Why Growth Feels So Heavy

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Growth in higher ed right now feels a lot heavier than it should, because every time we want to expand, we build something new, instead of building something that allows what we already have to compound. But according to the research we're exploring today, that is exactly how colleges and universities are trying to scale right now. How many of us feel like we're digging wells week after week? It seems like we think growth requires a constant stream of new programs, new initiatives, and new projects. Never mind that the ones we already have feel completely disconnected from each other to begin with. And then we talk about scale. What does that even mean anymore? And did we ever even know in the first place? This limited view of growth is precisely what we're analyzing today. I'm bringing you pieces from Fortune, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, and a few others. And you know my goal here is not to talk about abstract business theory, nor to fawn over what's happening in the corporate sector. I want to understand something practical to our colleges and universities. Why are some organizations able to grow in a way that compounds over time, while others burn out on constant reinvention? Why does every new academic year welcome event for faculty and staff feel like reinvention instead of a reminder of where we are in a multi-year plan? When I talk to friends across the nation who are working in higher ed, there is one common thread that seems to tie everyone together. Do you know what it is? Exhaustion, confusion, uncertainty about where to even start. What I'm trying to do is trace that exhaustion right back to how your organization has been designed to grow. We are all the designers who have contributed to this. I want us to design better. I want us to be better at expanding what we've already built, instead of just building something new.

Platforms That Let Others Build

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I want to start with a few examples outside of the education sector that are likely familiar to you. Through these examples, I want you to see that some organizations scale by building more, but others scale by building something that allows more to happen. If you've traveled out of town with your spouse and your kids and your nephews and your mother and your sister and her husband, which is how my family usually rolls, then the first example is familiar to you. Airbnb. There's a piece from Fortune that quotes Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, saying to third parties, if you build something for Airbnb, you will have a market. Airbnb itself does not grow by frantically buying up houses and apartment buildings. They're not hiring construction crews. Airbnb doesn't grow by building housing inventory themselves. They grow by making it easier for other people to add inventory for them. Put a pin in that point. Because we're going to come back to it in the context of higher education. The next example is familiar to me because I'm a bit of a serial entrepreneur. During the pandemic, I was preparing to send my then three-year-old daughter to daycare, who I've shared with you has severe asthma. I was terrified that she was going to swap masks with other toddlers, because that's what toddlers do. So I created a design, bought the cutest fabric and t-shirts, sourced supplies, found a small seamstress shop in Milwaukee, opened a Shopify storefront, and I launched what I knew would be a temporary business. I sold shirts with masks directly sewn attached to them. And I also sold clips that allowed parents to attach any mask for their child's shirt. Imagine a pacifier clip, but for masks, so that kids always had their mask and only their mask during this unfolding public health crisis. When I launched that business, a business that I knew was going to be temporary, I didn't build a website from scratch. I didn't build a payment system. I didn't have to build any of the infrastructure. Shopify already had all of that in place because Shopify doesn't sell products. They enable other people to sell. So we have a clear theme brewing from our first two examples. Airbnb grows by making it easier for other people to add inventory for them. Shopify grows by making it easier for other people to sell through them. What's the third example? It's OpenAI. A recent Fortune article highlights OpenAI's move to integrate third-party apps directly into ChatGPT. They're making a bid to become a universal interface. They're not just building standalone tools anymore. They're becoming a foundational layer that others can build on top of. Now before this goes any further, I want to be really clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying colleges and universities should turn into marketplaces where anyone can sell their courses and ebooks. I'm not talking about giving up control over quality, curriculum, or learning. That's not the point. The point is that Airbnb, Shopify, and OpenAI are not growing by adding more themselves. They are growing by making it easier for more to happen within a system they've built. These organizations are not scaling through what they offer. They are scaling through what they make possible. A simple

