BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL

The complex challenges facing colleges and universities are well known: changing demographics and consumer preferences, aging facilities, and the need to keep pace with technological advances. College closures and mergers are becoming increasingly common.

But what can faculty and other colleges and university leaders — trustees, presidents, alumni and parent boards, administrators — do to tackle these challenges and keep their institutions relevant in today’s educational and economic climate?

The first step is to recognize that no institution is immune from these headwinds and, rather than bemoan this reality, to learn how to make the changes necessary to survive and even thrive in today’s challenging higher education landscape.

I recommend starting with How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Administrators, and Policymakers, a concise (216 pages), practical book that combines data, case studies, and the combined experience as presidents, trustees, and faculty that W. Joseph King and I bring to the table.

We argue that the colleges and universities best positioned to survive in the 21st century will be those that have a collective clear head about the challenges they face and the internal structure and processes to respond nimbly and successfully.

Using How to Run a College by itself or as a springboard for discussion, new and seasoned board members, administrators, and faculty will learn why and how to update their practices, monetize their assets, and focus on core educational strategies in order to build strong, sustainable institutions. 

Now in its fourth printing, How to Run a College is part of the “Higher Ed Leadership Essentials Series” from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cutting through the jargon prevalent in higher education, we offer a frank yet optimistic vision for how colleges can change without losing their fundamental strengths. Specifically:

• how to strengthen board governance and understand its role in shared campus governance;
• how colleges operate financially and the financial challenges they face;
• how to build a stronger class of admitted students; the vital role of academic affairs, student life, and athletics as partners in student success;
• how to re-imagine college fundraising in a way that advances an institution’s strategic agenda;
• why and how to collaborate with other colleges without losing your institutional identity; and
• how to work towards a sustainable institution that can succeed in an increasingly competitive higher ed marketplace.

We reject the notion that American colleges are holdovers from a bygone time. Instead, we argue that they are centers of experimentation and innovation that heavily influence higher education not only in the United States but also worldwide.

To survive and become sustainable, college and universities must be centers of dynamic learning, as well as economic engines able to power regional, state, and national economies. How to Run a College is the operating manual needed to achieve this goal.

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A version of this article first appeared on the Academic Innovators’ publication on Medium.