Ideas Are Easy. Execution Is Hard.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what separates the higher education leaders who change their institutions from those who simply talk about change. Every president, provost, and dean I've ever worked with and for was able to articulate a compelling vision of their unit or the university. And I think this is the easiest part of leadership because the language of transformation isn't hard to craft and employ. What's harder (and increasingly more rare) is the higher ed leader with the acumen and capabilities to turn that language into action.

I've long been drawn to colleagues and peers who share the traits of actionable leadership. They always specific and have low tolerance for ambiguity. They take ownership of priorities have owners, establish realistic timelines, and measure, measure again, and measure some more to ensure that efforts are tracking successfully. They're coalition builders and respectful of shared governance and the expertise of faculty, but they understand that not all decisions can or should be made in committee. This is where they demonstrate the most important traits of balance, prioritization and managed risk. They listen widely, decide, and adjust as they learn. They hold humility and resolve at the same time, which I think is one of the hardest things to do for any leader.

My worry is that we just don't have nearly enough of these leaders at a time when they are needed most. Evaporating enrollments, ballooning deficits, eroding public trust, AI, unrecoverable research funding... These are exactly the existential crises that call for leaders who can move quickly and confidently from idea to impact. If we can't or won't value the traits of action among our leaders to best navigate and survive the next 10 years, our institutions will rapidly drift into obsolesce and failure. 

Leadership Training Circa 1981

If you've spent more than a minute working in higher ed, you know that we're never at a loss for "leadership development" opportunities. Some are internal to our institutions (HR-type workshops) but most of it comes in the form of workshops, seminars and short programs offered by an array of consultants, professional associations, think tanks, and accrediting agencies. 

My sense is that this method of leadership development has far exceeded it's usefulness and applicability. Training current or emerging higher leaders how to "understand your own reaction and response to outside environmental factors," or how to "explore your impact on your team and learn ways to positively leverage your influence to increase trust and encourage action" isn't going to equip leaders with the tools to successfully navigate the existential crises battering higher ed. Learning how to "influence institutional initiatives by embodying core skills of collaboration, innovation, and exploration" isn't going to help the senior leader looking wide-eyed at evaporating traditional enrollments, rapidly eroding public trust in higher education, and an industry being reshaped by AI.

The best universities that are equipped culturally and operationally for rapid response have trained differently. They've run the enrollment and budget crisis simulations. They've trained their senior leaders with actual financial fluency so they can look beyond the digits on a balance sheet and make informed decisions about closing programs, merging units, and cutting costs. As I've suggested before, the foundation of this type of leadership is action and courage. That leadership seminar offered by that consulting firm isn't going to prepare or empower your leadership team to make the hard decisions that place survival before the mission. What we've lacked for years and desperately need at this moment is the training and preparation that equips our capable and competent leaders with the confidence and tools to act decisively under pressure.

The Failure of Operational Leadership

I'm a "leadership" junkie. Increasingly, I'm drawn to books, articles, posts and commentary relating to what higher ed needs in its leaders at this moment of reflection and inflection. Not surprising, much of the conversation is focused on presidents and provosts. And while this is a necessary and important focus, it's missing the operational leader tier of individuals tasked with turning strategy into outcomes. My experience and sense is that there are a lot of individuals in these mid-tier operational roles who are immobilized by the existential crises battering higher ed and struggling to reconcile their roles and authority with their leadership capabilities (or lack thereof). 

The retort, "That decision is above my pay grade" has always frustrated me when working with operational-level leaders. It's almost always a skittish reflex to elicit a chuckle, but to me it exposes the frailty of individuals placed in roles where mistakes and failures are highly visible. When afforded the opportunity and responsibility, I've worked hard to move these individuals forward by equipping them with the training, preparedness and support that frames decisive leadership. Of all leaders within higher ed, these are the individuals who need to do what has to be done, when it has to be done, as well it can be done. And then do it that way all the time. (Yes, that's an old Bobby Knight quip about discipline, but I've long found it applicable beyond the hardwoods.)

