Not the faculty, not the president or chancellor, not anyone on the senior leadership team, not any dean or provost, not even the support staff. Students are the most important people on a college campus with four-year programs because without them, the two core missions of colleges and universities have no meaning: (1) providing professional training and related credentials and (2) creating new knowledge and innovation.
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
