Technology has become essential to institutional success across K–12 schools, colleges, and universities. From AI-driven tutoring platforms and digital assessments to LMS integrations and campus security systems, technology for education has become foundational to efficiency.
Yet, tech procurement is more complex than ever.
There are literally thousands of AI tools on the market now. Spending on AI technology for education last year alone was nearly $6 billion and it’s expected to grow 5X by 2030. The sheer number of tools being used is expanding as well. The EdTech Top 40 Report tracked some 64 billion interactions across 10,000 different products and showed that academic institutions accessed an average of nearly 3,000 different tech tools annually—more than 1,500 every month.
Navigating this crowded, fast-moving landscape requires more than just buying the latest platform. It takes a strategic approach to maximize the return on your investment while avoiding redundancy and budget waste. Cost-efficient tech procurement is both more challenging than ever and more necessary at the same time.
McKinsey research shows that nearly 90% of organizations are undergoing some form of digital transformation, including academic institutions, with varied results. Your approach to tech procurement will play a significant role in your success and how you serve your staff and students. For example, the 2025 EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report shows that students who believe their campus has cutting-edge technology report 85% higher levels of satisfaction with their academic institution.
Making smart decisions about the procurement of technology must start well before any RFPs are issued. Treating edtech procurement as a lifecycle process rather than a one-time purchase is essential to delivering long-term value. Best practices require a focus on four distinct steps:
Each stage requires collaboration, data-driven decision-making, and forward-looking planning. Let’s break down each step.
Every successful tech initiative begins with asking the right questions: What problem are we solving? What outcomes are we targeting? How will success be measured?
Best practices include:
Effective tech procurement must align your technology decisions with institutional goals. When technology directly supports core objectives, it’s easier to justify investment and secure support across your campuses.
Structured tools like gap analyses and digital maturity models help assess your current tech landscape. These frameworks reveal outdated systems, unmet needs, and areas where new solutions could create value—while offering a shared language for stakeholder discussions.
At this stage, it’s smart to include voices from across your institution and not just IT and finance.
One of the most overlooked steps is involving users. More than 60% of teachers believe they should be the primary decision-makers in classroom tech, but only 38% are typically consulted during the procurement process. This can be challenging when you are trying to standardize tech solutions, especially across multiple campuses. Yet, failing to involve staff and other stakeholders early in the process can hinder edtech adoption, especially when it comes to higher ed tech.
Once your needs are defined, it’s time to explore solutions. But with tens of thousands of products on the market, making the right choice is harder than ever. Among your choices will be whether cloud-based solutions are your best fit.
By 2026, cloud-based SaaS solutions are projected to make up more than 60% of edtech company offerings. While this allows for more flexible, scalable deployment, it also introduces new concerns around security, licensing, and integration.
A few best practices when evaluating technology for education include:
While pricing is important, choosing an edtech solution based solely on upfront cost can lead to long-term inefficiencies. Instead, define selection criteria that reflect the broader needs of your institution and the total cost of ownership over the long term. Factor in licensing, training, maintenance, support, and future upgrades.
Tech procurement solutions should integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, whether that’s your SIS, LMS, or campus IT infrastructure. Tools that don’t integrate seamlessly with other platforms typically create more work and can force data into silos.
Academic institutions, especially when there’s a research arm, are attractive targets for hackers. Reports show that campuses face more than 2,500 cyberattacks every week. Suppliers must have military-grade encryption and a proven track record of identifying and mitigating security threats.
Suppliers must also meet institutional data governance policies and regulatory compliance for privacy.
Tech solutions must be able to grow and adapt to your evolving needs. Whether you’re serving a single department or multiple campuses, scalability should be part of the evaluation.
Even if your technology procurement yields the best tech solutions, they can fall short if users don’t adopt and embrace them. Tools should be intuitive for both staff and students, with minimal training required. User experience is key to adoption.
To protect long-term flexibility, look for open standards and ensure contracts include clear exit clauses. You always want the ability to make decisions that benefit your campuses, and locking into proprietary technology can make it complex and expensive to move forward with other suppliers.
Procurement success is about choosing the right solution and making sure it gets used. Poor implementation is one of the most common reasons technologies fail to deliver ROI.
True success comes when technology for education is fully implemented, embraced by users, and integrated into daily workflows. Without a strong rollout strategy, you are taking a risk. Make sure your implementation includes these four strategies.
Start with comprehensive training plans for all user groups. Each audience has unique needs, and ensuring everyone feels confident using the tool is critical to early adoption.
Implementation doesn’t stop at go-live. Establish accessible technical support channels, create user resources like FAQs, video demonstrations, or quick-start guides, and prepare IT teams to troubleshoot common issues.
