Growth Strategy for Higher Ed Didn't Exist. So I Built It.

I want to tell you a story about the moment I realized I didn't know what I was doing. Not in a general, imposter-syndrome sort of way. In a very specific, very physical, my-hands-are-shaking-under-the-table sort of way.

The Room Where It Happened

I am sitting across from a provost — a nationally respected economist who once urged the chancellor not to pursue the very initiative I have been hired to evaluate. An entire portfolio of online degree programs is hemorrhaging millions. Everyone in the room wants answers. Nobody — including me — can agree on what those answers should be.

I know the numbers cold. Enrollment trends, revenue projections, competitor benchmarks, market intelligence. I have spreadsheets that would make your eyes water. On paper, I have everything I need.

Here is what nobody tells you about having all the data: it does not help when the people staring at that same data walk away with completely different conclusions.

If you have ever presented a beautifully sourced analysis to your cabinet and watched three people interpret it three different ways, you know this feeling. The data is not the problem. The data is never the problem. The problem is that you do not have a shared framework for deciding what the data means.

One leader sees online education as the future of the university. Another sees it as a threat to everything the institution stands for. Both have evidence. Both are credible. And you — the person who is supposed to help them find a path forward — are sitting there thinking: how are all these brilliant people looking at the same information and arriving at entirely different answers?

The disagreement is not about the programs. Everyone in the room knows that. You are debating what the institution should stand for. Whether growing online is evolution or erosion. Whether reaching new learners is the mission or a distraction from it.

And I am supposed to help them figure it out.

How I Ended Up in That Chair

Let me back up.

I grew up in a family where education was the family business. Not metaphorically — literally. Both of my parents were public school teachers in Chicago. Both sides of my family work in education in some capacity: educators, student services professionals, support staff, K–12 and higher ed. Our dinner table conversations were about education. I was named after Maya Angelou — not because my parents loved her poetry, but because she fought for justice and equity for Black people, and my parents decided to do that within education.

Education is not my career. It is my inheritance.

I earned a bachelor's, master's, and PhD in political science, focused on urban politics and Black politics. In grad school, I thought I had a research assistantship lined up. On the first day, my faculty advisor told a male student he had funding for him — but not for me. I had signed a lease a few days prior. I found a job at Oakton College instead. That started my career in higher ed.

Over twenty years, I held just about every kind of role the sector offers. Staff, tenure-track faculty, adjunct instructor, executive director of research and planning, director of institutional research, director of growth strategies, associate dean. Community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, four-year privates, a large public land-grant university. Education technology executive. Consultant. If there is a seat at the higher ed table, I have sat in it.

And through all of it, I never quite found my spot. I have a knack for seeing what is missing — and what is missing in higher ed is usually a role that does not exist yet. I created one: Director of Growth Strategies. The rollout was brutal, because the title was unfamiliar to everyone around me.

You might know this feeling — carrying a vision for a function your institution does not yet recognize. It is a particular kind of lonely.

What I Learned on the Other Side

Before the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) hired me back as a fixer, I spent time as Vice President and General Manager at an Online Program Management company (OPM), leading partnerships for online undergraduate and graduate degrees at three different institutions.

That experience shook me. I learned how much the industry did not know — and how confidently it pretended otherwise.

I watched consulting firms advise colleges and universities with poor modeling and projections. I watched OPMs advise their partners with the same. I experienced it firsthand, multiple times over. We all have. Every college and university at the end of those relationships was unhappy. What had been sold as science was art — and the outcomes proved it. Missed projections. Unhappy faculty and staff. Dissatisfied students. Budget deficits.

At one of my partner institutions, students were so unhappy they formed a group chat rooted in their frustration. It was featured in USA Today. At another, a program was being advertised and students were being admitted into a degree that was never approved by the faculty. The faculty refused to teach it. I sat in a meeting at the OPM where people were outraged: "Why can't the provost force the faculty to do it? He's their boss."

If you just flinched, you understand higher ed. If you didn't, you might be part of the problem.

Do you know how many people are consulting and advising your institution who have never worked in one? Who do not understand shared governance, faculty culture, or the political dynamics of a provost's leadership team? Who think leadership operates by command?

Every institution I encountered was asking the same question about their online programs: keep it or kill it? Which is a pretty extraordinary thing to ask when online education is supposed to be a growth engine in higher ed.

The Moment the Floor Dropped Out

So there I am, back at UW-Madison. Hired as the person who knows online programs inside and out. And I am sitting across from a provost with my hands trembling, realizing that everything I know is not enough.

I can diagnose financial losses and enrollment gaps in my sleep. That is my training. That is my entire career up to this point.

But I cannot lead leaders through the deeper question: who are we, and how do we want to win?

Maybe you have been in a version of this moment. You are the smartest person in the room on the topic, and yet the problem in front of you is not a knowledge problem. It is a strategy problem. And you do not have a framework for it.

