One of today’s most enduring “business-guru” books was authored by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema ten years ago.[9]  They advise business to “choose your customers, narrow your focus, and dominate your market” and to do so by focusing intensely on exactly one of three possible “value disciplines”—operational excellence, product leadership, or customer intimacy—while meeting threshold standards in the other two to maintain competitive position within the selected market.  In nonprofit higher education terms, their advice translates at first glance as “choose your student audiences, narrow your focus to those audiences, and, in each, outperform your mission obligations.”  Such advice is appropriate for an independent institution that is free to self-determine its “charitable purpose” under the tax code.  Public institutions, however, are not completely free to choose their student audiences—their missions and services being subject to public charters and even to changing public laws and expectations.  Nevertheless, all nonprofit institutions have considerable latitude in how they fulfill their mission obligations.  That latitude is where Treacy’s and Wiersema’s value discipline enters the picture to help an institution discipline itself to deliver the value that is its mission, whether self-selected or mandated. 

For example, most community colleges and non-research public universities should adhere to the value discipline of operational excellence characterized by high productivity and highly satisfactory, but streamlined services that must be provided within a tight publicly subsidized resource allocation.  They should consider applying the common course redesign and the flex program and service redesign strategies in combination to 1) improve and report student learning, 2) increase capacity (the faculty’s, the staff’s, and the physical plant’s), and 3) respond to economic development and workforce/professional needs with flex programs—all while reducing unit costs to stabilize tuition and fees.

In contrast, many independent institutions practice the value discipline of customer intimacy—“student intimacy” through an individualized, personal educational experience featuring rich student/faculty interactions.  These institutions should consider using the common course redesign strategy to increase student intimacy while reducing its unit cost.  Some may also wish to use the flex program and service redesign strategy to offer selected professional or niche programs to convenience markets at profitable tuition rates.  (The “national” liberal arts colleges in this group also practice the value discipline of product leadership by marketing the prior achievements of their incoming students and the post-baccalaureate educational and/or lifetime achievements of their graduates.)

Most public and independent research universities practice the value discipline of product leadership by marketing a highly-productive research faculty and national/global brand recognition owing to some combination of incoming student quality, alumni achievements, and/or national standing in major sports.  They can consider using the common course redesign strategy to improve student intimacy and reduce per-enrollment costs.  They can deploy the flex program and service redesign strategy to extend their graduate professional programs and brands beyond traditional markets to new flex markets.

The rush of recommendations and supporting evidence in this executive summary are offered in the spirit of “tough love.”  The reader may choose not to read further, but we believe that nonprofit higher education will eventually adopt and adapt the advice offered here and detailed in the sections that follow, and will delay action at the expense of relinquishing significant near-term control of its own destiny.