Published by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Talk to most college leaders long enough, and they will eventually invoke their institutions’ strategic plans, sometimes as blueprints for specific improvements, other times as almost talismanic documents that will increase enrollment or diversity through their existence alone. Talk to others in higher education about strategic plans, though, and you’ll get a different reaction — that such plans are wastes of time or cynical pretexts for predetermined outcomes.
They can be met with fury, which is what happened, in 2019, when the University of Tulsa acted on part of its 2017 strategic plan that called for a sweeping academic reorganization, including cutting 40 percent of its programs. The resulting uproar led to a faculty vote of no confidence in the president and provost.
Or they can be seen as irreplaceable, especially for a college leader joining a new institution. Kent Devereaux started a strategic-planning process last fall, about a year after he took over as president of Goucher College, a private institution in the suburbs of Baltimore. He found strategic planning invaluable. If you don’t have a plan, the budget ends up becoming the plan, he says, with short-term financial considerations — not the mission — shaping decisions.
But plans don’t always deliver on that premise. Even experts who work with colleges to develop strategic plans see how often they’re flawed in conception and execution, says David Strauss, a principal of the Art & Science Group, a company that consults for colleges. “There’s a disturbing number of college and university strategic plans out there that, in our view, are neither strategic nor plans,” he says.
The truth, based on conversations with those who advise colleges on strategic plans, those who use (or disavow) them as tools to run institutions, and those who’ve worked under them, lies somewhere in between those views. They can serve as road maps to transformation, under certain conditions, but other times they can wind up as bureaucratic dead ends.
Another truth: Strategic plans are a fact of life in higher education. Accreditors require some form of strategic planning. Boards of trustees often expect them. Many colleges now face a landscape more challenging than any current leaders have ever known, and need adroit strategies to steer toward thriving futures.
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There is, however, such a thing as being too inclusive, says Strauss, of the Art & Science Group. If a planning process becomes about making sure all parties feel as if their wishes are represented, the resulting plan is likely to be unfocused and unsuccessful. Strauss recalls a college president who told him and his colleagues how proud she was of her strategic plan. “We asked her, ‘So what basis do you use to judge that it was successful?’” he says. “She said, ‘Well, it had the input of 5,000 members of the campus community.’ Her objective was to include people, not to devise a strategy to move the institution.”
College leaders must thread the needle, soliciting input and genuine participation while working toward an effective process and plan. “You want to have a healthy mix of fresh ideas and experience,” says May, the UC-Davis chancellor. But you need to choose carefully, he says; otherwise “you sometimes get people who are naysayers and spend time telling you why you can’t do things as opposed to why you should try to do things.” Setting a tight schedule and sticking to it is also key, says Devereaux, of Goucher. “We could take forever to research it more,” he says, “but we’ve got to make decisions, and we’ve got to deal with the information we have at hand.”
Sometimes, though, the information on hand isn’t as complete as it could be. The authors of the RHB report found that 63 percent of the strategic plans they reviewed didn’t mention using environmental surveys or data about the campus climate, perceptions of the institution, community conditions, or student interest in academic programs.
Colleges may also fall short of strategic success because they haven’t defined what success looks like. Among the strategic plans RHB reviewed, 73 percent included no specific metrics for measuring progress toward their goals.
The absence of external data did not surprise Strauss, who saw two reasons for it. “One is just a hubris of thinking whatever we do, our markets will come along,” he says. “The other is a shallow understanding of what information we need from our markets.”
Just because other colleges and universities have had successes in starting nursing programs, for example, or adding online courses doesn’t mean that such moves would be right for a particular institution. “It’s one thing to look outside at the beginning and say, Here’s what’s going on out in the world, how do we want to fit into it?” Strauss says. “It’s another to say, Now, the ways that we think we might fit into it, will they work for us?”
The lack of metrics is likely to keep a strategic plan from changing an institution’s day-to-day operations. Without specific goals, such as raising the graduation rate by x percentage points or increasing the endowment by y dollars, says Zinkan, the RHB vice president, employees don’t begin to get “that clarity to know, as a member of this university or college community, what am I supposed to do differently than I’m doing today?”
Clarity also helps when communicating the plan. Leaders may need to frame the same discussion in different ways for different groups of stakeholders. As James T. Harris III, president of the University of San Diego, puts it, “You have to be bilingual in your approach.” When talking to trustees about a student-success goal, for example, he might focus more on talking about freshman-retention statistics, graduation rates, and other hard metrics. Those numbers matter to professors, too, but they’re also interested in students’ classroom experiences and their ultimate learning outcomes. A plan, says Harris, “should have in it language that the key constituents can understand.”
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A successful strategy is often less a matter of how radical a departure it represents from the norm than whether the plan is authentic to the institution’s identity. It doesn’t have to be anything new at all if it’s done in a committed way with a concrete indication that it will succeed. “Doubling down on something and deciding you’re going to do it really big can be a strategy,” Strauss says, “if it’s the right thing.”
Goucher’s new strategic plan calls for doubling down on two key ideas: global education and diversification. You won’t see them as major headings in the actual document, but they undergird everything, says Devereaux, the president. Goucher already sends every one of its students abroad, but it hasn’t been making the most of its international connections as a recruiting tool, especially for international students themselves — right now, for example, the institution has only about 10 athletes recruited from abroad. Increased international recruiting will help with diversification, a concept that applies not only to the student body, faculty, and staff, but also to the college’s revenue streams. Goucher has historically been an undergraduate-focused college, he says, but for the last 10 years its graduate programs have been growing at about 7 percent a year. “So that’s also a big component of our strategy,” he says.
If the college can make progress on those two fronts over the next five years, “we will fundamentally change the nature of the campus experience,” Devereaux adds, and strengthen Goucher’s financial position while staying true to its mission. “So we felt like that’s it,” he says. “That’s what we’ve got to focus on.”
Ideally, the ultimate product of all this planning isn’t just a plan that succeeds or fails, Santilli says, but adopting a planning mind-set. “It is an organic process,” he says, “that never ends.”