How Higher Ed Leaders Can Find Value in the Flawed Strategic Planning Genre
We analyzed 45 recent college strategic plans for signals of how higher ed is changing, what is trending, and what the format can and can't do.
Dear Colleagues,
Many articles have raised questions about the validity or utility of strategic planning in higher ed — the “gathering dust on a shelf” trope is common — but none that we know of have offered answers to those questions grounded in a detailed look at actual strategic plans. To tackle this question, we assembled and analyzed a large corpus of recent strategic plans to understand more about the current state of higher education. In addition to yielding specific insights about how the sector sees itself and its environment, what it names as priorities, and what innovations are trending, this brought the limitations of the genre into clearer relief.
For example, in the Interpretation and Findings sections below, we discuss how nearly every institution can name the conditions putting downward pressure on its enrollment and resources and forcing significant operational change, but every plan also assumes a progress narrative in which it will be one of the institutions to grow. And none names what the institution will stop doing or how it will develop the leadership and management capacity necessary for broad operational transformation.
We follow this close look at a seriously flawed genre with a set of seven questions to get the most out of strategic planning, and we identify implications for leaders at different stages of their strategic planning cycles.
As always, we appreciate your responses to this report. The best way to reach either of us is through our LinkedIn profiles. If either of us can be helpful to your work at your institution, please be in touch.
- Ilene and Robert
The HELIOS Report is a joint project of Ilene Crawford Consulting and McGuire Editorial & Consulting. It is developed with HELIOS — Higher Education Leadership Intelligence Orientation System, a proprietary AI-assisted tool that applies a defined set of analytical frameworks and strategic filters to generate usable insights for leaders in higher education, workforce development, and education technology. Learn more, provide feedback, and join the email list for future reports at www.heliosreport.com.
I. Methodology
We collected strategic plans from U.S. colleges and universities that were made available online in the 18-month period between January 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026. We included only institution-wide strategic plans, excluding plans from statewide systems or for individual schools or units within a university. The resulting corpus was 45 documents — 33 from 2025 and 12 from 2026 — totaling over 900 pages. The longest is 84 pages and the shortest are two-page summaries. The corpus includes material from multiple community colleges, HBCUs, small liberal arts colleges, private universities, public regional universities, and public flagship universities. We used AI to read and discover themes in this corpus. You can read more about how we use AI as a research assistant at https://www.heliosreport.com/p/ai-disclosure.
Caveat: We took the “made public” date as a proxy for recency. These strategic plans were developed as part of processes beginning as early as 2023, with a typical timeline ranging between 10 and 15 months. As a result, only a few plans directly name emerging issues such as AI, NIL, changes in accreditation, campaigns to suppress diversity, equity, and inclusion, or trending innovations like three-year degrees. This gap between “recent” and “current” highlights one of the challenges with this genre: The development and implementation timelines for strategic plans can be a poor fit for the pace of change demanded by the compounding effects of quickly emerging factors.
II. Interpretation
A broad characterization of this corpus of recent college and university strategic plans is:
realistic diagnosis of the sector,
limited details about the specific institution’s weaknesses or threats,
precisely named pillars or goals, and
limited details about implementation.
Nearly every institution can name the conditions shaping the higher education sector: enrollment volatility, tighter finances, public skepticism, workforce demands, staffing strain, and the need for more flexible delivery. Few can detail frankly how their own revenue and budget model is weakening, how their enrollment base is fragile, or how some of their current offerings may not survive. Nearly every institution converts threats into actionable language: stabilize enrollment, redesign pathways, align resources, sharpen program mix, diversify revenue, strengthen student success. But few outline the operational choices and trade-offs necessary to achieve these priorities.
This tension appears most clearly around the universal expectation of continued growth rather than contraction. Every institution in this set characterizes itself as among those that will grow. Whereas some support that ambition with references to adult learners, pathway design, or online access, many do not name even that much.
