The Stench Of Uneaten Crow

SVP of Somemoronicjob: “Thanks again for hiring me. My last job wasn't working out anyway.”

Tired & Clueless Senior Leaders: “Oh, you're most welcome. So tell us again what we hired you to do?”

SVP of Somemoronicjob: “I convinced you that I was going to increase your online enrollments by 300% in four years.”

Tired & Clueless Senior Leaders: “That's right! So how is that going?"

SVP of Somemoronicjob: “Well, blah blah, external exigencies, lie obfuscate and lie some more, market decline, consultant word vomit, growth and scale, blah blah blah, when I sold sugar water, blah, blah, blah, namedrop, more lies and word vomit, blah blah, look at this slide with numbers on it, lie.”

Tired & Clueless Senior Leaders: “Wow, that's an impressive update with quasi-business terms and phrases we'll pretend to understand. So what you're saying is our online enrollments aren't increasing and we'll never see a 300% increase.”

SVP of Somemoronicjob: “That's one way to look at it. I think it's better if I lie, obfuscate and lie some more. But yes, you're basically correct.”

Tired & Clueless Senior Leaders: “Understood. Tell you what, since you're so confident in your abject failure to deliver what we pay you a ridiculous amount of money to do, we're going to expand your authority and give you this other mission-critical line of university business. It only seems fair.”

SVP of Somemoronicjob: “Thanks. I'll get right on that. Just let me put my carpetbag back in the closet.”

~

Increasingly, universities (particularly private universities) are buying into amazingly ludicrous proposals from failed consultants and higher ed hacks that promise to increase online enrollments by 300% in five years. The proposals all include uninformed promises of hundreds of millions of dollars of gross revenues. The disingenuous hack gets hired and the numbers get touted for as long as it's convenient.

Then a year into the morass, the consultant-turned-employee talks their way out of the failures and massive enrollment misses in impressively deceptive ways. But there is never an apology and no crow is ever eaten publicly. Worse yet, there is no institutional reckoning. Leadership and boards never ask why the projection was 300% and therefore are unwilling to question the result of .2%, but they will happily accept the new plan with down-graded numbers authored by the same unctuous hack. The failure isn't named, just absorbed by the institutional habit of never admitting to strategic errors.

This is unique to higher ed. In any other sector, an executive who promises the board 300% growth and delivers a fraction of it does not get a bigger portfolio. A startup founder who burns through runway chasing fantasy metrics doesn't get handed a second company to run. In any other business, missed targets (especially those that were earmarked to address revenue shortfalls) trigger intense scrutiny, a litany of questions, and often termination.

In the Land of Make Believe, higher ed's weird immunity to accountability derives mostly from its mushy culture of consequence-free ambition. Bold pronouncements made by oily sugar water salesmen backed by visionless and unimaginative head-nodding robots cost nothing to make and nothing to abandon. And that's the structural failure of higher ed. The structures never correct overpromising and failure, they only permit it to continue. Every fantastical new plan blurs the reality until someone on the board asks what happened to the last plan.

What makes this so disheartening is how the story always ends. The greasy and doughy consultant-turned-employee who talked their way into the job eventually moves on to the next one, leaving behind a trail of disruption and wasted time and money. And the staff who stay behind are left to clean up the wreckage and wait for senior leadership to hire the next liar with a grand line of bullsh*t.

Doing More With Less Is A Lame Excuse

My friend and colleague Michael Jones' recent piece for UPCEA makes the compelling case that applying entrepreneurial discipline through online and professional continuing education (PCE) units is highly effective, particularly for mid-tier tuition dependent private universities.

Michael is 100% correct in his claim that PCE units "have always operated closer to the market than the rest of the university," generating alternative revenues and absorbing unfunded mandates that the traditional academic side cannot or refuses to take on. And this is precisely why deconstructing PCE units in this moment of enrollment and budget crises is a catastrophic strategic error. Mid-tier privates reeling under these exigencies are choosing, in effect, to disable the one unit within the university built to reach the market that represents their most realistic opportunity for alternative revenues.

Once again, I'll note how utterly disappointing it is to watch mid-tier privates consolidating their PCE units into hack back-office administrative units led by unctuous and doughy consultants-turned-employees with no experience in adult, online, or workforce education. Michael's framework describes exactly what is playing out at many of these privates. Stripping away and dismissing PCE expertise and replacing it with uninspired robotic staff and disingenuous consultants is creating chaos, lost market share, additional unbudgeted costs, and an overall paralysis that ill-equipped and wilting "leaders" are passing off as reorganization.

We all know that non-traditional initiatives outside a tuition dependent private university's traditional line of business (residential, full-time undergraduate education) never survive when they are led by unqualified people lacking any real skill, self-awareness, or vision. Michael keenly observes that PCE units succeed because they are led by and staffed with people who do things the traditional university cannot. So a hack back-office unit filled with transactional dullards unfamiliar with the professional & continuing education space will simply default to what they know, which is too often simple self-preservation. 