Highways Versus Delivery Trucks

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way to think about this is the difference between trying to manage every delivery truck in a city versus building the highway system those trucks run on. If you're managing the trucks, every new truck requires more effort. You have to buy a new truck, find and hire a new driver, coordinate the routes, take on more costs. But if you build the highway, your business can grow without having to add every new truck and every new route yourself. This manage every truck model is an example how most institutions are building their program portfolios. You create a discrete offering, you market it, you build up the staffing to support it, you build the processes to deliver it, and when you want to grow, you do it all over again, from scratch. Every program is carrying its own startup cost, separate from the next program. And then we wonder why we can't get to net positive revenue quickly, or sometimes ever. It's because nothing is shared, nothing connects, nothing compounds. So how do traditional established organizations actually make this shift? Not startups or tech companies, but organizations like ours that have been operating this way for decades. Research from McKinsey and Company finds that we don't have to tear everything down to grow in a way that actually scales. We don't have to become more Airbnb like and less state university. Scale is built from how the work actually moves across an organization. How the work actually moves across an organization is the leading indicator for the lagging indicator of achieving scale. I'm going to say that one more time. How the work actually moves across an organization is the leading indicator for whether you achieve the lagging indicator of scale. Efforts where work is duplicated cannot scale. Efforts where work has to restart cannot scale. Efforts where the same thing is being rebuilt over and over cannot scale. So what does this actually look like in practice? That McKinsey research profiled a very traditional established bank. This bank didn't burn everything to the ground to become a tech startup. They didn't try to reinvent themselves as something completely different in order to grow at scale. Instead, they looked at how work actually moved across the organization. They call this customer journey mapping. I laughed to myself when I wrote that line because I can see your eyes rolling right through the podcast. Customer journey mapping? You've got to be kidding me, right? Listen, what this bank did is not what we typically call journey mapping in higher ed. Most of the time, journey mapping in higher ed sits at the experience level. We ask questions like, how can we create better orientation experiences? Where can we facilitate clearer communication to students? How can we create smoother transitions between steps that we're requiring students to take? What this bank did was different. When they mapped their customer journey, they weren't just asking, where is the customer frustrated? They asked about the journey of the actual work. Where are we doing the same work twice? Where are different teams maintaining separate systems for the same function? Where does everything restart when it doesn't need to? Take a simple example from the bank. A customer has a checking account and then they apply for a mortgage. In most organizations, including ours, this type of activity happens in two separate worlds. Different application systems, different teams, entirely different processes. So even if that customer has been there for 10 years, everything starts over. From an operational standpoint, that means the same information is collected again. The same compliance checks are run again. Separate staffing and systems are maintained to support each one. Which means the organization is rebuilding the same infrastructure every time it expands its services. And that's exactly what cannot scale. So what this bank did wasn't just improve the journey by improving the customer facing experience. They eliminated the redundancy underneath it. They built a shared layer across their services. One customer record, one verification process, shared data across teams. So when a customer moved from one service to another, the work didn't restart. It carried forward. And if we take it back to where I started the podcast, they changed the economics of growth. Not because they added something new, but because what they already had could finally work together.

Silos Create Burnout Economics

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The barrier to growth in your organization right now lives in the fact that Team A does not know what team B is doing. Data aren't shared across units, and if nothing is shared, then nothing compounds. If every single department or unit insists on having a completely unique process for everything they do, there is zero compounding value in your organization. This raises an important question though, because we have to balance that with if you force every department to operate in the same exact rigid way, innovation dies and nobody wants that. You have to require rigidity where it matters, and you have to facilitate flexibility where it matters. Rigidity at the foundation, flexibility at the edge. Now let's say a senior leader listens to this and thinks, you know, that sounds like a massive political turf war. My department heads love owning their own silos. We're just going to stick to our program by program approach. It might be disconnected, but it saves me massive social capital. Listen, I'm not going to overstate the risk. Sure, your college or university isn't going to close tomorrow. Likely not ever, but you are facing a slow and agonizing grind where you are fighting against the wave rather than gliding on it. Your operating costs inevitably increase with every single new initiative, because you're building a new well every time. Internal coordination slows to a crawl because every cross-department collaboration requires a custom treaty. I'm honestly not exaggerating. Some of us are maintaining several interdepartmental agreements or keeping track of unique deals between senior leadership and different deans to make a single initiative happen. Your growth becomes entirely dependent on constant Herculean effort from your staff, and you're driving them to operational burnout fast. You might not have built the highway I talked about earlier, but you're definitely building express lanes to burnout. And

