In the first two parts of this series, I presented the structural features of Responsibility Centered Management (RCM), how money flowed throughout an RCM campus, and how campus costs were covered in this decentralized budgeting system. It is now time to discuss some of the “political” aspects of RCM, namely campus (from faculty to the top) attitudes that determine the success or failure of RCM. There are institutions where RCM has operated successfully for years as well as institutions where it has failed and been replaced very quickly.
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