Real leadership from operational staff takes courage. Not reckless, willy-nilly decision making. Just the belief in yourself and a willingness to make a decision with a clear scope, rationale thinking, and positive or negative results you can stand behind. The best operational leaders I've known are capable of doing this because they can quickly and confidently determine which decisions don't require permission from someone in the provost's office to enact.

The challenge, of course, is that higher ed is a weird place with plenty of pockets of make-believe. The entire system is full of silos, egos and unqualified senior leaders who routinely answer the wrong questions and make inexplicably poor decisions only to look downstream at the operational level with that "Well, we're waiting," expression on their faces. At institutions where this is the accepted form of senior leadership, operational leaders need to be capable and comfortable with carrying "corrective but aligned" strategies down to their teams. Then they need to be courageous enough to carry the ground-level reality back up to senior leadership. That is the core competency of a highly effective operational leader.

Train, prepare and empower your operational leaders, because this is the leadership tier where real institutional resilience is created. 

Leadership & Workforce Pell

It's been interesting and frustrating to watch universities (particularly private universities) stare blankly out the window as they pass the Workforce Pell billboard. 

Workforce Pell took effect in July, but too many university leaders see it as a community college thing. I'm seeing it as a test of sorts for how effectively universities can respond to a rapidly changing definition of "value" in higher education. The universities that pass the test have or will quickly develop a plan. This doesn't have to be complicated, but it does need to have the university authentically consider if workforce development is or will be a core part of the institution's mission or simply an opportunistic revenue experiment. If the answer is a serious and financially supported commitment to workforce development, the plan is easy. 

First, get into the room with the right state leaders in the Governor's office. Bring reams of labor-market evidence, your catalog of market-sensitive credit and non-credit programs, and employer commitments that demonstrate your university is all in on workforce development. Second, ground the presentation and the ask for funding in reasonable and achievable outcomes. If you don't have the program completion, job placement and earnings data required for funding eligibility, demonstrate how your current reporting infrastructure and data ecosystem will be deployed to measure and capture what works AND what doesn't. Third (and this is critically important), connect your current and future programs to the on-ramp(s) that Workforce Pell is intended to create. If the connectivity isn't already there to move students directly into qualified employment, identify how you're going to redesign your programs for that necessary connectivity. Fourth, align your institutional leadership and governance to cross academic affairs, financial aid, enrollment, and external relations. Finally, start small and build your credibility (don't kid yourself that you already have this). A few really well-designed, well-resourced efforts with early results will quickly build your reputation as a serious participate in workforce development.

Like many things in higher ed, this isn't hard. You just need to commit to being all in or step aside and cede the space to your regional community colleges. There's some small amount of dignity in admitting that your university just can't or wont do what's necessary.

Rethinking The Studio

This isn't specific to PCE or university leadership, but it's a topic that is increasingly important to universities that have in-sourced their online course production. 

For decades (and certainly the 26 years I've been working in online, distance and technology-mediated education), higher ed has operated under a phantom guidance to keep instructional videos under 8 minutes. The evidence informing the guidance is based on some very old research that suggested learner engagement with video content tends to drop off after 6 to 7 minutes, so the threshold instructional designers began using is 8 minutes.

A team at Northeastern University is pushing back on the "best practice" of 8 minute videos. Their argument is not that the eight-minute guideline is wrong, but they are suggesting that applying it uniformly across all disciplines misses important aspects of how learners process content. A conceptual video on business strategy can benefit from 8 or fewer minutes. A technical walkthrough of an algebra derivation or an accounting calculation might need more time as the learner has to follow an unbroken sequence of steps to master the skill. The Northeastern team suggests that chopping that sequence into shorter clips to satisfy an arbitrary time limit actually hurts retention and disrupts learning.

