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.
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