In a quiet conversation on the upper floor of a centuries-old building, a college president shared with me a telling truth about higher education.
“In this industry, we are excellent at adding things but terrible at subtracting.”
Found in the plus signs that adorn numbers of majors, minors, clubs, organizations, alumni networks, and a slew of other loosely quantified metrics, volume screams for attention and adoration. The more, the better, so keep on adding. How else can institutions appeal to the 3.5 million (and shrinking) high-school graduates if they don’t provide something for almost everyone?
But that audience is already spread across thousands of colleges and universities clamoring for consideration, many competing with identical offerings. For many college-bound students, choice is not lacking—it’s clarity in why what’s offered matters to them, how it makes things better for them, and the belief that an institution can deliver value and meaning uniquely for them. It’s differentiation that’s harder to find.
Strategy creates differentiation.
In “Playing to Win,” former dean of the Rotman School of Management Roger L. Martin writes, "Strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry to create a sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.”
Strategy doesn’t emerge from sets of choices—it guides and creates them. It’s the well-researched, data-backed, audience-insight-driven theory of where to play, how to win, and specifically why your institution can do it while others cannot. Strategy demands coherence.
With their immense complexity, colleges and universities can seem like unwelcoming hosts for great strategy, threatening coherence with deeply cherished autonomy and histories older than nations. Yet, it’s strategy that leads institutions to pursue positive change for their audiences. It moves schools to make choices that uniquely change opportunities, perceptions, interests, ambitions, status, expectations, experiences, beliefs, and cultures for the better.
Where Strategy Lives and Hides
As a thing, strategy can be hard to see because the ‘integrated set of choices’ sits above and beyond the more familiar, easier to comprehend elements that you can list, like plans and tactics. Without looking up to see the strategy, there’s the temptation to call everything “strategic” instead of understanding the strategy and using it to make the sometimes hard and necessary choices to get you closer to your goals.
Like many other industries (ok, all of them), colleges and universities risk sacrificing any competitive advantage by allowing individual elements that support the strategy to masquerade as the big capital S strategy with impunity. The good news is that some of these pieces and approaches encapsulate a subset of choices that can reflect elements of a solid strategy, but only when they work together with the full, integrated set of choices can they move in the same direction toward a goal. Here’s where you might find them.
Mission, Vision, Values
Typically, the endlessly optimistic trio of mission, vision, and values give language to the institution’s core business and reason for existence, its long-term aspirations, and the guiding principles and beliefs that shape the organization. With all elements of strategy, the trio gives a description of what this desired future state will be in broad strokes but stops short of articulating how it will get there, what choices it will make to serve its audiences better and solve their problems, and how it will create competitive advantage.
Still, this trio has a lot to offer to strategy. A vision points to a distant outcome, giving shape to specific goals for the short and medium term. If a school’s vision is something like becoming the most sought-after experiential education in the country, the strategy might include the set of choices that get the school closer to achieving a short or medium-term goal that serves the vision. Maybe it’s a goal to increase the number of undergraduate students enrolling by 25% over the next three years. A strategy based on research and audience insights might be to partner with DIY content creators to reach potential students who like watching tutorials to learn new things and then do them. The goal supports the vision, and if it works, the strategy moves you closer to the goal, while the mission and values underpin the strategy.
Strategic Plans
Straddling the space between elements of strategy and tactics—especially self-described “strategic” ones—plans often stand in for overarching strategy. But a plan is not a strategy; it’s a plan. Plans are more limited than strategy. They give detailed steps about the organization's actions, often from an operational frame. What resources will be allocated, when, and where? A plan may even outline some activities that the organization will stop doing, and it details specific steps and actions that will be taken. Its existence doesn’t make it strategic.
Strategy articulates what it all amounts to—what competitive advantage the steps in the plan help create, why it matters, to whom, and how it moves the organization closer to its goals. For a plan to be strategic, it must answer strategy’s great question: to what end?
Optimization of the Status Quo
It’s tense in higher education these days. Doubt is high, and standard metrics only tell part of the story. Some believe the path to continued relevance exists in optimizing business processes to run a highly efficient, lean educational operation. Realized efficiencies might even nudge some numbers up a bit to create a bit more value for students. Admirable efforts for sure—anything that reduces costs and potentially increases profitability is certainly welcomed. Optimization doesn’t answer whether your activities are right for your institution and audience. For example, using generative AI to develop emails for an automated comms flow might create efficiencies. Still, it doesn’t ask questions that can illuminate strategy and challenge the status quo in search of a competitive advantage.
What problem are we solving for our audience? Will an automated comms flow get us closer to our goals? How will more efficient email creation and delivery provide more value for our audience? Are there other choices we can or should make as part of our strategy that provide a competitive advantage?
To quote Seth Godin, “If all we were waiting for was a better idea, a simpler solution, or a more efficient procedure, we would have shifted away from the status quo a year or a decade or a century ago.”
In Pursuit of Best Practices
Like optimization of the status quo, prioritizing best practices can feel strategic, creating a sense of distinction compared to those who don’t and putting you on level terms with competitors that do. Best practices have their place. Tools, processes, and approaches that produce favorable results for others in the industry make for a comfortable framework. Deploying the same set of activities as your competitors, even more effectively, ensures that you’ll be doing a respectable version of the same things. But it’s not a strategy. It’s more of an expectation, like tires on a car.
Sameness isn’t differentiation; best practices can only offer a route to what others are already doing. There is no intrinsic competitive advantage—no path to winning anything other than a gold star for completing the same assignment in the same way as your competitors.
However, strategy gives best practices meaning and purpose. It moves the focus from emulating what others are doing to making choices about what your audience will respond to in ways that will change their expectations, deliver unparalleled experiences that create preference, and carve out a competitive space the competition can’t reach.
Your Strategy is Yours Alone
Strategy is powerful because it creates value, meaning, and advantage and because it is something no one can copy. Another institution could match you tactic for tactic and plan for plan, but their efforts won’t get to the same place as you. Missions, visions, and values may be indiscernible without brand labels at times, but how you move to your goals—the choices you make—are distinct. They rely on the totality of your institution, the people, place, and work that makes what you do mean something. Strategy is where you’ll find your advantage.
__
As Director of Brand and Integrated Strategy, Tim Jones helps higher education leaders create experiences that bring brands to life. More than 20 years of on-campus experience in marketing and senior leadership have shown Tim that everything speaks. Every detail, interaction, and idea combine to shape perceptions and define higher education brands.
Ready to turn your vision into a winning strategy? Reach out today to find out how your institution can carve out a unique competitive advantage.