The pressure is not the data. The data is the easy part. The pressure is earning the trust of leaders who are accomplished, opinionated, and not aligned. It is helping people with far more institutional power than you come to agreement on a path forward — when some of the most respected voices at the institution have publicly argued against the direction you are supposed to evaluate.

You are not presenting evidence. You are asking people to stay open to a future that some of them do not want.

The Dodge That Every Leader Recognizes

That experience at UW-Madison changed how I saw the entire sector. Once I named the problem — the absence of a growth strategy — I started looking for a tool or framework to develop one. And I discovered it did not exist.

Higher ed has strategic planning. It has enrollment management. It has academic innovation. It has market research. It has consultants and benchmarking firms and advisory memberships.

None of those are growth strategy.

They are adjacent. They are components. They are pieces that someone should have assembled into a coherent discipline — but nobody has.

And when you ask the people who should know? You get the dodge. You have heard it. You have probably delivered it yourself, because there is nothing else to say:

How do you know if an initiative is worth the investment? We'll track it and see.

How do you decide what to prioritize when everything is a priority? That's what the strategic planning process is for.

How do you know if your institution is actually differentiated in the market? Our mission makes us different.

These answers sound reasonable. They sound responsible. They sound like leadership. Until you are in the room where the money is running out and the enrollment projections were wrong and the faculty senate is in open revolt and the board is asking questions nobody can answer.

That is not the moment to rely on instinct. That is the moment you need a discipline.

So I Built One

I did not set out to build a field. I set out to survive that room with the provost.

Nights and weekends, I dove into corporate strategy literature. Fortune 500 case studies. How Apple decides what to build and — more importantly — what to kill. How Amazon structures accountability. How Blue Ocean Strategy helps organizations find uncontested market space. How Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done framework reveals what customers actually need versus what you think you are selling them.

I started testing what could and could not translate to institutions governed by mission, shared governance, and a culture that prides itself on tradition.

Some of it translates directly. The idea that you need to understand your competitive alternatives before you can position yourself maps almost perfectly to higher ed. You benchmark against peer institutions and track rankings, but do you actually know how you are perceived by the people choosing where to go, what to study, and whether college is worth it at all? Your real competition now includes employers offering apprenticeships, bootcamps offering credentials in sixteen weeks, and platforms offering courses for free. Most institutions cannot see this because nobody has given them the framework to look.

Some of it requires real adaptation. Higher ed institutions are not companies. You have faculty who do not report to the provost the way corporate direct reports answer to a chief executive. You have cultures where stopping a program feels like a moral failure, not a strategic decision. You cannot apply a corporate framework and expect it to work. You have to translate it — with deep institutional fluency and the scar tissue to know which parts survive the translation and which do not.

And some of what I needed did not exist yet for education at all. Nobody had built it.

So I started building. I mapped the business model — something higher ed institutions almost never do. You know how I knew we lacked a shared understanding of our business model? We argued for months about whether the online programs existed to increase access or to generate revenue. Do you know how different the business model has to look for each of those to succeed?

Once I started mapping those models, the growth levers crystallized. What drives enrollment. What drives expense. What drives revenue. We started picking them off, year after year.

That experience — messy, painful, full of wrong turns — gave me something I did not have before. Not just a solution for one institution. A conviction: growth strategy is an actual discipline. It has a model, a methodology, a body of knowledge that can be taught and practiced. Higher education needs it. And no one has built it.

The Discipline That Was Missing

That is how The Education Strategist was born. Not from a business plan. From a room where the floor dropped out from under me and I had to build something to stand on.

I believe growth strategy for higher education is a discipline — as rigorous and teachable as the corporate strategy it draws from, but translated for the cultures, governance structures, and mission-driven realities that make our institutions what they are.

I believe the leaders who run these institutions are brilliant. They know their disciplines, their accreditors, their students, their communities. What they were never taught — because it has never existed — is how to read market signals, think about competitive positioning, allocate resources against a growth strategy, or build the organizational conditions that make sustained growth possible.

You are not failing because you are not smart enough. You are navigating without tools that should have been built a generation ago.

Why I Am the One Building It

My critique of higher ed comes from deep belief in its importance. Education is my family's legacy. It shaped every opportunity I have ever had. I did not come to this work as an outsider. I belong to this sector.

That is what makes the work so hard. I am not observing from a distance. I am inside it. And some of the hardest moments are not analytical — they are cultural. There is a particular loneliness in trying to move an institution toward a future that parts of it resist. A particular weight in carrying ideas before people are ready for them. A particular vulnerability in standing up and saying: the way we have been doing strategy is not working, and I think I know what works better.

I do not say that lightly. I say it because I have been in the room. I have done the work. I have felt my hands shake under the table. And I came out the other side with something worth sharing.

Someone had to build the discipline of growth strategy for higher education. It turned out that someone was me.

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