Northern Illinois University, Kishwaukee and Waubonsee colleges, are grappling with artficial intelligence, a changing work landscape and the loss of federal funding.

The heads of those northern Illinois higher education institutions talked about those changes during an annual business leaders event on Tuesday hosted by the DeKalb County Economic Development Corporation in DeKalb.

Kishwaukee College President Laurie Borowicz said the past decade – from a budget impasse to the COVID-19 pandemic – has been a whirlwind for higher education.

“Now we’re just in a world of uncertainty,” Borowicz said. “Dr. [Lisa] Freeman, I know she’s lost federal funding. We lost a big federal grant. We got a 10-day notice that a multimillion-dollar grant was going to be gone in 10 days. This is now our reality.”

Freeman, the president of NIU, did not talk directly about the change in federal funding that was mentioned by Borowicz. Those changes in federal policy spurred Kishwaukee College to make unprecedented financial decisions.

“As far as the money, we are budgeting differently,” Borowicz said. “This year we budgeted in contingencies that we’ve budgeted in before because we know that we’ve got these federal grants that could go away.”

During what was billed as a “fireside chat” by the economic corporation, Freeman said that 90% of NIU students receive some amount of financial aid.

“Our students make up a big part of the population in DeKalb city and DeKalb County, and the challenges that they experience are the same challenges that the community experiences,” Freeman said, stressing the need to support students – who she said often have “complicated lives.”

Dozens of business leaders, city and county politicians, and community members met at Faranda’s Bangquets, 302 Grove St., DeKalb, on Tuesday morning for the annual business event.

Melissa Amedeo, executive director of the DeKalb County Economic Development Corporation, moderated the panel-style interview with the three higher educational institution leaders. Kishwaukee College is in Malta and Waubonsee Community College has campuses in Sugar Grove, Aurora and Plano. .

Waubonsee president Brian Knetl answered questions alongside Freeman and Borowicz. He said he likes to approach partnerships with other educational institutions through a lens of collaboration, not competition.

“We just had a meeting a couple of weeks ago about,” Knetl said. “We’ve always had good transfer agreements with NIU, but we’re looking at what that next level of transfer looks like.”

The goal is for every credit earned at Waubonsee Community College to be eligible to be transferred to NIU, he said.

Knetl, Freeman and Borowicz all said changing technology, including AI, has significantly altered how their educational institutions operate in recent years. For NIU, that means taking an approach Freeman called “high-tech, high-touch.”

“If you’re a student living in our residence hall and you stop going to class, the first notification that you get is from our mission AI chatbot that tells you that your absence has been noticed and you better get to class,” Freeman said.

If the “high-tech” part doesn’t work, a residence hall advisor will knock on the student’s door, Freeman said.

The annual business breakfast event was attended by numerous members of the business community, including Meta. Tara Tenorio, of Meta’s DeKalb data center, told the crowd that she admires the community’s tenacity and desire to build its business sector.

“Every time I look out into this room, I see a community not just of dreamers and visionaries who have brought such tremendous growth to the region, but also of folks who are willing to dig in and help,” Tenorio said.

On Monday night, dozens packed into a DeKalb Public Library room for a city public hearing related to a proposed 560-acre data center campus by Endeavour Energy, which also has a data center in Aurora. The DeKalb City Council has yet to approve the development, though city officials have publicly backed it to date.

In remarks during the hearing, local businessman Jamie Walter of Whiskey Acres Distilling Co. said he believes DeKalb is a “a nexus” and leaders should carefully balance the need for economic growth with maintaining the city’s “agricultural character.”

During her closing statements, Amedeo said she doesn’t think DeKalb County needs to abandon its agricultural heritage to make space for business developments.

“It is important to understand that this is an agricultural county,” Amedeo said. “We are not going to try to just do away with agriculture and bring in all these businesses, because agriculture is a key part of our life nationally.”