There’s a truism in the procurement of technology. Technology introduces change. Change can generate resistance.
Make sure you are thinking about change management strategies and how to communicate the “why” behind any new edtech solution you’re introducing.
Without thoughtful rollout and support, edtech tools can quickly become shelfware. Unused licenses can crush your budgets without delivering value.
How do you know if your investment is working?
Defining clear success metrics at the outset, and revisiting them regularly, is key to determine whether you need to scale, revise, or retire a solution.
ROI should track back to your initial assessment, establishing benchmarks for comparison. Use performance dashboards, surveys, and usage data to monitor outcomes and meet with your suppliers regularly to review performance.
Typical KPIs that academic institutions measure include:
The bottom line though is whether the tech solutions you put in place are meeting the goals you set when you started. That’s not a given. The majority of digital transformations don’t yield the expected results, so it’s crucial that you monitor performance and discuss any shortfalls with your vendors.
The closer the relationship you build with your suppliers, the more effective your tech procurement strategies will be. It’s smart to share your long-term goals and edtech planning with your partners and ask about their education technology development roadmaps to ensure they remain aligned. Strategic partnerships can often influence product development to make sure you have access to the tech solutions you need.
Here’s a quick checklist that summarizes each of the four key steps and the best practices you should employ.
| Needs assessment |
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| Vendor selection |
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| Implementation |
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| Evaluation and ROI tracking |
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Even with the best intentions, procurement professionals often face systemic barriers. So, what gets in the way?
Overcoming these challenges requires a shift from reactive to proactive procurement planning. You need to centralize procurement wherever possible and streamline your RFP process. Even the most efficient universities, colleges, and school districts will take months to research, write, solicit, and review proposals.
And just because you’ve put together a strong RFP doesn’t mean you get the response you want from suppliers. Typical response rates now only range from just 30% to 50%. Even when you target a select group of suppliers, response rates are only averaging 60%. Many tech suppliers are juggling as many as 10,000 RFPs a year and they’re only responding to large-scale implementations.
The solution? Leveraging cooperative contracts aggregates demand against hundreds or thousands of academic institutions. These cooperative agreements represent significant business for suppliers, who are more likely to participate and provide greater volume discounts.
Cooperative purchasing contracts allow you to access competitively solicited contracts without having to run your own procurement process from scratch. This approach can deliver:
E&I Cooperative Services is the only member-owned nonprofit cooperative exclusively focused on education. With hundreds of competitively awarded contracts and a deep understanding of the education landscape, E&I regularly helps procurement teams:
For institutions managing technology for education, E&I’s cooperative model offers a trusted, efficient, and education-aligned path forward. With four simple steps, we can help you improve your tech procurement whether you’re looking for higher ed tech or education technology for K–12.
There is no cost to become a member of E&I and no minimum purchase obligation. You are not locked into any particular suppliers or contracts. You’re free to work with whoever you want. In fact, many of the vendors you may already be working with already have cooperative agreements with E&I, which can lower your costs immediately.
Members play an active role in guiding solicitations, helping to ensure the right technology and edtech companies are part of the mix. For 90 years, E&I Cooperative Services has helped members achieve their procurement goals by working together to find the best solutions at the lowest possible cost.
E&I’s category experts can also support your procurement strategy. They are deeply familiar with higher ed tech trends, vendor roadmaps, and contract negotiation. This knowledge can help make sure you align your technology procurement with your strategy, provide benchmarks and product comparisons, and recommend suppliers that fit your needs.
As a nonprofit and member-owned cooperative, E&I shares proceeds with members in the form of patronage refunds based on annual participation. Annual disbursements typically exceed several million dollars across members.
Additionally, many E&I contracts include built-in rebates that provide immediate savings or credits back to member institutions based on purchase volume. These contract-specific rebates work alongside patronage refunds to maximize your return on every dollar spent, creating multiple layers of value that general-purpose cooperatives simply cannot match.
Edtech spending will only continue to grow, and so will the pressure on procurement professionals to make every dollar count. Whether you’re evaluating your current portfolio or preparing to invest in new tools, now is the time to rethink your procurement approach.
Explore how E&I Cooperative Services can support your next EdTech procurement strategy.
What makes edtech procurement different from other types of purchases in education?
Edtech procurement requires balancing technical compatibility, user adoption, data security, and long-term ROI and aligning with institutional goals. Unlike physical assets, tech tools rapidly evolve, requiring ongoing evaluation and strategic implementation.
Ready to explore how E&I Cooperative Services can support your next EdTech procurement strategy? View hundreds of cooperative contracts including leading edtech companies, or apply for membership to leverage education technology expertise and achieve your procurement goals.