The tension also appears in workload, staffing, and capacity. Plans commonly promise increased student support, operational modernization, new partnerships, stronger communications, better data, and employee well-being. None say what they will stop doing or where they will get the leadership and management capacity necessary for broad operational transformation.
In short: Every plan assumes a progress narrative and tends to close off explorations of any irresolvable tensions that may exist.
III. Findings
Overview: Institutional conditions
Strategic planning process
Most plans describe their development process as a legitimacy exercise with broad consultation, cross-campus participation, surveys, listening sessions, and forums, followed by a committee-led synthesis and leadership approval. A smaller group of plans describes a structured method with SWOT exercises, benchmarking, phased drafting, or formal training in planning methods.
Patterns by institution type
Public institutions in this sample are more likely to speak directly about structural financial pressure, model strain, pathways, persistence, workforce alignment, and the mechanics of student flow. Private institutions are more likely to write from the standpoint of public story, identity, differentiation, reputation, belonging, purpose, place, and educational meaning. Community colleges are the clearest on barriers to access, transfer, workforce relevance, and completion, but they are less likely to address leadership capacity, strategic marketing, or institutional distinctiveness.
Projected futures
These plans largely imagine similar futures with a tougher enrollment market, stronger pressure to connect programs to work, rising demand for adult and flexible learning, and more scrutiny of price, value, and student outcomes. They also assume compounding technological disruption and a reshaped demographic landscape. Many further assume that state support, federal support, and inherited financial models will weaken, forcing redesign in delivery, staffing, funding, and student experience.
Declining enrollment
Most strategic plans respond to enrollment strain with an intent to build enrollment machinery that develops new markets, reaches new learners, expands pathways and modalities, strengthens brand and yield, and improves persistence. They avoid characterizing declining enrollment as a severe institutional danger. That recoding is part of the rhetorical context where boards, accreditors, donors, and prospective students are the audience. The result is a gap between sector conditions and institutional self-description. Reading this corpus alone, the higher education sector looks calmer and less endangered than the enrollment reality.
Adaptability
Most of the work behind these plans predates factors introduced by the Trump administration and recent phases of AI adoption. That timing makes clear one reason strategic plans have a reputation for getting shelved unread soon after publication: They may feel irrelevant as urgent new conditions emerge. The clearest indicators of revision mechanisms to account for new factors are frequent review cycles, a limited number of priorities, explicit links between priorities and money, diversified enrollment and revenue bets, named lead units, and willingness to revisit the academic portfolio or budget model. In contrast, growth assumptions without a market case, long lists of aspirations, language about shared ownership without decision-making mechanisms, and thin attention to personnel capacity all suggest fragility.
Measurement
Most plans define success broadly in terms of transformation, belonging, regional impact, mission strength, and institutional distinction. Where precise metrics appear, they are most commonly related to enrollment, retention, graduation, fundraising, web traffic, and rankings. Some conflate activity with success, counting workshops or launched initiatives as proof of student development or institutional renewal.
Alignment with accreditation and budgeting
It is rare for plans to link both accreditation and budgeting processes to strategic planning. Most plans treat accreditation as a background condition rather than as an opportunity to inform strategy. Roughly one third of plans tie resource allocation to the strategic plan. The remainder treat budget alignment as implicit. In only four plans does accreditation shape metrics, reporting, training, assessment culture, or evidence standards at the same time that budgeting shapes strategy.
Organizational capacity
Governance and decision making
These plans generally assume institutions can still govern themselves effectively. They do not spend much time on paralysis, veto points, or chronic inability to choose. Shared governance usually appears as a source of legitimacy and participation during planning, but the plans are silent on how shared governance supports or restrains execution. A few plans name an operating system to implement change: lead units, review cycles, dashboards, budget links, reporting expectations, and visible accountability. Most rely on vague language of shared responsibility, broad consultation, and institutional goodwill without showing who will make hard choices when priorities collide.
