Why “New” Becomes The Default

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Higher education really overthinks growth to the point where we always want to do a growth exercise by starting with something new. We'll say, look, we need new enrollment, so help us find a new audience. Instead of saying, do we actually need a new audience? Where's the growth opportunity that fits what we already have the best? Because the reality is when you work a growth problem that way, you often end up with this sort of aspirational new thing that doesn't actually match the relationships or capabilities the institution already has 51.

Learner Lifetime Value Mindset

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Welcome to another episode of Beyond the Ivory Tower. With me, Maya Evans. How are you doing? It's been a minute. I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about learner lifetime value and what changes when we stop treating a single enrollment as the whole relationship between a learner and an institution. So in a lot of that work, I've been looking at the things institutions do when they're under pressure to grow, because there are a set of decisions that leaders tend to make almost automatically. There are some things we reach for before we've really decided what kind of growth problem we have. I'm talking specifically about things such as new audiences, which I think we tend to reach for very, very quickly when the enrollment numbers get uncomfortable. We talk a lot about new programs and there's a whole lot of activity right now around building new programs. That conversation has gotten even louder because I'm not sure anybody believes the old enrollment playbook's going to carry institutions indefinitely. And I think most people know that now. After you get through the new audience conversation, there are usually a couple other things that come after that. So there's a point where somebody looks at the revenue target and says, look, we need this much growth. And underneath that, we've got the audiences and programs that are supposed to produce it. This is how we're going to get there. So after that, usually there's a conversation around what else we could launch. So you say, look, we have these programs and these markets, but the reality is they're not producing the growth we need. So what else could we build that people might really, really want to enroll in? In sitting in a whole lot of these conversations, I find that the more complex the institution, the more places there are to go, looking for a new answer. Bigger universities have more schools, they have more programs. They usually have more teams thinking about different populations and different markets. They've generally got more units launching things, and those units are often focused on their own part of the enrollment picture. So if the institution's quite big, there are a lot of places where growth can get fragmented. If the institution's smaller, there may be fewer places to look, but the urgency around finding one new thing that