Michael's closing argument reminds us that now is the most critical time to lean into and exploit PCE units because they are already serving the "learners the demographic cliff is pushing away from traditional pipelines." Private universities that gut or bury their PCE units are cutting off their own future enrollment base, replacing market expertise with generic administrative slop incapable of executing on anything and calling it a cost-saving measure.

You Can't Beat the Regional Publics

Risepoint's recent piece on AASCU institutions suggests that regional public universities are structurally built for online growth. They carry name recognition, decades of legislative and community trust, workforce-aligned program portfolios, and tuition price points that undercut private universities. 

I can’t agree more.

Mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities, on the other hand, don't have the same attributes or conditional luxuries. Their name recognition is often based on sports or a niche program, which have no relevance for the online learner market. Their tuition sits well above the online market's price sensitivity, and they don't have a governor's office reinforcing their legitimacy to adult learners. For mid-tier privates, online growth has to be built against regional publics that own the online price-and-product space, not against the university’s aspirational or actual peers.

And this is exactly why schools and colleges of professional & continuing education (PCE) matter at tuition-dependent privates. PCE units are where these universities have historically learned to operate outside the traditional undergraduate model with flexible scheduling, workforce partnerships, corporate tuition agreements, accelerated formats, non-traditional admissions, and pricing structures that don't map to the spiraling discount-rate. PCE units are the only part of these institutions having already solved for adult-learner logistics, already built employer relationships, and already developed the muscle memory for iterating on programs quickly.

This is, again, why it's alarming and disappointing to watch so many private universities deconstructing or deprioritizing their PCE units, folding them into hack back-office administrative offices led by doughy consultants and uninspired transactional staff. Without a PCE unit's operating model, pricing flexibility, and market instincts, online enterprises at mid-tier tuition dependent privates will fail (and in some case, are already failing) catastrophically and shamelessly without accountability or “leadership” consequence.

When Universities Eat Themselves

My doctoral studies are in the domain of composition and rhetoric, and CCCC is the organization that significantly informed how I approach research and teaching. I and many of my colleagues are still reeling and left wondering why NCTE would disband CCCC given its sustained excellence and impact as a scholarly association that spanned disciplinary boundaries and barriers. NCTE says the decision was based on fiscal sustainability and governance problems, but rejected all proposals to correct the issues and dissolved the organization anyway.

I've been watching something structurally similar happening at private universities with their schools and colleges of professional & continuing education. With blind faith in uninformed online enrollment projections offered by consultants, leaders at these universities are deprioritizing or folding their PCE units into hack back-office administrative units because they think they'll save some pennies while they chase the unrealistic online revenues. Like NCTE, some of these universities hold muted disdain toward anything that doesn't fit their dying model of higher education, so their short-sighted and myopic views of PCE units serve as a false reassurance that they're making the best decision. This is especially egregious when these leaders try to justify their bad decisions with disingenuous tropes about evolving the organization or protecting the core. CCCC was told its "culture" threatened NCTE's nonprofit status, with zero explanation. PCE divisions are being told they no longer fit university brands, or that relocating their services, programs and mission under visionless administrators and bands of transactional robots will create operational efficiency. In both cases, "leadership" is trying hard to tidy up something that sits awkwardly within their fading imagine of a dying institution. 

What frustrates and saddens me most is the shortsightedness of it all. I don't think these leaders are bad. I do think they're uninformed, scared and casting about to do something that looks like control. But dissolving a mission-critical scholarly association or dismantling an established and successful PCE unit isn't control, it's just dumb.

LOL - The University Startup

I've noticed a pattern in job postings from mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities, the ones under increasing enrollment pressure and reeling from massive budget deficits, trying to staff "growth" divisions in floundering efforts to chase alternative revenue. The language in these job posts read like they were written by someone who watched one season of Shark Tank and asked Chat GPT to come up with something provocative. 

Candidates are told the roles demand physical presence because the problem solving and innovation that defines startup culture apparently only happens when you bump into a co-worker in the bathroom. Oh, and be ready to work evenings and weekends, because that's what real startups do. (NOTE: I worked for two successful entrepreneurial ventures and this is not what real startups do.) The postings all close with a hollow flourish about desiring people who want something more than just a job because what's happening at University X in a cobbled together back-office of uninspiring consultants and visionless robotic staff is different and special, as if working for a paycheck and stability is something only underwhelming employees seek.

I just have to shrug and laugh, because this is higher ed sadly but comically doing the corporate cosplay thing again. Those of us of a certain age likely remember the U.S. Navy's old and legendarily bad recruiting advertisement insisting that life on a ship is “not just a job, it's an adventure.” For universities trying this gaudy messaging to staff their ill-conceived back-offices, the efforts come off as desperate to a labor market that no longer assumes university jobs are stable.