Leadership development
Most plans do not treat leadership capacity as a serious institutional design problem. They celebrate leadership but stop short of showing how deans, chairs, supervisors, faculty, and staff will become better at leading people and implementing difficult change. Most institutions still treat leadership development as a byproduct of broad professional development rather than as a strategic asset. The plans referencing leadership development as a priority discuss it in terms of an internal talent pipeline through succession, mentoring, and onboarding.
Personnel capacity
Almost every individual on the 45 campuses represented in this corpus is expected to significantly change how they work. The plans collectively demand a massive cultural and operational shift from traditional, siloed academic environments to highly coordinated, data-driven organizations. Most plans assign new work to the same five groups: faculty and academic leaders, student-facing support units, enrollment and communications teams, finance and operations teams, and whoever owns data and reporting. A few plans name those actors, attach timelines and metrics, and show where the work of advising redesign, program review, dashboard production, employer partnerships, budget shifts, and cross-unit coordination will be done. Most plans name who gets consulted but stop short of naming who will redesign courses, retrain staff, build systems, or give up lower-priority work. Leaving capacity unnamed assumes faculty, student-facing staff, enrollment teams, and reporting offices will absorb additional labor.
Belonging and mental health
Belonging and mental health appear in many plans as conditions for student success. Some institutions connect these conditions directly to persistence and degree progress, first-year structures, curriculum, and supports such as cohorts, mentoring, and living-learning communities. That suggests an understanding taking hold across the sector that students do not persist or learn through a purely academic channel. However, this diagnosis has advanced faster than the labor logic needed to carry it out. Few plans say who will build the cohort model, staff the case management, train faculty and advisors, maintain the basic-needs system, and sustain the peer mentoring network.
Equity and historically underrepresented students
Comparing the plans released in early 2026 with the 2025 set show signs of adapting to a changing political environment. The 2025 plans are more likely to name equity directly and prominently, often alongside racial equity, social justice, DEI, or explicit references to Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, underrepresented, or minority students. The 2026 plans still address many of the same concerns, but more often through access, belonging, support, affordability, and student success. That change suggests a more managerial and less ideological public register and a narrowing of public vocabulary rather than an abandonment of the underlying issues.
Disaggregating data
Using disaggregated student data is still a rare practice in this corpus. Only a small subset of plans explicitly ties student success goals to subgroup analysis. Most still frame student success in aggregate terms. Community colleges are more likely to describe organizing student success goals around disaggregated data.
Adult learners
About half the plans mention the adult learner population at all; a smaller subset names it as a strategic priority, and only a handful address the infrastructure needed to serve it: prior learning assessment, flexible scheduling, credit transfer, and degree-completion pathways. Though elsewhere the sector is concerned with stop-outs and some-college-no-degree, that vocabulary does not show up in any of these plans. Where adult learners appear, the strategy is most plausible at the community colleges and regional public universities when it extends existing online, evening, workforce, regional-center, or continuing-education operations. Plans that prioritize significant enrollment growth without referencing adult learners are making a bet they can capture a larger share of the shrinking traditional-age market.
Strategic pressures
The “worth it” question
Declining public confidence in the value of college appears often in the environmental scan portions of strategic plans, but in most cases, the plan names the condition and then moves on. The few direct responses are about storytelling, branding, reputation building, and communicating outcomes. They operate on the theory that the problem lies in public perception that clearer messaging will repair. A smaller group treats the “worth it” question as a signal that the institution may need to change what it delivers. Their responses connect questions about the value of a degree to program relevance, workforce alignment, clearer outcomes, or the makeup of the academic portfolio.
Marketing and communications
Marketing and communications appear in almost every plan in some form, but few treat marketing as a domain requiring strategic clarity about audience, a distinct public argument, named ownership, and measurable outcomes. They show some mix of research, channel logic, metrics, and sharper claims about what the institution wants to be known for. Most plans assume communications will do a lot with little clarity. Others call for stronger reputation, better recruitment, and greater trust without specifying message, budget, or operating logic. Most institutions know they need more attention, but only a minority use strategic plans to show how they will get it or even what they want attention for.