The Hub Economy And New Value

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this actually connects to a much bigger shift. There's a fortune piece on Warren Buffett that I keep coming back to. Buffett built his entire strategy around what we generally expect in an industrial economy. Find businesses with strong moats, defend the position, limit competition, create switching costs. It's the classic model. Protect the castle, raise the drawbridge, keep everyone else out. And for a long time, that worked. But what this piece points out is that he initially underestimated how the digital economy was changing the rules. Because the most powerful companies today don't operate like castles. They operate like hubs. They're not trying to block access, it's trying to attract it. They're not destroying the roads leading to the castle. They're building the fastest, easiest, most accessible highways into a place where more and more activity can happen. This flips the growth strategy. Growth is no longer about protecting what you have, it's about enabling more to happen through what you've built. And this is exactly what a piece in the Harvard Business Review by Marco I and City and Kareem Lakani calls the hub economy. Value doesn't come from controlling everything, it comes from being the place where everything connects. Value is increasingly consolidating around a small number of central organizations or units that act as connective tissue. And when you provide that connective layer, you capture an outsized share of the value, which has a pretty significant implication. If your organization is operating as a series of disconnected silos, you are fundamentally misaligned with how value is created today. Let me simplify that. The issue is not how much you offer. You can have a massive catalog with hundreds of programs and dozens of services. Without a doubt, high quality work is happening across the institution. But if nothing connects, you will only realize the value of each discrete activity on its own. The academic programs, the internship office, the advising team, the online learning unit, they're all creating value for students on their own, and that value is rooted in what they uniquely deliver. But if you use the hub model, a higher layer of value is created when those activities are connected. Connection does not just combine existing value. It creates new value for your students in terms of new opportunities, experiences, and outcomes. That value does not exist when each function operates alone. For example, an institution may want more students to participate in internships and career experiences. If online learning and internships remain separate, students get the value of online courses, and some students get the value of internships, but connect them and new value is created. Students can use flexible online courses to open daytime availability for internships that would have otherwise been inaccessible. Now more students can participate. Employers gain access to more talent. Students graduate with stronger experience. The institution improves career outcomes. That value did not previously exist in either activity by itself. It was created through connection. That is the difference between offering many things and designing them to work together. And in an environment that rewards connection, a large catalog of disconnected offerings is not an advantage. It is a liability. Unfortunately, our sector has been built exactly this way: a collection of discrete offerings, courses, programs, experiences, all delivered well, but largely operating independently. You come to a specific campus, you enroll in a specific program, you move through a defined sequence, and the institution manages each part of that journey as its own contained system. That model made sense in a different era. But if value now comes from connection, we have to ask a different question, not how much do we offer, but what actually connects across what we offer? Because that's what determines whether anything scales. Campus

When Others Organize Learner Pathways

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AI is a startup that is building a comprehensive learning system for enterprise training. A TechCrunch article specifically described it as Roblox for adults. If you're not a gamer, or if you don't have a 12-year-old in your house, then I probably need to explain what Roblox is, because I think that analogy is brilliant once you understand it. Roblox is not actually a video game, it's a digital coding platform. The company itself does not make the games. They just provide the tools. They provide the underlying infrastructure, the avatars, the payment system, the server space, and millions of users build their own games for each other. Similarly, Campus AI is trying to be the engine, not the course. They aren't selling a specific training module. They are selling the ecosystem where the learning happens. Here's my big question for you today. What would it mean for colleges and universities to move beyond being only the place that creates and delivers learning, and instead become the infrastructure that organizes learning? A place where faculty remain essential, but where students also learn through structured interaction with employers, practitioners, alumni, creators, communities, and peers. A place that does not try to be the sole source of all learning, but creates the conditions for many forms of learning to happen with quality, coherence, and purpose. In that model, the institution is not stepping back. It is stepping into a larger role, designing pathways, curating experiences, connecting students to people and opportunities, ensuring what students learn from others is meaningful, rigorous, and tied to their goals. In a time where the public questions the relevance of our teaching and learning, can we be open-minded and consider how to become the platform that expands who gets to teach, where learning happens, and how students move through it? One line of thought says that if colleges and universities do not build this connective layer themselves, others will. New providers may emerge that help learners navigate full journeys across degrees, certificates, employer training, coaching, and skills-based experiences. In that world, a college or university may no longer be the organizer of their relationship with the learner. It may simply become one stop along a pathway designed by someone else. This is the exact moment where people tend to diverge when they hear this. Some will think that would never happen to us. So instead of leaving this abstract, let's walk through what this actually looks like in practice, step by step, in a way that maps directly to how colleges and universities operate today. It doesn't happen all at once. It happens gradually, through a series of shifts that seem reasonable in isolation, but fundamentally change where value sits in the system. It usually starts with the front door. A third party becomes the place where learners go to explore their options. They compare programs, think about possible pathways, and start connecting learning to career outcomes. That experience becomes more useful, more intuitive, and more comprehensive than any single institutional website. So learners begin there, not with you. From there, that platform expands beyond a single institution and begins to aggregate across providers. Your programs are no longer being considered in isolation. They are presented alongside programs from other universities, alongside boot camps, certificates, employer-based learning, and other forms of education. Everything is visible in one place, which means everything is now comparable in a way it wasn't before. At that point, the control over the learner's pathway starts to shift. The platform begins to shape how options are sequenced, what combinations of learning make sense, and how a learner moves from one experience to the next. Your program still exists and it may still be strong, but it is no longer positioned as a full journey. It becomes one option within a pathway that is being designed somewhere else. Over time, the relationship itself moves. The learner starts on that platform, returns to that platform, and relies on it to navigate decisions over time. You may still deliver a portion of the experience, but you are no longer the primary point of connection. You don't control discovery, you don't control ongoing engagement, and you don't control how that learner continues through their education over time. That's when the role of the institution fundamentally changes. You are no longer organizing the learner journey. You are contributing to it. Your programs function as components, courses, credentials, pieces of a broader pathway, but not as the structure that holds their entire experience together. And once that happens, the economics begin to shift. Because now your offerings are being evaluated side by side with alternatives in a way that is constant and unavoidable. Differentiation becomes harder to maintain, switching becomes easier, and as a result, pricing pressure increases. Not because the quality of your programs has declined, but because the structure around them has changed. This is how institutions move from being pathway organizers for students to content providers within someone else's ecosystem. And again, this doesn't happen all at once. It happens one layer at a time. Modern organizations need to act as hubs. That does not mean you own or build every single activity internally. It means you focus on the layer that connects everything. You provide the shared elements, credentials that carry across experiences, data that moves with a learner, and systems that connect students, employers, and partners. I'm not saying every college or university must become a hub today. This is simply the reality of how these learning hubs are forming and how growth works within them. You can see them for yourself in the platforms where learners are exploring options, in the companies connecting education to careers, in the systems that are starting to link institutions, employers, and alternative providers together. The real question is whether your institution is helping shape how they work as a hub, or if you are going to sit next to them furiously, digging new wells by hand and hoping your disconnected offerings survive.

