Higher Ed Leadership Has An Imagination Problem

I was re-reading Inside Higher Ed's retrospective on 2025 and how so many university leaders were caught flat-footed by massive disruptions to federal research funding, catastrophic declines in traditional enrollments, and a complete collapse of the international student pipeline. The piece refers to the subsequent lagging institutional responses as "failures of imagination." When you overlay this assessment on the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, it's hard not feel like universities are treating the existential pressures of affordability, trust, workforce relevance, evaporating enrollments, budget deficits, etc. as things to casually react to rather than redesign around.

Nowhere is this latency more evident than at mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities that are reeling from the demographic cliff and waves of affordability backlash. Faced with cratering enrollment and increasing revenue pressures, we're seeing too many of these universities doubling down on their traditional residential experience as their differentiator. It's an understandable bet because the residential model is what they've sold for the last 100 years. But it's a flawed bet because it doesn't seriously include new revenue streams and new populations of learners beyond the 18-22 year-olds sitting in classrooms.

What's more conspicuously and dangerously absent from these institutional responses are strategic uses of existing Professional and Continuing Education (PCE) units as innovation platforms. These are the units already positioned closest to workforce and adult-learner markets, which represent the fastest-growing, most credential-agnostic population of potential students. Yet at too many mid-tier tuition-dependent privates, PCE is being pushed further to the periphery or deconstructed completely. Instead of letting PCE units experiment with pricing, delivery, programming and audience in ways the university can't, leadership is myopically suggesting these units' services, programs and missions can be spread across the university's schools and colleges, and administered by hack unimaginative robotic staff and doughy consultants. It's this dangerous inability to see the innovation infrastructure inside their own institutions that is the real failure of leadership at these universities.