Financial stability and changing financial models
Financial stability is frequently named as a goal but usually in controlled language that avoids references to financial distress. Institutions use strategic plans to justify change while still projecting clarity and control to boards, donors, accreditors, and prospective students. Most plans talk about sustainability, stewardship, diversified revenue, affordability, efficiency, and responsible resource management. They acknowledge enrollment volatility, cost pressure, and demographic or political headwinds, but they rarely describe those conditions as immediate dangers to their institution. The dominant tone is serious pressure, structural challenge, and planned adaptation. A smaller group acknowledges strain through deficits, hiring freezes, or financial model stress. A small group describes redesigning the financial or budget model itself. About a third prioritize revenue diversification through enrollment growth, philanthropy, auxiliary income, and optimizing the aid strategy.
Institutional identity and continuity
Every plan holds mission, identity, values, academic rigor, student commitment, and regional or civic purpose steady. Institutions articulate what will remain unchanged by anchoring their futures to immutable cultural identities, historical designations, classical academic models, and established core values. In short, they protect what the institution believes itself to be more than how it is currently organized. Private colleges and HBCUs are usually more explicit about that continuity.
Tension between affordability and net tuition revenue
Most plans promise affordability without explaining how it will be financed. A smaller set pairs affordability commitments with enrollment growth, net revenue targets, or tuition-dependent logic without fully reconciling the two. Explicit pricing strategy and affordability rhetoric rarely appear together in the same plan.
Athletic programs
Athletics usually appears in these plans as a supporting asset rather than as a standalone strategic domain on the level of academics, finance, or research. Most plans fold it into broader goals around student belonging, school spirit, community connection, brand activation, donor engagement, events, or facilities. A few give athletics a distinct role in revenue goals or fundraising activity. The plans do not treat athletics as a cost problem, a resource allocation problem, or a significant source of institutional risk. They do not discuss Title IX, gender equity in athletics, or the relationship between athletics spending and academic spending. No plan mentions esports. A few discuss using the rosters of existing athletics programs as an enrollment lever, but this corpus does not support the perception that multiple types of institutions are expanding athletics as a primary answer to enrollment pressure.
Strategic responses
Transfer and dual enrollment
A large share of the strategic plans treat student movement as a network of routes and handoffs: high school to college, noncredit to credit, two-year to four-year, and undecided student to program pathway. That shift changes the institutional task from recruiting more students to designing reliable routes into, through, and beyond the institution for multiple learner groups. Institutions aim to reduce friction inside the route, connect each stage to the next, and measure whether students actually move through the system rather than merely enter it. Community colleges, followed by public universities, show this more clearly than private colleges.
AI
Developments in AI inevitably outpace the production of strategic plans in higher ed. Among the 16 plans in this group that reference AI, most refer to either student readiness, where graduates need ethical and practical fluency for an AI-shaped labor market, or to enterprise integration, where leaders use AI to improve advising, support, operations, or analytics. Only a few treat AI as an institution-shaping force that will require new answers to questions about the nature of teaching, learning, and knowledge production. See our March 30, 2026 HELIOS Report, Making Sense of AI in Higher Ed: A Leadership Briefing for an Unsettled Field, for an examination at how colleges and universities are thinking about AI more recently.
