The risk is not just limited to big corporations or banks, to nonprofit organizations, government agencies and organizations but it also appears in higher education organizations. However, risk management practices in academia appear to be significantly less developed than in much of the corporate world. Every higher education institution deals with external and internal factors that can influence the performance of their tasks and goals and these factors are in fact the risks that higher education institutions are faced with. At an institutional level, risks can affect either positively or negatively the university's ability to operate as a business and/or deliver its strategic objectives. The aim of this article is to identify the main risks in the Romanian academic institutions and to determine the causes of their occurrence. The types of risk identified and analyzed in this paper are: strategic, financial, operational and academic.