Strategic Challenges in Higher Education

We live in interesting and challenging times.

For the communities Lansing Community College (LCC) serves, our students, and those of us who work at LCC, the challenges are unprecedented.   We are not alone. All of higher education in the U.S. is facing unprecedented challenges. The nation is demanding more of colleges and universities.  The people LCC serves, our students, the community, and the State of Michigan have new needs and expectations of LCC. The U.S. government and our accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), have new rules and new requirements. New competitors and new learning technologies provide both new opportunities and new threats. Our changing environment poses strategic challenges to LCC’s continued success, sustainability, and service to the community.

Andy Grove, the co-founder and leader of Intel Corp. for 36 years, said:

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.

Our community college is not a for-profit corporation. In many ways a college is more complex. But like any large organization, a college must also change, adapt, and transform itself.

LCC and community colleges in general have proven themselves very adept at adapting over their 50 some years of existence. Over these decades, LCC, like many other community colleges, has built on its core mission of expanding access to higher education.  We’ve added programs, support services, and partnerships with the community. We’ve added technologies to both instruction and operations.  But the changes over the past 50 or so years have largely been adaptive or expansive changes – we’ve added this or expanded that.  Like most institutions of higher education, the core methods, focus, and values have remained unchanged.  We’ve grown and added layers in response to the community and the environment, but in many ways these changes stopped short of transformation.

Today is different. Transformation is required.  The outside forces and trends demand nothing less.  We are facing what Andy Grove has called strategic inflection points (italic emphasis is mine):

Let’s start with Strategic Inflection Points. They represent, in my description of it, what happens to a business when a major change takes place in its competitive environment. A major change due to introduction of new technologies. A major change due to the introduction of a different regulatory environment. The major change can be simply a change in the customers’ values, a change in what customers prefer. Almost always it hits the corporation in such a way that those of us in senior management are among the last ones to notice. I’m paraphrasing the words you used in some of your talk, Peter. But what is common to all of them and what is key is that they require a fundamental change in business strategy, and that’s almost a definition of a Strategic Inflection Point. A Strategic Inflection Point is that which causes you to make a fundamental change in business strategy. Nothing less is sufficient.

… depending on the actions you take in responding to this challenge, you will either go on to new heights or head downward in your prosperity as a firm.

The biggest difficulty with Strategic Inflection Points is telling one from the many changes that impinge on you in the business. How do you know if a change is just a garden variety change or qualified to be this monumental, catastrophic change category that we call an Inflection Point?

Higher education is facing multiple strategic inflection points.  How we respond will determine not only whether we thrive as an organization but also our students’ futures and our communities’ futures. Not all colleges will make it. We are not alone in noticing the similarity between Grove’s strategic inflection points and the challenges facing community colleges today.  Curtis Ivery, in the 2009 book Reinventing the Open Door, edited by Gundar Myran also noticed the similarity. Ivery and Myran are present and past community college presidents from Michigan. Grove calls these extraordinary conditions strategic inflection points.  We will call them strategic challenges.

How will LCC deal with these strategic challenges?

We aren’t sure. Yet. But we are figuring it out. This website and its conversations are part of that effort. LCC is engaging in a year-long strategic planning project.  This effort is different from traditional strategic planning in higher education.  Traditional strategic planning has often been a top-down view of what needs to be done over the next 5 years.  It is typically based on detailed numerical projections and usually results in what is really a “long run master project plan”.  It’s long on plan and usually short on strategy. Traditional strategic planning works well in predictable environment that calls for the organization to refine and adapt.  Traditional strategic planning processes don’t handle strategic inflection points or strategic challenges well.  As Andy Grove pointed out, when it comes to strategic challenges, senior leadership often doesn’t have the full or best information.  That’s why LCC is seeking broad input about our strategic challenges.

We are separating this strategic planning effort into two separate projects. First we want to have a broad, open, and far-reaching conversation about the nature of the strategic challenges facing us.  We want to research the issues and bring the insights and knowledge of all of us to the project.  We are doing this through numerous conversations on campus, in forums with the public and students, and most prominently here on this website.  After we have explored the issues and educated each other about what we’re facing, we will identify our 5-6 critical strategic challenges.  After that, we will engage a second project to develop the creative and innovative strategies, projects, and revisions to processes that will enable us to thrive in the face of these challenges.  For more explanation of how these two projects are structured, see the Projects tab on this website or watch the 9 minute video introducing the projects.

What kinds of Challenges does LCC face?

We are facing major challenges from nearly all directions: competition, technology, funding and government support, student and community expectations, regulations and accreditation, the economy, and even demographics. For example:

• Increased emphasis on performance including student success and completion.   Nationwide, states, communities, foundations, and the federal government are placing much greater emphasis on student success and completion of credentials.  The picture at the right shows a billboard in Texas that questions whether the state’s money is well spent at Austin Community College.  In Nevada, the state is considering outsourcing all online classes a for-profit company.  For decades, community colleges could count on state and business community support for their mission.  Funding may not always have been at the levels we desired, but we could count on support for basic institution. Today, community colleges (and universities) are being questioned and challenged.
• The economy has changed. Incomes for people who have not successfully completed some college credential have stagnated and even declined over the past 30 years. In today’s recession-battered and slow-growth economy, college is a necessity for students to maintain a shot at the middle class, creating both demand for more education for more students while raising the risk for students when they fail.
• The nation needs more college educated adults but we are falling behind.  Harvard’s 2011 Pathways to Prosperity study of higher education in the U.S. observes:

Yet as we end the first decade of the 21st century, there are profoundly troubling signs that the U.S. is now failing to meet its obligation to prepare millions of young adults. In an era in which education has never been more important to economic success, the U.S. has fallen behind many other nations in educational attainment and achievement. Within the U.S. economy, there is also growing evidence of a “skills gap” in which many young adults lack the skills and work ethic needed for many jobs that pay a middle-class wage. Simultaneously, there has been a dramatic decline in the ability of adolescents and young adults to find work. Indeed, the percentage of teens and young adults who have jobs is now at the lowest level since World War II.