Academic portfolio
Across this corpus, the academic portfolio is shifting from an inherited collection of programs to a managed set of offerings expected to show demand, value, flexibility, and strategic fit. Most plans register that pressure, but few say plainly what it will require the institution to stop offering. Plans propose adding certificates, stackable pathways, health and technology programs, applied learning, and online options without saying what becomes smaller, less protected, or less central as a result. Portfolio changes raise questions about capacity and cross-subsidies that are rarely addressed in strategic plans. Program review appears often, but most plans do not address how that may conflict with faculty identity, disciplinary and contractual commitments, and institutional bylaws. A smaller set tries to translate this pressure into mission language by connecting portfolio change to purpose, inquiry, and student direction. See our March 11, 2026 HELIOS Report, Holding Academic Integrity and Performance Accountability in the Same Conversation: Implications for Higher Ed Leaders, where we explore the portfolio orientation at length.
Career readiness
Many plans reference career readiness, but institutions mean very different things by it. Community colleges and regional publics usually speak bluntly about workforce pipelines, employer demand, economic mobility, and applied learning. Private colleges often soften the category into purpose, professional formation, experiential learning, or lifelong success. Some plans stop treating career readiness as the job of a separate office and connect it to curriculum, advising, partnerships, and credentials. In those cases, the plans announce the redesign of general education, require internships or work-based learning, align programs to labor markets, or translate liberal education into purposeful pathways tied to work.
Digital learning
Digital learning sits at the edge of strategy in most of this corpus. Plans usually frame it as a way to reach adult learners, open an enrollment channel, improve services and infrastructure, or signal modernization. They rarely treat it as a question of teaching design. A small share treats online or hybrid delivery as part of the institution’s academic model with consequences for course design, student support, instructional quality, and program mix.
Alternatives to the degree
Two- and four-year degrees remain the center of institutional strategy. The corpus illustrates a moderate interest in stackable certificates, microcredentials, and prior-learning assessment, but it doesn’t support a broad “unbundling” thesis or indicate a trend to reopen the credit structure of degrees. Newer credentials support access, pathways for adult and transfer learners, workplace-facing extensions of the degree portfolio, or ways to make the existing bachelor’s degree model more flexible. Only one plan references developing a three-year degree option.
IV. The leadership demand: Making the most of a flawed genre
This collection illustrates that strategic planning for colleges and universities is a flawed genre, perhaps especially for this moment. But it is not necessarily a useless genre if it is deployed with care. Leaders and participants in the strategic planning process must keep in mind what the process is and is not capable of doing.
The process of strategic planning can serve to educate stakeholders and cultivate an institutional mindset. The finalized strategic plan can create institutional permission, set a common direction, and supply a public rationale for change. It can give leaders a visible framework for sequencing priorities, budgets, and accountability. And it can give the “middle managers” — AVPs, deans, department chairs, program directors — a way to translate broad institutional objectives into specific decisions in their areas of responsibility.
However, given its external and internal audiences, strategic planning usually cannot publicize the unvarnished truth about institutional risk, name the hard trade-offs, or show the full labor and political costs of implementation. Those limitations of the genre mean leaders must work intentionally to ensure strategic planning does not become an empty exercise.
We offer the following seven questions to help leaders correct for the genre’s weaknesses. These questions show leaders how to use strategic planning as a decision aid, a coordination tool, and a filter for institutional choice.
Seven questions to get value from strategic planning
1. The fit question
Does the process fit the institution’s actual condition? Leaders should ask whether the scope, pace, and timeline of strategic planning align with internal capacity and external pressure. A campus under acute financial, enrollment, or leadership strain may not need a broad aspirational exercise. It may need a narrower planning process tied to a smaller number of urgent choices.
2. The integration question
Does the plan harness existing institutional processes, or does it sit outside of them? Strategic planning has more value when it is integrated with budgeting, hiring, accreditation, assessment, and program review. It has less value when it creates a separate set of meetings, goals, and reporting that divides limited institutional energy to intentionally manage money, people, and programs.
3. The capacity question
Does the plan address who will carry the work? Strategic plans regularly assume new effort from faculty, staff, chairs, deans, and operating units without naming the labor or leadership capacity required. A more useful plan makes those assumptions visible. It articulates what employee capacity it presumes, what will stop happening to free up capacity, whether there is an order of operations that builds momentum, and includes an implementation plan that translates broad ambition into actual work.
