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For some, a strategy is something that has been written — sometimes through a process that involves countless meetings and untold memos — and then put on a shelf to be forever ignored. Others have operated in an organization that, as far as is known, does not have a strategy. A lucky few of us have worked in an organization that has a clearly stated strategy. In this article I make the case for having a strategy and at what level of the organization it should be defined and be operational.

Higher Education Strategy Series: This is the first entry of this series. This page describes the whole series and provides links to all of the articles.

At the Association of American Colleges & Universities Annual Meeting, Dr. Cynthia Kosso (the provost at Moravian College) and I gave a presentation titled “Building Online Capacity at a Liberal Arts College.” In this post I will share some quotes from the 60-minute presentation — giving  you the real-world perspective of a liberal arts college that has successfully embarked on the journey to online learning. 

Introduction to this Series

This is the first of a series of blog posts related to the multi-program financial model I have built. This financial model, housed in a Google Sheet, predicts the cash flows for your institution if it were to launch up to five new online programs in the next six years. This is a complicated model; it requires that you be able to answer a series of questions about your institution and those programs...so this won’t be a short exercise. But I’ve made it easier  for you by already building the model—you just have to fill in the values. And you can always change your answers later as you learn more! 

What happens when you tell an investor you can sell $2 bills to unsuspecting buyers for ten $1 bills and further that you can convince the buyers to sign a 10-year deal agreeing to these terms? That investor would be suitably impressed, of course, and would happily invest in your company at a high valuation. But then what would happen if you later went back to that investor and explained how these buyers you’d been selling to are gaining experience, talking to each other, and now are demanding to pay two dollars for that snazzy $2 bill?

Since 1742 Moravian College has had a history of providing access to underserved students. It was the first school to educate women and the first to educate Native Americans in their own language. As times have changed, so has the college. A men’s college (a seminary) was added in 1807, and in the 1950s the two colleges merged to become coeducational. Then, as the new millennium progressed (and in keeping with its mission of access), Moravian College faced the need to transition into the digital age.