As higher education institutions transition into a post-pandemic period, many will still face the challenge, now more acute, of keeping the lights on. And predictably, many leaders and boards will reengage in “faster horse” strategies to sustain their institutions, cutting more costs and trying to do the same stuff more efficiently. I suspect that some leaders and boards will discover that their horse can’t run any faster.
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