4. The literacy building question
Does the process increase stakeholder fluency in the external factors and forces putting pressure on the institution, especially demographics, regulation, and decreasing public trust? Strategic planning has more value when it leaves individuals throughout the institution better able to understand its environment. It should build cross-domain literacy among cabinet members, deans, chairs, directors, and other managers so they can make better decisions as the plan is implemented.
5. The institutional mindset question
Does the plan encourage leaders who can think beyond their own portfolio and make decisions for institutional sustainability, not just unit preservation? A strategic planning process has more value when it pushes cabinets, divisions, and departments to consider second- and third-order effects of choices across academic affairs, enrollment, finance, IT, accreditation, facilities, advancement, marketing, and student support. When that mindset is absent, the institution gets a plan full of worthy goals but no discipline for judging how one choice loads pressure onto another part of the institution.
6. The forced choice question
Does the plan make choices? Every plan adds priorities. Few say what stops getting attention, protection, or funding. A plan is more useful when leaders use the process to force explicit answers about what it adds, what it subtracts, how it justifies a growth scenario, and how trade-offs will be identified and decided.
7. The relevance question
Does the plan have adaptability and flexibility built into it? How does this strategic plan remain relevant and continue to be read, referred to, and circulated when (not if) conditions change or when (not if) new urgent concerns emerge? Leaders should develop an implementation plan that keeps it alive once attention moves elsewhere: clear owners, review cadence, links to budgeting and personnel decisions, an order of operations, and visible points where progress or failure will be assessed.
V. Implications by period in the strategic planning cycle
End of a current plan
Institutions nearing the end of a current strategic plan should resist the urge to move immediately into new language and new pillars. This period calls for an honest audit. Were existing accreditation, budgeting, and program review processes harnessed to the strategic plan, or were processes run in parallel? Which goals changed behavior, budget decisions, and operating routines? Which goals produced more visible activity than change? Which assumptions about enrollment, pricing, staffing, demand, or student support proved wrong? A campus that skips that reckoning and moves straight into a new planning process usually carries old evasions into a new document.
Beginning discovery
Institutions beginning discovery need to use the process to educate the campus about the institution’s real condition without pretending that a public strategic plan can tell the unvarnished truth. That requires tighter alignment between strategic planning, budgeting, accreditation, and assessment. When those processes run on separate tracks, planning consumes attention without gaining much operating force.
Presidential transition
A new president often wants a new strategic planning process, and boards often welcome that as a visible reset. That can be useful, but it can also erase necessary continuity. The better question is not whether a new leader should have a new plan. It is which commitments need to survive leadership change and which assumptions should be reopened. A transition period should clarify what is stable enough to carry forward and what is unsettled enough to require a new institutional bet.
Early implementation
Institutions that have just launched a new strategic plan should focus less on communication and more on machinery. The first year after adoption usually determines whether the plan becomes a working filter or a ceremonial artifact. Leaders need named owners, review cadence, budget links, decision rights, and a smaller number of active priorities than the published plan may suggest. Without that discipline, the institution will praise the plan publicly and then return to inherited routines.
Mid-cycle disruption
Institutions hit by major challenges in the middle of a strategic planning cycle need permission to change course. A strategic plan should function as a compass and a filter, not as a script that leaders defend after conditions have significantly changed. The institutions most likely to benefit from planning are not the ones with the most polished documents. They are the ones that use each point in the cycle to force clearer choices, sharper sequencing, and a more realistic calibration between ambition, capacity, and resources.
Can we help?
Ilene Crawford works directly with presidents, cabinets, provosts, and their teams navigating the same coordination problems this report describes. Connect with her via her website or LinkedIn.
Robert McGuire develops briefings, trend reports, and playbooks that translate sector signals into actionable insights for universities, nonprofits, and edtech companies. Connect with him via his website or LinkedIn.