Those in the trenches don’t need to be told higher education is facing serious challenges, but the reminders are everywhere. As reported by Inside Higher Ed, there’s a growing shortage of our prized input: undergraduates. Meanwhile the value of our output (a degree) is being questioned. A recent Gallup survey found that only a third of students believe they will graduate with the skills needed to be successful in the job market. On top of that, thought leaders such as Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor known for his work on disruptive innovation, has predicted that half of universities will go bankrupt in a decade. Hyperbole? Maybe not.
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