Universities are, structurally and culturally, among the least startup-like organizations on the planet. Even ASU, the school that has done more than any university to brand itself as a disruptive, edutainment-forward, innovation-first university, runs its operations through the same calendars, traditions, bureaucracies, and governance structures as every other university. The "innovation" NEVER touches how the institution treats the people who staff it. Never. And this is the real embarrassment in the comical job postings. Strip away the "mission" and "we're doing something special and different" bullsh*t and you're left with a hiring advertisement that says you can't work remotely but you will work beyond standard business hours without compensation. When I look at this insulting messaging in the context of higher ed today, I see it as a small part of the flailing efforts of financially stretched institutions asking new hires to absorb flexibility, hours and work that a real business would appropriately budget, plan for and staff properly. Dressing up an under-resourced and dysfunctional operating model as a cultural virtue is just unctuous and dishonest, which are sadly increasingly acceptable characteristics at so many mid-tier privates.

The "Platform for Every Stage of Life" Already Exists

I read this article with some amount of shrugging and head shaking. It describes a future of learning that doesn't treat education as a series of separate products for separate moments, but imagines a "platform" that stays with a learner from K-12 through university through career changes and reskilling, updating itself as their life and career needs change.

For anyone working in professional & continuing education, this isn't a novel idea. What the article imagines is a College of Professional & Continuing Studies. These and similar schools and divisions (PCEs) are the "platforms" designed purposefully to follow a learner from foundational education into professional skill building with credentials tied to real outcomes. Maintaining a relationship with a learner that spans different stages in their life is exactly what PCE units have been doing for decades. Adults come back for a certificate. Professionals stack credentials as they move into new roles. Alumni return for bootcamps because their jobs change underneath them. Military-connected students move in and out of enrollment on crazy timelines. None of this is new for PCE units.

So I'm again left wondering (and increasingly disappointed) why some universities are actively folding their PCE divisions into hack back-office administrative units led by consultants and uninspiring transactional staff who don't understand the population they're serving, stripping away the innovation, flexibility and acumen necessary to meet the modern learner where they are. It's actually embarrassing to watch, particularly at mid-tier universities that brand themselves as "progressive" and "accessible" to all learners. Deconstructing the one unit built to have a decades-long relationship with a learner while your traditional business model collapses around you is a decision with catastrophic results. 

Not Everyone's Good News

I'm always looking for professional and continuing education (PCE) successes. There were quite a few this past week. Considered collectively, they present an interesting case study in strategy AND as a warning to every mid-tier tuition dependent private university leadership team actively devaluing or dismantling their school or college of professional & continuing education.

The success stories I found this past week illustrate what happens when a university deliberately unleashes a PCE unit as an engine of institutional innovation, building new degrees, launching targeted alternative credentials, experimenting with new formats, and responding directly to workforce needs faster than traditional academic units can or care to.

Our colleagues at the University of Virginia's School of Continuing and Professional Studies recently introduced a new Master of Change degree to prepare professionals to lead organizations through transformation, disruption, shifting markets, and constant change. This is precisely what a PCE unit does best when it's empowered to look outward and rapidly respond to what employers and employees actually need. York University's School of Continuing Studies launched a new Certificate in Disability Case Management, connecting professional education directly to an aging workforce. The curriculum was built from labor market signals. And Coe College announced a reduced credit, online bachelor's degree in business administration, challenging the traditional 120 credit model to make degree completion more accessible to working adults and to students bringing in prior college and professional experience. This is the kind of structural experimentation that PCE units are positioned to do, and that core academic units are structurally unable, or unwilling, to attempt.

Taken together, I see these success stories as examples of universities using their PCE units to test new ideas, build employer relationships, create flexible pathways, and anticipate what learners will need next, all while their traditional enrollment pipelines shrink and public confidence in the value of a their full-time residential experience degrades. And this is why I'm so alarmed by and disappointed in the number of universities (particularly mid-tier tuition dependent privates) that are moving in the opposite direction, actively de-prioritizing, downsizing, or dismantling their PCE schools and colleges. Some universities are folding their PCE into hack back-office administrative units led by consultants and soulless, transactional, unimaginative robotic staff. Others are treating their PCE units as discretionary cost centers to be cut as their budgets tighten, disregarding the adaptive capacity the rest of the institution is desperately searching for.

In my humble but informed opinion, this is a catastrophic strategic error, compounded by the timing of the utterly moronic and short-sighted thinking. PCE units are built to respond to disruption. Dismantling that institutional capacity now will cost universities needed alternative revenues and strip them of the one part of the institution structurally equipped to adapt at the speed the market is moving. These incomprehensible leadership decisions are especially indefensible when you consider how they are being made on gobblygook promises from "leaders" who are offering confident but uninformed pronouncements about how they will close massive budget deficits with online programs and corporate partnerships. If a university's best strategy is to defer it's future to the ignorant opinions of soda salesmen and opaque transactional administrative hacks, that university is gambling with its relevance and sustainability.

The future of higher education isn't going to be found in traditional classrooms. Increasingly, it's being built in the places where PCE units excel. Universities that recognize this and invest accordingly will be positioned to adapt. Universities that treat their PCE units as expendable will find, too late, that they dismantled the one part of the institution that could have helped save the rest of it.

2026 UPCEA BOnES Report

Reading the 2026 UPCEA BOnES report through the lens of mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities requires a bit of translation, since the survey doesn't segment directly by public/private control. It does, however, segment by institution size, budget size, and Carnegie classification, and those categories (medium institutions, M1/master's-level classification) cluster in roughly the same place mid-tier tuition-dependent privates do. So read this way, I find several troubling and challenging issues in the data that look like risk and exposure.

