Growth Is a Governance Challenge
Picture this: Your university launches an ambitious growth strategy that includes new programs, bold enrollment targets, and a brand refresh for online programs. The marketing team hits its lead goals. Admissions teams work overtime to reach new yield levels. But then … faculty scramble to staff courses, advising and registration queues explode, and new student satisfaction sours. The strategy was sound. The execution was great — until it wasn’t.
What failed? Was it communication, culture, or resourcing? No, it was the absence of strategic governance.
In a prior article, I argue that presidents and provosts must establish formal cross-functional structures with real authority to align leaders around a unified enrollment vision, coordinate strategies, and embed shared accountability metrics across the student life cycle.
This article goes deeper. Here, we make the case that strategic growth at the institutional level is fundamentally a governance challenge. Without intentional governance infrastructure and practice, ambitious growth strategies may fail to reach their full potential. In this article, we outline:
- Why strategic governance matters
- How universities can design governance infrastructure to enable sustainable growth and cultivate a governance culture that supports execution
- Common governance pitfalls to avoid
Why Strategic Governance Matters
Decentralized universities can enable pockets of innovation and growth for a time. But today’s crowded and complex market demands an institutional strategy and approach. Enrollment growth, modality expansion, student success initiatives, and new credential portfolios all require coordinated decisions across multiple academic and administrative units with different incentives, budgets, and governance traditions.
Strategic governance provides the connective tissue that turns institutional ambition into coordinated action.
Strategic governance addresses these challenges by creating decision rights, accountability structures, and coordination mechanisms that align academic and administrative units around institutional growth priorities.
Defining Strategic Governance in Higher Education
Strategic governance isn’t simply about creating more committees. It’s a system of structures, processes, roles, and norms that enable the institution to make coordinated, timely, and data-informed decisions in service of strategic goals.
In the context of institutional growth, strategic governance answers three questions:
- Who decides? — Decision rights and authority
- How do they decide? — Processes, data, and cadence
- How are decisions evaluated and execution tracked? — Accountability, incentives, and performance management
Effective strategic governance balances autonomy with coordination, enabling institution-wide alignment on growth priorities.
Designing Strategic Governance Infrastructure
Developing governance infrastructure requires intentional design. But infrastructure alone is insufficient. Strategic governance succeeds when design meets shared accountability and collaborative decision-making. Below are key components universities should consider to capture both a successful infrastructure and a culture of effective governance.
1. Executive-Level Growth Governance Bodies
Universities should establish a cabinet-level body responsible for growth strategy. This cabinet is chaired by the provost or president and includes academic deans, enrollment leadership, and leaders from central services and planning, student affairs, and technology.
Executive leaders should incorporate enrollment growth and student success metrics into leadership evaluations for deans and vice presidents. Shared metrics reinforce that growth is the responsibility of the institution, not a mandate from the central office.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting context-informed enrollment and program growth targets by academic unit
- Approving portfolio strategy (programs, credentials, modalities) to ensure support and avoid duplication
- Aligning resource planning (instructional delivery hiring, course scheduling, incremental infrastructure growth)
- Monitoring performance and intervening as needed
This body must have clear authority to allocate resources, set priorities, and escalate decisions to the president or board when necessary.
Academic leaders often lack training in enterprise governance. Professional development, as needed, should cover:
- Understanding data-driven decision-making
- Using the RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrix and decision rights
- Developing financial modeling and margin analysis skills
- Developing change management and stakeholder alignment skills
2. Integrated Enrollment and Student Success Council
The integrated council should sit just below the executive cabinet and bring together admissions, marketing, financial aid, registration, advising, career services, and academic scheduling teams. Appointing cross-functional roles such as vice provost for enrollment strategy or chief student success officer signals institutional commitment to integration. These leaders should have dotted-line authority across academic and administrative units.
