsulting.com.
Campuses that ignore this dynamic will continue to invest in breadth rather than coherence, missing the opportunity to use dining to anchor community and connection.
Final Thought: Be Your Own Advocate
By 2026, the campuses that succeed will be those willing to advocate for themselves.
You do not need to be a food service or dining subject matter expert to seek, secure, and benefit from one. In fact, the most effective leaders understand when independent expertise is essential and when conflicts of interest must be avoided.
Dining on most campuses is the single largest revenue-producing auxiliary service. It also has the potential to exert the single greatest influence on the day-to-day interpersonal experience and emotional well-being of students. Few decisions carry as much financial, cultural, and human consequence.
There is no free lunch.
Hope is not a strategy when inking a food service agreement. And neither is what many campuses still believe: that leverage and strength in a so-called partnership comes primarily from the ability to threaten termination for cause or for convenience, or that a food service provider will make financial sacrifices and simply do the right thing by prioritizing student outcomes.
In our experience reviewing and renegotiating hundreds of food service contracts across North America, this assumption has proven to be one of the most insidious forms of misdirection in higher education. About ninety-five percent of the time, it produces the opposite result. Rather than compelling compliance, it shifts power to the food service provider, ultimately forcing the institution to capitulate.
True leverage is not rooted in threats. It is rooted in clarity, independent thought, intentional design, and contractual precision. It comes from crafting solutions and programs through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and predictable abundance, and from designing agreements that align incentives with outcomes from the start.
There is one more quiet failure that too many campuses rationalize.
The failure to act.
Too often, leaders justify inaction with a noble sounding excuse: we do not have enough time to do this right, so let us simply extend the food service contract for another year. That decision feels safe. It feels prudent. It feels temporary.
In reality, it is one of the most consequential choices an institution can make.
Extending a contract without addressing structural misalignment delays progress, compounds mediocrity, and sends a clear signal that convenience outweighs courage. Another year quickly becomes another cycle. Another cohort of students experiences the same missed opportunity for connection and belonging.
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the willingness to act despite it.
A more contemporary way to say it comes from leadership research rather than Hollywood: courage is choosing the harder right over the easier wrong.
Which independent food service subject matter expert you hire matters. Experience matters. Wisdom matters. Institutional knowledge and historical context matter.
The campuses that thrive will be those that saddle up anyway. Those who choose independent thought over default decisions, intentional design over delay, and human outcomes over institutional comfort.
That choice remains available.
Time is not neutral. It either serves your students or erodes their experience while you wait.
