Try sitting with Gordon Gee's words for a few minutes, particularly the ones where he says our universities are isolated and arrogant. You might find yourself feeling a bit uncomfortable because the isolation he describes isn't just an Ivy League problem or a flagship state university problem, it's prolific in the mid-tier space too.
Gee says that almost every university in this country is carrying a structural deficit and we just haven't been willing to admit it. That stings in a particular way when you are tuition-dependent and your online growth strategy was supposed to be the answer to the downward financial pressures. When the projections miss by 100 percent, you can't simply and quietly reforecast and move on. You will be forced to determine if the problem was execution, pricing, program design, or something deeper. I'm going to suggest it's all of those, even the something deeper.
I've never been a fan of it, but this is a situation where we would benefit from looking into the rearview mirror. For tuition-dependent mid-tier private universities, the missed projections are going to be painful, but oddly clarifying. They'll say something real about what our universities are and what they are not.
The mid-tier privates that survive the next decade won't be the ones that planned the best. They'll be the ones that listened the hardest and were brutally honest with themselves when they had to be.
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