Across the sector, calls for change in US higher education are intensifying. Students and families question cost and value. Employers signal misalignment between degrees and workforce needs. Public trust is uneven. At the same time, institutions are not standing still. New programs, partnerships, and models continue to emerge. Yet these efforts rarely accumulate into systemic transformation. Change is happening, but often in fragments, at the margins, and within structures that were not designed for the conditions higher education now faces.

This issue begins from a different premise: that the central challenge is not a lack of innovation, but a misalignment between the scale of the problems and the systems designed to address them. The contributions in this issue extend and complicate this framing. They examine how redesign unfolds in practice, where it encounters resistance, and what forms of leadership, collaboration, and institutional clarity are required to move from isolated innovation to sustained transformation. Taken together, they approach redesign not as an aspiration, but as a question of action, responsibility, and institutional will.