The clearest issue I find is in the structural disconnect of 39% of online enterprises running on general funds. For a well-endowed R1, this has never been an issue. For a tuition-dependent mid-tier private, it's more serious, because online is now being hailed as the one growth engine expected to offset flat or declining traditional enrollment. Leaders of online enterprises that run around with crappy PowerPoint slides and cliche talking points about entrepreneurial thinking (when they're general-fund dependent) are pinning their promised 300% online enrollment increases on a false premise. It's deplorably disingenuous. 

That gap between responsibility and accountability (and the lack thereof) shows up in the report at the strategic level. Eighty percent of respondents say leadership has named online a strategic priority, yet "strategic direction/governance" is the single most-cited barrier to success, ahead of funding. Mid-tier privates with dangerously thin administrative bench strength and pathetically weak starting lineups have no slack to absorb this ambiguity. So what we have are centralized budgets and reporting authority paired with courses and curricula scattered across semi-autonomous schools and colleges. Double-check the decision on who you've asked to operationalize that mess. Tuition-dependent privates with eight-digit deficits don't have the resources to carry expensive centralized online infrastructure when there is nothing in the pipeline from the schools/colleges and zero accountability at the top for delivering on previously hyped enrollment numbers and programs.

Competitive positioning data in the report indicate larger institutions differentiate on marketing and brand, while smaller, lower-budget, and M1-classified respondents (the segment closest to mid-tier tuition-dependent privates) lean hardest on price as their top competitive strategy. That's a structurally risky position for tuition dependent privates with the least pricing power and the thinnest margins, inviting a race to the bottom against better-resourced competitors. The mid-tier privates that have bought into poorly conceived online growth projections with high confidence paired with low resourcing will devolve their online enterprises into underinvested units borrowing capacity from academic departments that were never budgeted for it. That'll last one budget cycle, then the entire enterprise will implode.

Taken together, the BOnES report suggests rising revenue, rising strategic status, and growing administrative centralization for institutions with the scale to back it up. For mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities, the same trends point toward something closer to catastrophic failure through centralization without matching accountability, dependence on general funds, price-based competition, thin or absent program-launch reserves, and rising confidence set against anemic traditional enrollments and shrinking budgets. This is what the data are telling us. Someone just needs to listen to it.

Where Leadership Is Failing Fastest

Great article in Inc. which accurately notes that nonprofit college closures are increasing since 2024 and are projected to reach 370 closures or mergers within a decade. We're familiar with the causes, which principally include evaporating traditional age enrollments and failing budget models. The most common (and weak) corrective action for mid-tier tuition dependent privates has been to increase their discounted tuition rates, which on average is 57 percent, while net tuition revenues shrink, and new federal caps on student loans squeeze the financial model that all of higher ed is built on.

As the article goes on to suggest, the universities most exposed right now aren't the elite brands nor the low-cost regional publics and community colleges. The most exposed and at risk universities are the vast middle tier privates with modest name recognition, sticker prices well north of $50,000, and no clear differentiator beyond "we have DI sports and a climbing wall in the gym." These institutions can't compete on prestige or price without gutting the margins they depend on. And trying to hold the brand line while also trying to match discount-driven competitors with online programs is a failing strategy.

My disappointment, again, is in the leadership of so many of these universities. These are the individuals who have either spent their careers inside the traditional academic hierarchy or they're the unctuous consultants who sold limp plans to the traditionalists who don't know any better. Faced with an unprecedented collapse of the higher ed market, we're sadly watching this leadership class default to unimaginative instincts to protect the brand, defend selectivity, and invoke the university's legacy. That's the best they have. That, and maybe a bowl full of consultant word vomit tossed on the table to explain why the doughy and ill-conceived online growth plans are failing fast.

The universities that survive this decade will be led by individuals who understand expertise, abandon the comfort of tradition, and resolve to jettison the idiotic rantings of the consultants-turned-employees and their soulless transactional robots.

The BPS Is The Better Degree

I spent years teaching and researching how engineering students learn to write. What I found is that students get dramatically better at professional communication when they're placed in "high context" instructional engagement. These engagements include real design problems, real audiences with real information needs, and real consequences if the documentation or artifact is unclear or wrong. Context is the mechanism that makes learning stick.

I was thinking through my research again after reading this Fast Company piece about AI simulations replacing the traditional (and archaic) business school case study. The author's claims track mine pretty closely through a different disciplinary lens. Case studies are edited, static, and already resolved by the time students read them. Simulations that create contextual environments, especially the AI driven kind, are open ended. Students are permitted to make decisions, experience the consequences of those decisions, and adjust accordingly in a safe and low-risk learning environment. This is high context instruction by another name, but it still puts the student inside a live problem instead of having them read and respond to a polished narrative of a real or imagined business problem.

