Rethinking the System: Three Design Priorities for Higher Education’s Future

Introduction

There is no shortage of calls for change in higher education. Critiques are coming from all sides. Students and families, employers, state and federal governments, and funders are voicing growing dissatisfaction with affordability and relevancy. Polls show a declining sense of value in a college degree and frustration that it no longer prepares learners for careers after graduation.

At the same time, there is no shortage of efforts to improve higher education. Enterprising faculty, staff, and administrators are developing new approaches to advance student success and better align outcomes with the demands of the 21st-century world of work. Philanthropic partners and states are investing in these efforts, and many are showing real promise. And yet, a broad transformation across U.S. higher education has not followed. Instead, the voices of discontent are only growing louder. As a sector, we have urgency, and we have ideas. But the transformation called for by higher education’s external stakeholders is happening too slowly and often in isolation.

The critical question is why? This question was explored by UDI’s U.S.-based Global Fellows in a recent convening. Their conclusion was clear. Universities are trying to innovate within a system whose foundational logic no longer fits the future. Too often, efforts focus on adapting within existing structures and making incremental changes with the hope that these will add up to systemic transformation. If meaningful transformation is to occur, we must move beyond surface-level reform and shift toward transforming the systems and structures themselves. This requires questioning long-standing assumptions, rethinking core structures, and reorienting around mission, learners, and societal value.

The UDI Fellows identified three design challenges within U.S. higher education that must be addressed to achieve meaningful outcomes and rebuild public trust. While these challenges may seem daunting, examining the design problems embedded within them reveals powerful opportunities for change.

What follows outlines these three design challenges, the underlying structural issues they expose, and the opportunities they present to drive transformation. The goal is to provide a platform for strategic discussion within institutions, and a framework for highlighting efforts that go beyond incremental improvement to catalyze meaningful social and economic impact in the future.

Three Design Opportunities to Transform US Higher Education

1. From Institutional Preservation to Mission-Driven Transformation

Most universities operate on an inherited operating system designed for a different time. Structures that were created to standardize and regulate research and learning across institutions, including credit hours, semesters, departments, tenure systems, and accreditation frameworks, worked incredibly well to create uniformity and stability. But today they are creating barriers to innovation and a university’s ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. 

This creates our first embedded design problem: Our current system optimizes for institutional preservation and uniformity rather than learner transformation and societal need. 

Design Question: “How might we redesign the architecture of the university so that it is flexible, mission-driven, and centered on lifelong learner value rather than constrained by legacy structures?” 

Design Opportunity: Reimagine the university as a mission-driven, learner-centered, and structurally adaptive ecosystem

The opportunity is not incremental improvement, but system redesign across three domains.

From Fixed Pathways to Lifelong Learning Ecosystems. Learning is measured in ways that no longer reflect reality. By tying education to semesters, credit hours, and degrees, institutions constrain learning to fixed timeframes and formats. Yet learning today is increasingly continuous, nonlinear, and lifelong. A mission-driven, learner-centered university would move from fixed pathways to lifelong learning ecosystems, offering modular, stackable, and flexible learning journeys and recognizing prior learning and evolving forms of credentials. Education would no longer be a one-time transaction but an ongoing relationship supporting continuous growth and self-actualization.

From Silos to Integrated, Problem-Based Structures. Our current disciplinary-based academic structures inhibit innovation. Traditional department and college structures and incentive systems make interdisciplinary collaboration difficult and reduce agility, even as the growing complexity of real-world problems demand it. A mission-driven, learner-centered university would empower interdisciplinary collaboration by design. It would shift from departments to integrated, problem-based structures, and its work would be organized around real-world challenges, communities, and outcomes rather than academic boundaries. 

From Additive Complexity to Subtractive Clarity.  In our current environment, innovation often equals addition. Creating new programs, centers, and initiatives in response to isolated opportunities results in potentially impactful programs and services being relegated to the edges of the institution. Bolt-on innovation stretches already tight resources, increases organizational complexity, and reinforces competition and a scarcity mindset. A mission-driven, learner-centered university would embrace subtractive clarity. Instead of adding more layers, institutions would remove legacy constraints that no longer serve their mission and focus on expanding access, reimagining value, and inspiring collaboration. Simplification would become a strategic tool, increasing coherence and adaptability.

2. From Managing Institutions to Designing the Future

U.S. higher education is facing a crisis in leadership. Even as institutions are recognizing the need for change, our current leadership and governance systems are not built to support real transformation. At a moment that demands bold thinking and structural change, the system produces leaders and governing conditions optimized to preserve stability. It selects and rewards leaders who are skilled at managing within existing constraints, not those who are equipped to question and redesign them. The result is a system that manages within boundaries but rarely questions them.

This creates our second embedded design problem: Leadership systems that reinforce risk aversion and inherited assumptions rather than enabling innovation. 