What A Growth Strategy Does

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works can be much higher. So if you understand that pattern, I don't think there's anything particularly unusual about why institutions keep doing this. The thing I want to talk about today is what we mean when we say growth. Now, growth, I've always thought of growth as being a very, very important institutional question. And in higher education, we probably spend more time talking about enrollment and revenue growth than almost anything else, but it's interesting. The more I do this work, the more I think institutions really overthink growth, to the point where they actually want to solve a growth problem by starting with something new. They'll say, Look, Maya, we need a new audience, so help us figure out who that is. Instead of saying, do we need a new audience? What actually is the growth opportunity that fits what this institution already has the best? The problem with starting with something new is a little bit of the tail wagging the dog. It's often a bit aspirational. The institution says, We wish this new market would be our next source of growth, so let's make it so. But the reality is when you work a growth problem that way, you often end up with this sort of aspirational initiative that doesn't actually match the demand, relationships, or capabilities you have. So generally, if you want a new audience to create growth so that you're counting on a new population to move the numbers, you need a real reason that population would choose you to start with. And if you don't have that, then learners aren't stupid. They're going to see through it and they'll say, yeah, I know you built this thing for people like me, but I don't know, man. It just seems like another program to me. Why would I pick yours? And your marketing and enrollment teams will spend forever trying to answer that question. So that's the first thing. I think higher ed overthinks newness as growth. So here's some of my thinking on growth. So what's the job of a growth strategy? The job of a growth strategy is to take an institution that needs more enrollment and revenue and point it toward the places where it can create the most value from what it's actually good at. That's it. That's all it does. It doesn't take the place of your enrollment strategy, it doesn't take the place of your program strategy. You're still going to have to take that opportunity all the way from an idea to where you want to go, which is actual enrollment and revenue. So the growth strategy just does that. It's a starting point. Leaders understand where the institution has an advantage. So a good growth strategy does that. It points people in that direction. A good growth strategy sets off a set of assumptions about the institution that are true, so that people say, Oh yeah, yeah, I kind of get why this could work here. You've already got something to build on. Great. Now we can just continue on, and it's easier to take that opportunity where we want it to go, which is sustainable growth. The first rule of growth strategy is do no harm. So the harm that a bad growth strategy can do is it takes an institution that already has relationships and assets it could build on, and it points everybody somewhere else, away from those advantages. And so you'll say, Oh, we're going after this new market. And the learner says, Oh, I get it. You've got another new program for people such as me, but so does everybody else. You're not differentiated just because the program's new. And when everybody else is chasing the same audience, learners assume they can shop that program across a bunch of institutions that look basically interchangeable. This is bad. And then it's the job of marketing and enrollment to say, no, no, no, no, no, ours is different. No, no, come back over here, come back over here, no, no, no, no, no. And then somehow get the learner pointed back toward the value the institution actually has. So job number one is do no harm. A great growth strategy takes the institution a certain way, toward an opportunity, points people in the right direction, sets off a bunch of assumptions about why the institution can win that are true, so that everything enrollment and program teams have to do is a little bit easier. They don't have to undo a growth idea that was already disconnected from the institution's real advantages. So the way I think about this, at least if you're doing the work with me, is we'll look at here's the pressure the institution's under, here's what the institution already has, and then we'll look at whatever it's currently treating as the next source of growth and say, does this work? If I say this is where our growth's coming from, is the institution oriented toward an advantage it actually has, or are we pointed somewhere else? So does it set off a set of assumptions about demand and value that we can actually support? And so we'll look at that. And in cases where we look at it and we say the current growth path works, we don't touch it. That's it. The growth path works, so we're not going to mess with it. Now sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we get really clear on what the institution has going for it, and then we say, okay, here's the growth plan you've been using, and well, it doesn't really work. It kind of points the institution away from its strongest assets. So then we'd look at, is there something closer that does work? So either an audience that's adjacent to the learners you already serve, or maybe we're looking at the learners you already have, and we expand the relationship with them. Maybe it's not a completely new population, but people who already know the institution and have a new need. Maybe it's former students, or maybe it's people who are already connected through employers, professional communities, or other relationships the institution already has. We could move one step outward, or we look at the relationships that already exist and we're actually shifting the source of growth. But we're shifting to something that's related to what the institution already does, not something completely disconnected from it. That happens quite a lot. And then if none of that works because the existing markets really are tapped out, we're in a situation where we have to actually go find something entirely new. In those cases, what we're looking for is what I'd call a

Three Places Growth Comes From

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real reason to believe. Something to anchor the growth idea on, so that we're not just making up a market and saying, hey, there are millions of adults who need upskilling, and everybody's saying, okay, but why would they choose you? Let me explain why this particular institution should win them. What we're looking for is a kind of anchor that helps us understand why this growth opportunity belongs to this institution, even though the audience or offering itself may actually be new. It's a new thing, which kind of brings me to this idea of, in my perspective, there are different places higher education tends to look for growth. So there are three that I want to talk about today. The

When New Learner Growth Works

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first one is what I'd call new learner growth, and that's where I need more enrollment. There's a population out there that I'm not serving now, and I want to bring more of those people into the institution. And so this is new learner growth where it's we need more students. Adult learners are out there, I'm not putting any other condition on that. I'm going after adults, and I've basically just said this is where the next enrollment's coming from, and that's it. And as you can imagine, this isn't always a successful way to create growth. Now this works great if you happen to have a strong reason to win that market. So if you happen to have an institution that's unusually well suited to serve that population, and learners already see the value, I'd hesitate to overcomplicate that because you have an advantage. So you should use it. You have the ability to make a compelling case. That market works well for you. It's working well right now. And you'll often see institutions with a strong position in a market. Keep investing in it, because staying focused on a market where you already win works very well. And if that institution gets to the point where it's captured most of the obvious demand, then what it generally does is push the boundaries of that market a little bit, maybe into a new geography or modality, so the market's bigger, so it can keep growing from the same underlying advantage. The only time if you didn't already have a strong position that you might want to go after a crowded new population, is if you had a very strong reason that learners in that population should choose you and there's something going on in the market that gives you an opening. So I've seen this in institutions where they're not the obvious leader in a market, and that they have something very different that matters to the learner they want to reach. So there's absolutely a case for going after that population because the institution has a chance to win on something other than just spending more money to be seen. Usually what you're looking for is a real opening, so you're looking for something in the market changing in some way. Maybe learner behavior changes, maybe a new delivery model removes a barrier. I've seen that happen plenty of times. Maybe there's a big change in the workforce and suddenly a population needs something that your institution's particularly good at delivering. There are all kinds of things that can create an opening. But if you have that opening and you're a strong fit, there's no reason why you wouldn't potentially want to pursue new learner growth. If you aren't, you probably don't want to do this. This is a bad growth move if you're going after a population that every other institution is chasing, and you don't have a strong reason that those learners should choose you, because there are better ways to grow than trying to outspend everybody for the same student. So you probably don't want