This leads to one of the limitations of traditional BA or BS degrees, which are built around specific academic disciplines. The curricula in these degrees are organized by theory, or canon, or by a department of research-oriented faculty. That's not invaluable to students, but it's not situating them inside live, cross-functional problems the way a simulation does. A Bachelor of Professional Studies (BPS) degree starts from a different premise entirely. In a BPS program, high context instruction often looks like a semester-long capstone where students work as a cross-functional team on a live problem brought in by an employer or community partner. Instead of a written case study to analyze after the fact, students interview real stakeholders, draft real documents and design real solutions, present to real clients, and revise based on real feedback. The "artifacts" they produce are assessed on how they hold up against an audience with genuine needs. The grade comes from whether the deliverables actually function.

If simulations can replace or supplement the case study, and if embedded, situated instruction produces stronger outcomes than lecture based courses, the degree format that can absorb that shift most naturally is the one already built around applied, cross disciplinary, problem centered learning. A BPS curriculum organizes around practice and problems, not a discipline, so it has no natural department to claim it in a traditional college. Traditional colleges carry decades of pressure to look theoretically rigorous, pushing them away from applied work. Their infrastructure, admissions calendars, credit logic, student population, assume a different kind of student than BPS programs serve. Schools and colleges of professional studies have the structures, staffing, and operations built around applied practice. Universities that want to lead in this shift cannot deconstruct their schools and colleges of professional and continuing education. They need to invest in it, staff it, and scale it as a first class college, because it is already built for the kind of learning higher education is now being asked to deliver.

When You Think Anyone Can Do Workforce Development

Read the Strada Institute report cited in this Inside Higher Ed article and try to reconcile the embarrassingly clunky way mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities are responding to the significant growth and demand for "real" workforce development programs and services.

Not surprising to anyone, the report noted that less selective institutions, public and private alike, retain far more graduates in state than elite ones do, which means these schools already have a natural advantage sitting untapped. And they already have the unit built to capture the opportunity. Schools and colleges of professional & continuing education have spent decades doing exactly the kind of industry facing, market responsive, program development work that is required right now.

My disappointment, again, is the abject failure we're seeing of leadership at so many private universities who make glittery pronouncements about how workforce development is strategic (which it is), only to then hand the work to a traditional academic school or some back office administrative unit led by sales people and transactional unimaginative robotic staff. Predictably, workforce development will wither and die at these privates. Deans and department chairs are trained and organized toward incentives that don't align with workforce development programming. Hack administrators, who function like consultants and talk wildly about entrepreneurial thinking but are hard-pressed to explain what that is, are woefully ill-equipped to do any actual work. When a non-credit workforce pathway program takes eighteen months to get through a Senate committee, you can guarantee that the employer has moved on and signed with the community college across town that spun up a program in 3 months. 

The better and smarter response for mid-tier tuition-dependent privates is to appropriately fund their schools and colleges of professional & continuing education. Let these units build the required alternative credentials, programs and pathways without routing everything through a curriculum committee in the School of Aspirational Networking. Treat these units as the institutional growth engines they are.

PCE Units As Transfer Advisory Hubs

I've been following this Inside Higher Ed series on Michigan's credit transfer overhaul. As is the case with so many private universities, too often the burden of proving that credits should count falls on the student. The fix Michigan is pursuing, which is based simply on shared principles, transparency, and institutions taking responsibility for the complexity they created, is built largely around community college articulation networks. It's a model that I (and others) have been advocating for years in the private university space.

Most private institutions (particularly mid-tier tuition-dependent privates) sit outside their community college-to-state school transfer ecosystems, primarily because they have ridiculously restrictive transfer requirements. But now there are financial and market exigencies that should be driving private universities to adopt more progressive and fluid transfer policies. And this is precisely where schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies excel.

PCE units specialize in the populations traditional undergraduate admissions and transfer policies weren't designed for (working adults, military-connected students, career-changers, and community college transfer students). PCE units already run prior learning assessment, portfolio review, and credit-for-experience processes. Note: these are mission critical functions that should never be located outside of an academic unit in a hack back-office administrative unit of visionless, transactional, robotic staff.

Imagine if a bold, mission-committed private university formalized this PCE capability and strength into something bigger that looks like an Advisory Hub for Transfer Success. Imagine a standing, no-strings-attached resource within the university for any community college student interested in transferring in. Imagine a single unit that publishes plain-language transfer guides the way public flagships do, offers free human-reviewed credit evaluations before a student applies, assigns single-point-of-contact trained advisors (not bots), and formally partners on behalf of the university with local community colleges. 

Yeah, just imagine it.

PME Digital Badge Program

This Professional Military Education (PME) Digital Badge Program can be adapted to any institution-specific program and is intended as a template. Text in brackets and italics marks items each adopting institution should replace with its own policies, offices, course numbers, contacts, and pricing.

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The [Institution Name] Professional Military Education Digital Badge Program is a comprehensive digital credentialing model through which a university recognizes and validates professional military education (PME) completed by Service members. Service members receive university-issued digital badges that translate their PME into academic recognition, creating pathways between military service and civilian education and careers.