Design Question: “How might we redesign leadership selection, development, and governance so that leaders can act with courage as designers of institutional transformation rather than stewards of the status quo?”

Design Opportunities: Reconstruct leadership and governance as a design-driven system capable of sustained transformation

The opportunity is to redefine leadership as a design function, not just administrative stewardship across three domains. 

From Administrators to Designers. Our current system prioritizes managerial steadiness over transformational capacity, consensus-building over change agents, and conformity over courage. It undervalues imagination, systems thinking, and design capability. Short presidential tenures further exacerbate the problem, leading to short-term actions rather than strategic  transformation. Instead, we must expand our concept of leadership and prioritize individuals with the capacity to navigate ambiguity, take strategic risks, and drive structural change. Leaders prepared to design the future of their institutions must be equipped not just to administer but diagnose systems, challenge assumptions, innovate with new partners, and prototype new models. 

From Oversight to Enablement. Our current governance structures prioritize stability and risk mitigation over innovation and bold action. Boards, often lacking experience with complex university missions and business models, default to familiar metrics, such as rankings, enrollment, and financial margins, as proxies for success. Boards prepared to design the future must shift from a posture of risk mitigation to a position of strategic enablement. They must be a strategic partner with presidents in creating cultures of innovation and investing in and supporting experimentation and new models that lead to outcomes that matter to the mission. And they must shift from focusing on short-term performance to long-term impact, including measures of student learning, community outcomes, and sustained success.

From Constraints to Possibilities. Universities operate within an “illusion of constraints.” Inherited practices rooted in an institution's history or culture are treated as immovable limits and barriers to change. Policies are assumed to be fixed rather than open to evaluation or reinterpretation to align with a changing context. Institutions often fail to ask is this truly prohibited, or simply historic? Institutions prepared to design the future must develop the internal mindset and processes to explore if perceived barriers are real or simply cultural and cultivate a discipline of questioning what’s possible. By systematically interrogating what is truly fixed versus what is assumed, they can unlock new possibilities and reframe problems and potential solutions even before design begins.

3. From Imitation to Purpose-Driven Value

In today’s landscape, institutional success is often measured through signals that are external, generic, and increasingly disconnected from institutional purpose, including rankings, reputation, and growth. Universities are competing for a definition of prestige set by others rather than designing for mission, place, and value creation. The result is a system that rewards imitation over intention. Institutions with very different missions, students, and histories begin to look and act alike, pursuing more programs, more students, and more visibility, whether or not it aligns with their core purpose. Over time, strategy becomes imitative rather than intentional, differentiation erodes, relevance to local economies and communities weakens, and short-term competition takes precedence over long-term societal impact.

This creates our third embedded design problem:  A system that defines excellence in ways that disconnect institutions from their unique purpose, context, and value proposition.

Design Question: “How might we redesign the definition and measurement of excellence so that institutions differentiate around mission, create real societal value, and design their institution for that purpose?”

Design Opportunities: Redefine excellence as mission-driven, place-based, and outcome-oriented with a focus on value creation.

The opportunity is for institutions to redefine excellence on their own terms.

From Market-Driven to Mission-Driven Strategy. In today’s higher education landscape, strategy is often shaped by external signals that are disconnected from institutional purpose. A focus on rankings, reputation, and growth metrics are driving institutions to compete for prestige defined by others rather than to design for the unique value they create for their students and communities. As a result, universities imitate each other rather than differentiate themselves with purpose. A purpose-driven university grounds its strategy in impact and outcomes. It shifts the central question from “How do we rank?” to “What unique value do we create?” and aligns strategy and incentives with regional economies, community needs, and institutional strengths.

From Knowledge Producers to Co-Designers of the Future. Faculty sit at the center of delivering on a university’s mission and purpose, but have roles that are often constrained by promotion and tenure systems that undervalue teaching innovation, interdisciplinary and applied research, and community impact. A purpose-driven university would expand the role of faculty as co-designers of the future. Engaging faculty beyond producers and disseminators of knowledge would require rethinking reward systems to recognize innovation in teaching, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and applied, community-engaged work. Faculty roles would broaden to include design, partnership-building, and real-world problem solving and position them as active participants in institutional and societal transformation.

From Competition to Strategic Collaboration. Higher education operates within a competitive framework that limits its ability to address complex, shared challenges. Issues such as AI integration, workforce transformation, and regional economic development exceed the capacity of any single institution. Yet current structures reinforce competition over collaboration. A purpose-driven university would embrace strategic collaboration as a core capability. Institutions would act as partners and co-designers, sharing resources, design approaches, and implementation capacity to scale impact. This shift is particularly critical for institutions that are ready to innovate but lack sufficient resources. By moving from isolated efforts to collective problem-solving, higher education can accelerate transformation and deliver greater societal value.