The council ensures:
- Funnel metrics remain apples-to-apples and continuously improve
- Course and advising capacity align with enrollment plans
- Student success interventions are coordinated across academic and student support units
3. Program Portfolio Governance
Growth often comes through new programs, stackable credentials, and alternative modalities. Universities need a framework that evaluates proposals based on:
- Market demand and competitive positioning
- Financial viability and margin contribution
- Academic capacity and faculty workload
- Strategic alignment with institutional mission
This framework should also include postlaunch performance reviews to prevent portfolio sprawl and underperforming programs. Budget models can reward units that contribute to institutional growth (e.g., revenue sharing for online programs, investment funds for cross-school initiatives). Incentives should discourage siloed behavior that undermines growth.
4. Data and Analytics Infrastructure
Governance without data is performative. Institutions must invest in analytics platforms that integrate data from customer relationship management (CRM) systems, student information systems (SISs), learning management systems (LMSs), and finance and human resources (HR) records into executive dashboards or reports.
Effective governance dashboards:
- Track demand, conversion, yield, retention, and completion
- Forecast capacity constraints (faculty, sections, advising)
- Highlight variance from targets, with clear escalation triggers
Data literacy training for academic and administrative leaders is essential to ensure that dashboards drive decision-making, not just reporting.
5. Decision Cadence and Escalation Pathways
Strategic governance requires regular review. Institutions should define which items require monthly, term-level, or annual review. Escalation pathways should specify when issues move from operational councils to executive governance bodies and ultimately to the president or board.
Regular governance updates to faculty senates, staff councils, and boards build trust and transparency and reduce perceptions of administrative overreach.
Common Governance Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Even well-designed governance structures can fail if common implementation traps aren’t addressed. Executive leaders can underestimate how organizational dynamics, incentives, and authority structures can undermine strategic governance effectiveness. Below are some pitfalls for institutions to anticipate and avoid.
Pitfall 1: The Appearance of Governance Without Authority
Creating committees without decision rights leads to frustration and inaction. Charters should explicitly define authority, scope, and escalation mechanisms.
Pitfall 2: Coordination Scope Creep That Undermines Academic Autonomy
Strategic governance should coordinate, but not dictate, pedagogy and activities that impact instructional capacity. Academic units must retain ownership of curriculum, research agendas, and faculty governance.
Pitfall 3: Data Without Action
Dashboards that don’t trigger decisions or resource shifts become noise in the system. Governance bodies must commit to acting on data, even when decisions are politically challenging.
Pitfall 4: Misaligned Budget Models
If academic units bear the instructional costs of growth without sharing in the revenue upside, resistance is to be expected. Budget models must align financial incentives with institutional goals.
Pitfall 5: Change Fatigue and Cultural Resistance
Governance redesign can overwhelm institutions. Leaders should sequence changes, pilot governance structures, and celebrate early wins to build momentum.
The President and Provost as Chief Governance Architects
Higher education leaders increasingly recognize that enrollment growth and student success are institutional imperatives that cut across academic units, student services, finance, technology, and governance.
Strategic governance isn’t bureaucratic overhead. It’s the operating system for institutional growth. By intentionally designing governance structures, cultivating a collaborative culture, and avoiding common pitfalls, higher education leaders can transform growth from episodic campaigns into sustainable institutional capability.
Ultimately, strategic governance is a leadership responsibility. Presidents and provosts must act as chief governance architects, designing structures that enable coordinated execution while preserving institutional values. This requires political capital, clarity of vision, and sustained attention. The alternatives are fragmented growth, reactive operations, and eroding student experience, which proves far more costly over time.
Build the Governance Infrastructure That Turns Growth Strategy Into Results
Strategic growth works best when teams are aligned, decisions are clear, and everyone is moving toward the same goal. Archer Education helps institutions build the governance structures that make that alignment possible — without adding unnecessary complexity.
As a trusted growth enablement partner, we work alongside leaders to connect strategy, enrollment, and student experience in practical, sustainable ways. If you’re ready to turn growth plans into coordinated action, let’s talk about what’s possible together.
