About 20 years ago, when I first started covering higher education from a journalistic perspective in addition to working in the field, the big discussion was how colleges should function more like businesses. Rather than restricting themselves to an older model that placed the mission of the university in the hands of faculty and administrators who purported to know best what students need to learn and that depended on a great deal of state support to get the job done, institutions should be responsive to their customers, who were increasingly seen to be the student and, to an extent, businesses.
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