Three Questions To Diagnose Scale

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So, what does this actually mean for you? How do you evaluate this inside your own organization? If you were walking into a leadership meeting tomorrow, there are three very practical questions you could ask to surface barriers to growth and opportunities to build connective tissue across your college or university. First, what gets reused across your offerings? And what gets rebuilt every time? Because this goes straight to the issue we saw in the McKinsey example. Are you sharing core processes and infrastructure, or are you rebuilding them every time you launch something new? Second, what actually connects experiences once someone enters your institution? If a student comes in through one entry point, is there anything structurally guiding them to the next experience? Or are those experiences completely blind to each other? Because if they're not connected, you're not compounding value. You're reacquiring the same person over and over again, even though they're already inside your system. And third, when someone moves across your organization, what actually happens? Does their data follow them? Do their goals, progress, and prior conversations carry forward, or do you treat them like a brand new person every time they cross a program boundary? Those three questions. What gets reused, what connects, and what carries forward give you a very clear read on whether your organization compounds value or leaves potential new value on the table. Now, if these questions feel difficult for you and your leadership team to answer on an ongoing basis, there's a reason for that. There's a piece from MIT Sloan that makes this point very directly. Building this kind of shared structure is hard. It's actually not because the mechanics are unclear. In other words, we're not disconnected because we don't know how to build the connective tissue. We're disconnected because we have no incentive to build it. In higher education, we don't typically reward connection. We reward what's new, new initiatives and new programs. We don't tend to reward the work that connects what already exists. No one is recognized for standardizing processes across units, or aligning advising models across programs, or building shared infrastructure that multiple areas can use. And when we do, we usually put it within some obscure administrative excellence award. We have structured each of our units to control their own programs, processes, and relationships. And because of that, accountability, reputation, and decision making become tied to protecting those boundaries. So asking those units to share systems or to align processes or to create something new that leverages the very best of what they individually do can feel like asking them to give something up. Building something big requires people to give up a small amount of local control. In exchange for a system that works across the whole organization. And that can be a difficult shift when the incentives to do so are missing. As the academic year starts to wind down and you begin thinking about your leadership retreat or next year's kickoff, I would encourage you to shift the question. Don't just ask, what are we going to launch next? If that is the only question, you will keep adding new things on top of a structure that does not connect. You will keep chasing incremental value through separate initiatives. And in many cases, what you are trying to build already exists somewhere in the market, in another unit, or inside your own institution. Instead ask, what already exists that we have not connected yet? How could connecting it create new value? What is structurally preventing those things from working together? When you ask those questions, you stop treating growth as something that only comes from adding more, and you start creating growth through connection, design, and better use of what you already have. I want to leave you with one final thought. We've spent a lot of time talking about systems, structure, and how work moves across an organization. But shifts like this are never only structural, they are also human. When an institution moves from disconnected units to a more connected model, it changes how people experience leadership, ownership, and success. That requires a different mindset. And for leaders, that may be one of the hardest parts of the work. We're not going to unpack that today, but I think we should come back to it, because many transformation efforts fail not on strategy or technology, but on the human realities of change. I often say I created the education strategist because I want to center the human being asked to do strategy work. The human-centered conversation is one we need to have. Thanks for listening to Beyond the Ivory Tower. If this episode made you think differently about how your college or university thinks about platforms, hubs, and growth, share it with someone leading change on your campus. Until next time.