The Trap Of New Program Growth

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to do that. The second place higher ed looks for growth is what I'd call new program growth, and this is similar to new learner growth. You're still trying to create enrollment, but in this case you're not starting with the population. You're starting with the offering. You're building something new and you're attempting to create demand around that thing. So the requirements here are there needs to be an identifiable learner. Need that's not being served well enough right now, and then you have a program that does something meaningfully useful for that learner. And then ideally, the other condition that needs to be met is it's something your competitors can't immediately make interchangeable. Because if you get some success with a new program and start getting some traction, ten other institutions may actually just say, Well, we can launch one too, and take away the advantage at the moment you're just starting to see some enrollment. This new program move is the vast majority of growth conversations in higher ed, right? That's the way we tend to respond when we see a new market need. It's the easiest growth move to picture, because the idea is you build a program around a need that's not being met. It's easy to organize because you know what the deliverable is. So once you get a program approved, people know how to build the curriculum, market it, recruit for it, and enroll students into it. And then if you can get that program working, you can attempt to expand around it until you have a whole portfolio serving that area. And then you look for the next program that can keep the growth going. If you look at the way higher ed has responded to market shifts, this is kind of what we do over and over. Most institutions can point to a moment where a new field or new learner need became the thing everybody wanted to build around. If I think about what happens when a field suddenly gets hot, institutions don't just sit there and watch it happen. They come in, they build a certificate or a degree aimed at the part of the market that looks most immediately enrollable. They come in at the level they think they can get approved and launched fastest. Other institutions are doing the same thing. Nobody's waiting around for you to own the market. So you launch, you get some early enrollment, and then slowly, slowly, slowly the number of competing offerings starts to climb. And then the market changes again. Learners have more choices, employers change what they're asking for, and this allows the institutions with the strongest brand or clearest value to take more of the demand, while everybody else is left trying to figure out why the program that looked obvious two years ago is suddenly hard to fill. Eventually the new thing's not new anymore, and now it's just one more program in the market. A lot of programs that began as growth bets sort of follow that pattern, and then have to find their way after the novelty wears off. The last place, of course, is this idea, where we grow the value of a relationship we already have.