I see this suggestion as an opportunity for universities to reconsider how they are allocating budget, staff and faculty time on costly studio-based production for video-heavy online courses. There are too many universities now running video production through a full studio model with scripted sessions, camera crews, editing queues, and post-production polish that gets applied to every piece of video content. That model worked when video length was assumed to be short AND alternate methods of video production were sketchy at best.

This is where the growing set of AI enabled video production tools needs to be seriously considered. Even the most inept operations director should be able to recognize the efficiencies afforded by screen capture platforms that can record workflows and automatically generate narrated, edited video in a fraction of the time needed in a studio. Document-to-video platforms are turning scripts and slide decks into finished, narrated videos without a camera or a studio. AI assisted editing tools are handling captioning and pacing adjustments that used to require a team of video editors. Work that used to take days is now completed in a few hours.

None of this means that high-production studios an university campuses are irrelevant. Conceptual, narrative driven videos where an instructor's delivery and framing can genuinely shape a student's mental model can still benefit from high-end costly production. But the universities that are still routing every instructional video through a single, uniform, high cost production pipeline should be aggressively looking at AI-assisted and lower cost methods of video production. Matching production intensity to cognitive demand, rather than to a one size fits all workflow, will bring the cost of online course, and specifically video production, down dramatically.

PCE Units And Institutional Health

The pace of nonprofit university and college closures and mergers is accelerating due primarily to deepening debt caused by evaporating tuitional enrollment. Financial analysts and rating agencies have been suggesting for years that even well-established brands with exceedingly high tuition dependency are increasingly at risk as they double-down on their (expensive) full-time residential experience.

I'll suggest yet again that tuition dependent privates with strong professional & continuing education divisions have at their disposal a means of creating alterative revenue streams not tied to the traditional enrollment numbers driving closures and mergers. A quick non-rigorous review of the shrinking concentration of mid-tier privates indicates that those universities with well-resourced PCE units demonstrate to the market, analysts and rating agencies a type of institutional resilience necessary to adapt to the dramatic changes sweeping higher ed (see Villanova, Case Western, Wake Forest, and Lehigh as exemplars). 

Mid-tier privates at financial risk should be aggressively leaning into and elevating their PCE division's role as a central element of their long-term strategic and financial planning. This means giving PCE leadership a role in enrollment and budget-planning rather than treating their units as self-funding side operation. Use the market-facing data PCE units have historically depended on to inform decisions that traditional undergraduate enrollment management is slow to consider. Build-out flexible degree pathways offered by the PCE unit into the university's most market-sensitive degrees (stackable certificates into bachelor's or master's completion, accelerated bachelor's-to-master's tracks for working adults). Use your PCE unit as recruiting funnel and retention tool. Invest in your PCE division now and position your shaky mid-tier tuition dependent private university with a genuine asset.

PCE Units Know What Lean Looks Like

You can't open the higher ed news and not find a lead story about University X laying off staff to shore up massive budget deficits. The worst of the layoffs and subsequent freezes are just starting to hit the large concentration of mid-tier tuition dependent privates confronting tightening margins and evaporating traditional enrollments. Those of us who've living through similar cycles before know that these tired and stale institutional decisions don't really save the pennies suggested in the press releases. What these decisions always result in is slowed innovation, strained staff and faculty operating with no slack, and systemic morale crises.

Professional & continuing education units have operated under intense budget scrutiny for longer than the rest of most universities writ large because their programs and services are judged directly on meeting their intended outcomes and generating positive revenues. As a result, many PCE divisions have had to operate with lean staffing models built around flexible, cross-trained roles rather than narrowly defined positions. Any private university considering layoffs and a hiring freeze should first study how its PCE unit is structured and operates, and then apply a similar integrated cross-training model to stretched academic and back-office departments. 

A round of layoffs and yet another hiring freeze applied uniformly across every department will cut capacity from areas already running on fumes while leaving less examined parts of the institution untouched. This is the way it happens regardless of how intentional or surgical the university claims it's being. Privates that use their PCE unit's lean staffing practices as a model will be more likely to implement salary+fringe budget reductions that result in real savings without gutting the place entirely.