Today’s chief academic officers are uniquely positioned to help their colleges build and take full advantage of their most important asset—a differentiated curriculum that is valued by the marketplace. Doing so, in many cases, will not be easy. It will require careful analysis, certainty of purpose, and demonstrated political support. At the same time, those who do not recognize the need to take the lead on these issues will miss a tremendous opportunity to move their institutions forward.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
