Industries

Education

Unlike virtually every other industry, higher education has managed to avoid transformational change for much of its long history. For a variety of reasons, it was broadly immune to market forces and enjoyed price elasticity until fairly recently.

However, much like brick-and-mortar retail, the industry began to experience material declines in enrollment and revenue in 2010 and has suffered through year-over-year declines for a decade, shrinking about 20% overall.

While there have been pockets of growth, particularly among online institutions and those who recognized the shift in student-customers to a retail mindset, the market declines have been broad and deep. The addition of the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated those declines, while dramatically increasing the complexity of operational and leadership challenges within higher education.

Although it literally took centuries, the existential nature of the current crisis has pushed higher education institutions to either transform or die. While a very small percentage of institutions are wealthy enough and exclusive enough to continue to operate with a status quo model, the vast majority cannot, and the next several years will see an accelerated “culling of the herd” that was already in play.

As with any crisis, the challenges also present opportunities. Institutions with appropriate board and executive leadership that are able to create and deliver a compelling value proposition, establish new revenue and financial models, and focus on the post-secondary market rather than the higher education market are likely to not only survive but thrive.

Interestingly, the ongoing decline and current crisis have provided growth opportunities for education service providers, particularly those in the ed tech space. As a result, colleges and universities do not have to build their own proprietary capabilities related to the student value proposition. To a large extent, much can now be outsourced.

The complexity of contemporary challenges in higher education is simply too great for traditional models of leadership. Fortunately, the Top Gun Ventures model is ideally suited to identifying the kinds of dynamic, GameChanging leaders required for today’s reality – those who can run the daily operation, manage through disruption, and build for the future, all at the same time.

Importantly, due to our decades of work across industries, we are able to source leaders from both inside and outside of academe, who often bring experience and perspectives that challenge the status quo and lead institutions to thrive despite even severe headwinds.