PME Digital Badges acknowledge leadership and strategic education obtained through enlisted and officer professional military education courses. For example, primary and intermediate NCO/enlisted leadership academies, command and staff colleges, and senior service (war) colleges, or the equivalent professional development courses of the partnering service branch. Each badge stacks into one or more certificates awarded by the institution.

In this model, badges stack into two illustrative certificate tiers:

• A foundational-level certificate (referred to below as the “Strategic Leadership Certificate”)
• An advanced-level certificate (referred to below as the “Executive Leadership Certificate”)

Institutions may rename these certificates, add or remove tiers, and adjust the required badge combinations to fit their own academic programs and the PME structure of the service branch(es) they partner with.

Certificates are awarded upon “stacking” the required badges and successful completion of the associated academic coursework. This model assumes 3-credit-hour, 8-week online courses as an illustrative example; institutions should substitute their own credit-hour and term structures.

Certificate 1: Strategic Leadership Certificate (Example)

Enlisted Track – Option A (Junior/Mid-Level Enlisted Leaders)

• Primary Leadership Development Badge (for example, Airman Leadership School equivalent)
• Intermediate Leadership Development Badge (for example, NCO Academy equivalent)
• Course 1: Analysis and Decision Models for Leaders
• Course 2: Strategic Leadership

Enlisted Track – Option B (Senior Enlisted Leaders)

• Intermediate Leadership Development Badge (for example, NCO Academy equivalent)
• Senior Enlisted Leadership Badge (for example, Senior NCO Academy equivalent)
• Course 2: Strategic Leadership

Officer Track

• Company/Field-Grade Officer Development Badge (for example, Squadron Officer School equivalent)
• Course 2: Strategic Leadership

Certificate 2: Executive Leadership Certificate (Example)

Enlisted Track – Option A (Senior Enlisted Leaders)

• Intermediate Leadership Development Badge
• Senior Enlisted Leadership Badge
• Course 2: Strategic Leadership
• Course 3: Design Thinking for Organizations

Enlisted Track – Option B (Senior Enlisted Executive Leaders)

• Intermediate Leadership Development Badge
• Senior Enlisted Leadership Badge
• Senior Enlisted Executive Leadership Badge (for example, Chief-level academy equivalent)
• Course 3: Design Thinking for Organizations

Officer Track – Option A

• Company/Field-Grade Officer Development Badge
• Intermediate Officer Development Badge (for example, Command and Staff College equivalent)
• Course 2: Strategic Leadership
• Course 3: Design Thinking for Organizations

Officer Track – Option B

• Company/Field-Grade Officer Development Badge
• Intermediate Officer Development Badge
• Senior Officer Development Badge (for example, Senior Service/War College equivalent)
• Course 3: Design Thinking for Organizations

Badge names above are generic placeholders describing the type and level of PME they represent. Each institution should map these to the specific PME courses of the service branch(es) it partners with (for example, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, or Coast Guard equivalents).

Illustrative Credit Course Descriptions

The course titles and descriptions below are illustrative examples of the type of leadership coursework that can anchor a PME Digital Badge Program. Institutions should substitute their own course numbers, prerequisites, delivery formats, and learning platforms.

Course 1: Analysis and Decision Models for Leaders

This course introduces analysis and decision models for leaders. After taking this course, the student will be able to:

• Analyze their personal decision-making style and evaluate its impact within their organization.
• Identify and assess various decision-making styles, key competencies, and strengths.
• Evaluate an organization's culture, power dynamics, and leadership effectiveness.
• Utilize analysis tools, decision models, and techniques for problem-solving and strategic decision-making.
• Integrate course learnings into their professional roles and decision-making processes.
• Develop a comprehensive implementation plan demonstrating the application of analysis and decision-making models.

Course 2: Strategic Leadership

Strategic Leadership is focused on achieving enduring performance potential. After taking this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the boundaries, challenges, and changing nature of strategic leadership.
• Identify factors in the internal, external, and global business environment, and analyze how they impact leadership in organizations.
• Apply tactics and practices that demonstrate core strategic leadership competencies of strategic thinking, strategic acting, and strategic influence.
• 1Assess present and future resource needs, identify gaps, and develop plans to meet future needs.
• Use a strategic leadership model to analyze a leader's role in organizational effectiveness and develop a strategic leadership plan.

Course 3: Design Thinking for Organizations

This course reviews models and methods in creative and design thinking from an entrepreneurial perspective, a current business perspective, an organizational design perspective, and a personal life progress perspective. After taking this course, students will be able to:

• Define the different types and value of thinking strategies used for problem solving in a professional environment: creative, opportunistic/entrepreneurial, decision, futures, and design.
• Apply examples of creativity and creative thinking in business, in organizations, in society, in professional problem solving, and in daily life.
• Demonstrate application of design thinking and how it can result in creative solutions to solve complex business or organizational problems.
• Develop a list of sources for tracking trends as part of the problem-solving process.
• 1Prepare a final project using concepts, principles, definitions, and applications of the multiple modes of thinking learned in the course.

