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.
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