Relationship Growth And Lifelong Learning

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And this one, as I mentioned earlier, we tend not to start here, even though in a lot of institutions this may be the most under-examined opportunity. It's much easier for us to imagine growth as getting somebody new to enroll. Again, if we think back to what the job of a growth strategy is, it's to point the institution toward a place where it can create more value from an advantage it actually has. That can be much easier when I give you an asset that you already understand. For example, if I say you have 50,000 former students who already know your institution, that gives you something concrete to work with, and you can leverage what you already know about those relationships. You know who they are, you know what they studied, you know they've already trusted you enough to enroll once, and then you say, well, what happens when their needs change? Well, okay, maybe they need something from you again. There has to be some point in a long career where the institution can create value again. In a relationship growth scenario, you kind of don't have the normal higher ed growth playbook for that. You don't. You can't say, well, we'll just launch a new program and assume the same learner will somehow understand that it's for them and come back. In this case, you're coming in with a relationship and you have to kind of explain what the institution's going to do with that relationship. When the learner's needs change and there's no obvious institutional process for that. Now, in these situations, it's interesting. If you look at institutions that are trying to build lifelong learning in a serious way, often the starting point is to convince people that there's a growth problem here. Because the reality is if everybody already saw the lost relationship as a growth problem, we'd already have systems designed to keep that relationship useful. So if learner lifetime value is actually a different way to think about growth, it's because most institutions don't even count the relationship as the thing they're trying to grow. So at the beginning, what I'm doing isn't selling a new program. I'm not even selling lifelong learning, I'm selling the problem. So I have to convince people that we have a problem when we spend years creating a relationship with a learner, and then let that relationship go economically quiet after one enrollment. Once a certain portion of the institution realizes, yes, oh, we've been treating a warm relationship as though it has no growth value after the credential ends, now you have to convince people that this problem's worth solving, and worth solving right now over all the other problems they have. Because colleges and universities have a lot of problems. So over all the other problems they have, this one has to be worth solving, because it changes whether every future enrollment starts from scratch, and the institution has to believe it's capable of solving it. As you can imagine, this is a long-term thing, as is any real change in the way an institution thinks about growth. If you look at how universities are organized, you can see pretty quickly that relationships don't conveniently belong to one unit from the first course through the next 30 years of a learner's life. Now, the really scary part about relationship growth in my mind is that sometimes the current model appears to work in the short term. But because it depends so heavily on constantly finding the next learner and the next program, you can go a long time without seeing how fragile it is until the market gets harder. Meaning at the point where leaders are starting to say, yeah, we have an enrollment problem, we should find more students, and people are thinking about it and talking about it. Right at that moment, it's very easy to pour more money into the same acquisition model instead of asking whether the institution's repeatedly abandoning relationships it already paid to create. And we know this happens because you can see the same response across the sector. Enrollment drops and we go looking for a new population. A program struggles and we go looking for the next program to launch. Revenue gets tight and we go looking for a new revenue stream. What about the people we already taught? There are a lot of learners who keep learning after they leave us, just not necessarily with us. So relationship growth is it's different. It's hard. Now, if you pull it off, of course theoretically, the gain is that you've designed the institution so the value of a learner relationship can continue instead of resetting after every transaction. So if you're attempting to do this, you should design the relationship in a way that makes it genuinely easier and more valuable for a learner to return to you than to start from zero somewhere else. For example, so these are the choices that we have coming back to how we think about growth inside an institution.

Why Naming The Asset Matters

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Sometimes I get the question where people will ask me, why bother calling this learner lifetime value at all? And I've had smart higher ed leaders ask me that question, why bother naming it? Can't we just say lifelong learning? And you know what? In some cases I think you can. In some cases, I think it's just as good to say, we want to keep creating value for learners after their first enrollment. Now, if you try to do that, it's kind of hard to do it without deciding what exactly you're trying to grow. So you end up defining the learner relationship as an asset anyway. But I do think in some cases the language can be simple. Here's the risk though. If you don't define the learner relationship as something the institution's actually trying to grow, the risk is that a couple of bad things might happen. The first one is every unit will define growth in the way it already understands. And because you haven't defined the relationship as a shared unit of growth, everybody'll go optimize their own thing, and you might not be happy with what all those separate successes add up to. That's one thing, and it's not just academic units. It might be enrollment, alumni relations, continuing education, career services. Everybody might just optimize their own piece in a way that doesn't create a coherent relationship at all. So that's no good. The second thing is what happens to the learner. So we get asked the question, so what do I do when I need to learn something next? And if you don't have a really tight, clear answer for that, what'll happen is every part of the institution will answer that question in a different way, and it'll be very confusing to the learner. In particular, the learner might just start looking somewhere else. And again, in the same way that you maybe didn't like the way every unit defined growth for itself, you may not be very happy when the learner decides your institution was a place they went once rather than a place they can keep returning to, if you never designed the relationship to tell them otherwise. In

Start Closer Before You Leap

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conclusion, I'd say don't overthink growth by assuming it has to come from something new. If you're doing this inside an institution, I'd always start with the learners and relationships you have right now and really examine them to decide whether there's more value there or not. If there isn't, I'd look at, is there an adjacent audience we're unusually well positioned to serve? Is there a new program that solves a real problem we can credibly solve? Before I'd automatically assume we need to go find an entirely new source of growth, you may discover that you actually do need one. If you do, that's okay. But go into it with your eyes open. It's not going to be free. I've got a lot more that I want to talk about, which is what it actually takes to design an institution around a relationship that can remain valuable as a learner changes. So how do we understand what learners will need over time? And then how do we take that understanding and turn it into things the institution can actually build, such as programs, guidance, engagement, and a reason to come back? And then I think we'll keep pulling that apart in future episodes. So if you have a question about that, send it my way. If you've been listening to the show and you have a growth question that I haven't touched on before, and you think, hey, I wish Maya would do an episode on this, let me know. And maybe I'll make that one of the next episodes. Anyway, that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you next time.