You're Overplaying the Adult Learner Market

I'm seeing more tuition-dependent private universities building survival plans around adult learners. As we're well-aware, traditional-age enrollment is evaporating for privates (particularly mid-tier privates in the northeast and mid-Atlantic). And somewhere in a strategic plan deck is a cheesy and poorly developed slide promising senior leadership and trustees that a consultant will somehow increase adult enrollment in online programs by 300%. 

It's a bold number. 

It's also fantasy.

I encourage anyone who has seen these plans (and terrible slides) to demand the data behind the projections. When I look at the trend lines, adult undergraduate enrollment rates have dropped 35% since 2025. This is an important trend to consider for private universities, because additional data suggest that adults are opting out of formal degrees because of the product itself. Adult prospects are increasingly uninterested in degrees while increasingly interested in non-credit certificates, alternative credentials, and shorter non-degree pathways. 

Mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities aren't leaning into this non-degree market shift fast enough. Their financial models are archaic and run on multi-year degree enrollments, financial aid, and credit-hour tuition. So even where adult demand exists, it's demanding something these universities aren't investing in to develop and deploy at scale. 

Price is also a significant issue (it's always the number one criteria for adult learners). Private universities chasing adult learners without adjusting price are setting themselves up for a disastrous net tuition revenue collapse, where they'll be reactively discounting online part-time tuition so deep that hitting the enrollment number will do nothing for the budget gap it was supposed to fill. Keep spending stupid marketing dollars (on trite and insulting digital ads) and all you have is a pile of inquiries at the top of the funnel.

I'm not suggesting that the adult learner market is dead. There is significant opportunity and demand. But mid-tier privates buying into promises of a 300% enrollment increase to balance the budget and justify terrible organizational decisions should be asking honestly whether the ridiculous projection was based on fully evaluated data or was it just another bowl of wilted consultant word salad.

From NCO Academy to College Diploma

Somewhere on a military base, a National Guard member is coming off a drill weekend, then heading straight to a civilian job on Monday morning. They spent the weekend completed an intensive PME course on tactical leadership. They have a certificate that proves it. And at most private universities in the county, none of that training counts toward anything they're offering.

This doesn't have to be true. There is a woefully underutilized (and misunderstood) working model that translates PME on a Joint Services Transcript into accredited digital badges. Stack the right badges, add two credit-bearing courses, and a service member walks away with a university undergraduate certificate. The infrastructure exists. The advising process exists (it's not complicated). The tuition assistance pathway exists, bringing the out-of-pocket cost to zero for eligible members.

This is truly an easy system to implement, but it's frustrating and sad to watch private universities refuse to adapt this model. Scaling it into something broader, something that serves military students simply because it's the right thing to do, should be enough. Unfortunately, it's not for universities with dough leadership that talks a lot about being a better place for those who serve, but goes only so far as the TA and GI Bill money. Anything beyond that would require actual leadership and commitment to those who serve.

Are You Really The Better Place For Those Who Serve(d)

A recent Fulcrum essay on the "poverty draft" is a reminder that military service for millions of people has and continues to be the only affordable path to a college degree. I'll again suggest that this is why every private university needs to put into action all their bluster about being "military friendly" or being the better place for military-connected students.

Not surprising, schools and colleges of professional, continuing & online education (PCE/Os) are best positioned to drive expanded programs, support and access to currently serving military students. These units already have the infrastructure and credentials military-affiliated students need. At some universities, they are the units that have developed and implemented the online "military strategy." Note that in a few disastrous cases, a PCE/O military strategy was permitted by senior leadership to be co-opted by hack back-office transactional administrative robots incapable of operationalizing strategies that require bold and committed leadership to drive institutional change. (A wilting administrator delivering awkward presentations that claim ownership of a military enrollment strategy they didn't develop is disingenuous, vapid and insulting to those who've done the actual policy and budget work to create greater access and opportunity for military-connected students.)

Public universities are doing this necessary and meaningful work at scale. SUNY's new Military Tuition Rate closes the gap between DoD Tuition Assistance caps and actual tuition at dozens of campuses. PCE/O units at private universities (particularly mid-tier tuition-dependent privates) are positioned to close that gap further to serve members before they separate from active duty. 

Please, do this better. It's not hard when you have the right (real) leadership AND the institutional mandate.

Rethink Your PCE/O Strategy

I've long admired Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies (I had the honor of serving as an external reviewer of the college some years ago). They're again demonstrating the true value of a school or college of professional & continuing studies. 

First, the college was named to the inaugural cohort of the Future Universities Alliance's Innovation Sandbox, a Duke incubated network built to universities learn from each other and turn scattered innovation into something durable. The college landed a spot alongside 49 institutions from 23 countries, including Georgetown and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Second, and maybe even more fun, three first year graduate students from the college's won the Lahey Clinic's inaugural Care-AI-thon, taking home an AI Innovation Award.

All of this great news about Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies matters because the college is a distinct academic unit within Northeastern. The college has the flexibility to build an Applied AI master's program that moves at the speed industry needs, the institutional muscle to compete for slots in something like the Innovation Sandbox, and the institutional mandate and Provost-assigned authority to send its non-traditional students into clinics and hackathons.

