I've also moved over to Laravel for the most part, but I like the minimalism of CodeIgniter, and still use it occasionally. It's actually to CI's advantage that it has grown so conservatively: it's still fast, secure, reliable, quick to deploy and upgrade, and there's not much to learn when coming back after years of absence.
(My only real gripe has been the lack of a good Model base class, which led me to roll my own: https://github.com/lukifer/TheMissingModel)
Best of luck to BCIT, I hope they keep building on CI's core strengths and resist the temptation to make radical changes.