The Strategic Planning Door has briefing papers on: operations performance analysis, methods for conducting strategic planning, strategic and operational issues, and other topics.
Preface Strategic planners need to pay attention to corporate and legal documents that can delimit decisions needed to support strategic change. Corporate documents refer to the charter, bylaws, and mission statement of the college, while legal documents may comprise...
Failure Has Many Causes Why are some colleges seemingly collapsing overnight? There are many causes for some private colleges surviving at the brink, but it takes a particular set of circumstances for a sudden collapse. What follows are factors that could drive a...
Michael Townsley and Robert DeColfmacker By May of 2024, twenty private colleges have closed or announced that they are closing. If this pace continues, sixty private colleges could close by the end of 2024. Before these colleges fall into oblivion, little is heard...
Zombie Colleges are the walking dead of private colleges. They have: no cash, cannot make payroll, pay bills or debt services, violated their debt covenants, and only a few faculty who work for nothing. [1] The Sisyphean hill for these colleges is very high and...
The higher education market is shedding colleges at a record pace. Despite the large influx of federal funds in 2022 to offset the effect of the pandemic (see Chart 1), fourteen private colleges closed or disappeared in mergers during the first three months of 2024....
First Published on Stevens Strategy Blog Nearly every week news flashes a report of another private college either closing or in deep financial trouble. Here is a short but not exhaustive list of colleges that have closed this year: Alderson Broadus, Cardinal...
The Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times are trumpeting what they see as major changes in demographics, finances, technology, and regulations for higher education. The evidence strongly suggests that these four factors are already...
Strategy, Mission and Vision Without task force input ...the president will be the author of an uncoordinated technical strategy that will fall short of institutional goals. If colleges and universities are havens of reflection and restraint where change is glacial...
Executive Summary Efficiency in higher education is an amusing topic that is best left to economists. The reality is that all constituents of a college or university know that the institution in inherently inefficient due to poorly designed operational policies,...
Debra Townsley, author of articles on strategy and presidential leadership and Michael Townsley have a new book – Colleges in Crisis. The central theme of this book is that the massive decline forecast for prospective college students over the next decade will push...
Before we talk about the Transition Principles, I want to sketch out a small scenario about interviewing and taking a presidency at a college in need of a turn-around. The characteristics of the institution I present is not built upon any single college and…
Several years ago, higher education leaders expected to see a nice bump in the size of the student pool between 2021 and 2024. However, recent data indicates that enrollments are continuing…
Small independent colleges may require planning of a different kind. If you think about it, the literature of educational planning is in some ways bizarre. Much of the literature assumes that colleges and universities are reasonably well financed, that the...
The quickly evolving financial crunch, which is due to a sharp decline in the student pool over the next decade, is not unexpected by boards of trustees and presidents. For example, Susan Resnick, in her book Governance Reconsidered, remarked that “significant...
A slow, plodding revenue growth strategy may no longer provide private colleges with the financial reserve needed to survive. For decades, marginal increases in enrollment, tuition, and other revenue sources were good enough to…