• Financing of higher education has changed. In the 1950′s-1970′s when community colleges were established and grew, states and property tax districts basically provided the dominant share of funding because higher education was considered a public good. Nationally there has been a long-term change in thinking that has increasingly shifted the costs to students themselves in the form of student loans.  In recent years the default rates and the volume of student loans have created what some call a student loan crisis.  The trend does not seem sustainable.  It must change somehow.
• Funding has been cut with slim prospects for increases and formulas are changing.  The state of Michigan, like many states, is introducing performance-based funding instead of enrollment-based funding. A recent article in the Detroit Free Press notes:

The measurements, level of funding and other details are being studied this year in Lansing.

Michigan is one of 17 states implementing or studying performance funding. The goal is to push universities to focus more on producing graduates, which in turn drives state economies with more highly skilled employees. Lawmakers also see it as a move toward greater accountability in education.

• Productivity improvement and financial sustainability are more important than ever before.  We cannot count on either increased state funding or increased property tax collections.  Instead the only way to achieve financial sustainability is to improve productivity, a task that has historically been very difficult for higher education.
• Globalization and a vastly changed economy that is much less dependent on heavy industry are changing the programs and education needed by our students. Our students will graduate and work in an economy that is vastly different than what we have seen the past few decades. This affects what we teach.
• New competitors, including for-profits and non-instructional outcomes-based institutions have arisen. There is a wave of innovation stirring in higher education.  For-profit institutions have grown their market share dramatically in the past decade and continue to compete for students.  But even newer forms are on the horizon. Western Governors University, an accredited institution, has started an operation in Indiana with the state’s support.  Yet it offers no classes. Instead it is based on new competency-based model.  Many entrepreneurs, backed by millions in venture capital and foundation funding (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) are pursuing a “DIY” (do it yourself) university world.
• Our learners have changed.  Much has been written about “new generations” of learner. Much of that writing has proven to be hype and nonsense. But there’s also some truth in it. Separating the two is difficult. If nothing else, students are entering college with vastly different expectations and preparation than they have in the past.
• New types of students. As we reach more of the population and as K-12 systems struggle, we face increasing numbers of students who aren’t college-ready or who don’t thrive with the traditional approaches to instruction.
• New technologies. Teaching and learning technologies are changing rapidly.  Professors who formerly needed only to keep up with changes in their field of expertise, now must keep up with changes in their field of study, technology, pedagogy, and andragogy.
• Newer and wider availability of information via the Web  is challenging traditional approaches to teaching and to what students need to learn.  Critical thinking and communication skills are more important and acquisition of facts from the teacher less so.
• Challenges require a more agile and nimble organization but the traditional ways of doing things in higher education are built around slow, incremental, studied change..
• The HLC and government are changing regulations and criteria for accreditation.

What are the real Strategic Challenges?

Much of what I listed above can be considered “trends” or just “challenges”.  So what makes something a Strategic Challenge?  Strategic challenges, as Andy Grove pointed out, require the organization to make fundamental changes in what it does, how it does it, for whom it does it, and in how it’s different from other organizations.  I’ll expand Grove’s definition a bit. Strategic challenges require creative and innovative responses.  The answers aren’t obvious.  If you have the resources or knowledge right now in the organization to deal with a new trend or challenge, then it’s just a question of adapting and doing the obvious. We just need to do our jobs.  It’s when the solution isn’t obvious that trends rise to the strategic challenge level.  For example, some of the trends listed above, if taken individually, have obvious, do-able solutions.  But when all of these trends and changes are taken together we see a problem. If what works to solve one problem, such as just buying more technology, exacerbates our efforts to respond to another trend, like reduced funding, then we have some strategic challenges.

The solution to strategic challenges lies in creativity, innovation, and building a high-performance organization.  But before we can discuss solutions, we need to better understand the challenges themselves. That’s where we need your help.

In coming weeks I will post briefing papers on the topics and trends listed above.  I’ll be editing the papers, but the core research and writing is being done by a wide variety of people at LCC.  In each paper we’ll introduce some data and research about one of these issues and some others.  We’ll try to explore how it affects LCC.  We need you to read them, think about them, discuss them, and contribute your comments. They will be posted under the Briefing Papers tab.  We’ll also be posting a series of shorter conversations based on shorter questions and posts under the Conversations tab. If you use a Web-based feed reader like Google Reader, you can subscribe to both briefing papers and conversations by clicking this feed link or any of the orange buttons on the lower right of each page. An RSS feed for comments is here. When you comment, please observe the Rules for discussion so we can keep the conversations constructive.

Our objective for these conversations is two-fold.  One, we need to better understand, explore, and define the challenges we are facing that will require transformative change. But there’s a second objective, and that’s to educate ourselves and make sure we are all “on the same page”.  The strategic challenges facing us are complex and significant.  None of us understands them fully now.  LCC is large, complex, and diverse.  Few see the entire big picture, and when they do, they often miss many critical details.  Each person has something to contribute.  Do not assume that what you know and see is obvious to others.  That’s why we need to have the conversations.

Together we can build on what is useful and good, and we can change what needs to change to improve our ability to thrive in the future. Together we can build an LCC that thrives in the face of these strategic challenges to meet the needs of our community.

What do think?

What are your reactions? 

What strategic challenges do you think we face?

What topic do you want to see in a briefing paper or conversation?

 

Category: Briefing Papers, Challenges