So to say it plainly, yet again... universities that are debating whether to shutter their CPS equivalents, or fold them quietly into "the main campus," are making a disastrous strategic mistake. And they're making it at exactly the wrong moment. Continuing and professional studies units are where the fastest, most applied, most industry connected work happens. They're built for speed and relevance in a way that traditional academic departments, encumbered by legacy structures, aren't.

If your university is eyeing its school or college of professional & continuing studies as overhead to trim rather than an engine to invest in, take a hard look at what Northeastern has been doing for years.

The Old Online Course Playbook Is More Expensive

I read two pieces this morning that remind me how the technology and design logic behind expensive, centralized online course production is quietly but rapidly disintegrating.

The Inside Higher Ed piece illustrates how AI is turning hours of faculty prep (guided notes, rubrics, graphic organizers, accessibility supports) into minutes without sacrificing rigor. It's framed as a teaching-accessibility story, but I read it as a cost-mitigation story. If a faculty member can generate a semester's worth of course content in minutes with a well-built prompt, the same logic applies to full course development and ongoing maintenance.

A Times Higher Education piece on course "future-proofing," makes a similar point by suggesting that course design shouldn't be expensive. Courses become brittle and hard to maintain when every component is tightly chained to the next. The fix the piece suggests is designing in modular blocks (anyone remember Object Oriented Design?) each with a clear purpose, so any single component can be reviewed or swapped out without rebuilding the whole course. This is nearly diametrically opposed to how most universities are producing online courses in-house. Slickly produced, studio-shot video locked into proprietary authoring tools like Articulate is now a significant problem for these universities.

For years, the studio-and-Articulate pipeline was a reasonable model because faculty didn't (and still don't) have time to build accessible, well-structured courses themselves. AI has eroded the "faculty don't have time" barrier, and modular, block-based design is undercutting the case for locking content into closed and proprietary formats.

None of this means centralization of some online course design and development functions should disappear. Shared standards, instructional design support, and quality review still matter, and a fully decentralized free-for-alls create their own costs (been there, done that). But centralization course production around expensive studios and locked-in authoring tools is will never scale. Not now.

For mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities competing on price for adult and non-traditional learners, every dollar spent maintaining the old model of online course design and development is a dollar not spent lowering tuition. The universities training faculty now to build and maintain their own courses will have demonstrable pricing flexibility. The ones doubling down on a dated model of course production will keep hemorrhaging cash until their online enterprise fails.

The "I Fixed a Transmission Once" Problem in Education Leadership

There used to be a car repair commercial that ran in north New Jersey markets. A customer walks into a shop and a guy in coveralls fumbling with a garden hose says, "Sure, boss, I fixed a transmission once." 

Higher ed has a strange tolerance for letting generalists and hacks get their hands on the transmission. "Leaders" of all ilk are routinely hired from fields where the core competencies look great on paper, but can't find the correct wrench in their shallow toolbox when the situation demands actual leadership. The assumption that has always perplexed me is that institutions tend to have a "leadership is leadership" perspective on these hires. Sort of, "hey, it says here you were really good at selling shoes. Want to sell education?"

But we know that education isn't shoes, or underwear or soda. And the leadership gap becomes frighteningly visible when these individuals are placed in positions to engage with non-traditional students. Time and again, these individuals make soft and doughy decisions with consultant-like pronouncements, then roll up behind "market challenges and exigencies" to explain why they are actually incapable of leading anything.

This is just an opinion, of course, and it certainly doesn't mean you can't be a good leader in higher ed if your not "of" higher ed. But the industry's casualness about domain expertise deserves more scrutiny than it gets, especially when the stakes are so high.

How PCE/O Units Will Save Mid-Tier Private Universities

I'm glad I didn't attend the NACUBO conference this year, but it might have been interesting to be the person in the audience standing up and saying, "Yeah, it's awful right now, but here's a few things you can do to counter-act these existential enrollment and budget crises." What would follow is a reminder that many CFOs have on their campuses the very unit designed to drive alternative revenues and pivot rapidly to exploit emerging opportunities. 

Of course, I'm talking about schools and colleges of continuing & professional studies and related units (PCE/Os).

Mid-tier tuition-dependent universities are discounting sticker price further every year just to keep the incoming class full (and some have failed to do even that this fall), a race that erodes net tuition revenue even as enrollment holds steady. At the same time, federal student aid is being significantly revised and disrupting LRPs. PCE/O units are naturally positioned to route around these challenges and their students enroll and pay differently. Short, stackable certificates and degree-completion programs financed through employer tuition-benefit partnerships, institutional payment plans, or income-share arrangements don't need to clear financial aid hurdles, so working adults, certificate-seekers, up-skillers and life-long learners shouldn't be caught in the same bidding war as 18-year-olds comparing offer letters and aid packages. Growing the non-traditional side of the business with low-overhead, fully online credit and non-credit programs gives a tuition-dependent university a way to add net revenue without digging the discount-rate hole deeper.

PCE/O units aren't silver bullets for fixing the structural problems facing tuition-dependent privates. But in the midst of all the chaos, they are strategically important lever these schools can pull now. They just have to understand how and why to do it.