Richard Novak and I have overlapped at countless online learning and continuing education professional meetings, seminars, gatherings and events. Over the years, I always appreciated Rich’s wisdom, generosity and sense of humor. Recently, Rich reached out to let me know that he had retired from his longtime role as vice president for continuing studies and distance education at Rutgers and had moved into a new adventure as partner and chief academic officer for EduStrategy Group.
Q: Tell us about EduStrategy Group and your role with the consulting firm. What sort of projects and initiatives do you work with universities on?
A: EduStrategy Group works with colleges and universities—and, in some cases, organizations that serve the higher education sector—to help institutions grow and strengthen their capacity to serve adult learners and lifelong learners.
Our approach is somewhat different from traditional consulting. We do not want institutions to become dependent on us. We work alongside institutional leaders to develop strategy, build the organizational capability to execute it and then transition ownership fully to the institution. The goal is to leave behind not simply a set of recommendations, but the internal knowledge, systems and leadership capacity necessary to sustain the work.
Our engagements generally focus on areas such as lifelong learning and enrollment growth strategy, learner experience and retention, leadership and organizational capability, and, increasingly, the ways in which technology, data and artificial intelligence can support institutional transformation.
We typically begin with discovery and diagnosis—understanding the institution, its market, its learners, its organizational structure and the challenges it is trying to address. From there, we co-design solutions with institutional stakeholders and help build the capabilities needed to implement and sustain them. Ultimately, success means the institution owns the strategy and can continue moving it forward without us.
I serve as one of the four principals of EduStrategy Group and as the firm’s chief academic officer. In that role, I bring the academic and institutional perspective to our engagements—helping ensure that growth strategies, technology initiatives, new programs and organizational changes remain grounded in academic quality, learner needs, faculty realities and the mission of the institution.
As a principal, I am also involved more broadly in the firm’s strategy, client engagements and decision-making. Much of my role draws directly on my experience at Rutgers: understanding how complex universities operate, how change actually happens within them and how to bridge the sometimes very different perspectives of academic leaders, administrators, technologists and external partners. My professional experience at Rutgers was amplified, informed and somewhat shaped by my long tenure with UPCEA, the premier professional association for professional, continuing and online education. Seeing and working with institutions across the country, serving as the UPCEA president and multiple terms on the board, and other assignments have all been formative.
Q: From your experience as a leader at Rutgers and from what you are seeing in your current role, how do you think university leaders should be thinking about opportunities in the online learning space? Can online education still be a growth area in terms of building new durable revenue streams, or are costs so high and competition so fierce that large institutional investments in this space no longer make sense?
A: I remain bullish about the opportunity in online learning, but I think university leaders need to define the opportunity very differently than they did 10 or even five years ago.
During my years at Rutgers, I watched online learning evolve from something largely peripheral to the institution into an increasingly important part of how universities serve students beyond the traditional residential population. One of the lessons from that experience is that demand for education does not disappear simply because demographics or technology change. The market shifts. Learners change. Employers change. The institutions that succeed are the ones that recognize those shifts early and organize themselves to respond.
Today, however, simply putting more degree programs online is not a growth strategy. The market is too competitive, student acquisition costs are too high and prospective learners have too many alternatives. Universities that approach online education as a volume play—launching programs and assuming students will come—are likely to be disappointed.
But that does not mean institutions should retreat from online education. It means they need to become much more strategic about it.
I believe the larger opportunity is in what I would describe as the lifelong-learning marketplace. Universities should be thinking beyond the traditional distinction between “online” and “on campus” and instead asking, who are the learners we are uniquely positioned to serve, what do they need throughout their lives and careers, and what assets does our institution possess that competitors cannot easily replicate?
That can include online graduate degrees, but it also includes certificates, microcredentials, executive and professional education, employer-based learning, degree-completion programs, pathways for adult learners, and increasingly flexible combinations of credit and noncredit education. Those offerings can become meaningful and durable revenue streams when they are connected rather than developed as isolated programs.
The economics also require greater discipline than they once did. Not every program deserves to be launched and not every existing program deserves continued investment. Institutions need much better market intelligence, portfolio management, pricing strategies, enrollment forecasting and an understanding of the true cost of recruiting and supporting a student. Leaders should be willing to invest aggressively in areas where they have a genuine competitive advantage—and equally willing to stop investing in programs where the market evidence simply is not there.
That is something we are emphasizing in my current work with EduStrategy Group. Universities frequently have extraordinary academic assets, strong brands, valuable faculty expertise, employer relationships, alumni networks and enormous amounts of institutional data. What they often lack is the organizational infrastructure for bringing those assets together quickly enough to respond to changing markets.
Technology, data and AI can substantially improve that equation. They can help institutions identify emerging markets, understand learner behavior, improve recruitment and retention, streamline administrative processes, personalize learner support, and make better decisions about where to invest. Used effectively, those capabilities can also change the cost structure of online education.
But I would caution university leaders against treating this primarily as a technology problem. It is fundamentally an institutional strategy and operating model problem.
The institutions that succeed will be those that connect academic strategy, market intelligence, enrollment management, technology, workforce relationships and lifelong learning into a coherent institutional strategy. Online learning becomes one delivery mechanism within that larger ecosystem rather than a separate business sitting somewhere on the organizational chart.
One more thing—in alignment with the above, institutions need to move from a supply mindset to a demand mindset. Traditionally, institutions have operated from a supply mindset and offered whatever faculty wanted to teach. Shifting to a demand model means greater attention to the demands of the community, of employers, of societal changes and looking at how an institution can meet those needs through existing curricula or by building something new.
So, yes, I believe online education can still produce significant new revenue. But the era of easy online growth is over. The next generation of growth will come from institutions that are differentiated, data-informed, operationally disciplined and deeply focused on the needs of learners across a lifetime. The opportunity for intelligent online growth may be greater than ever.
The real question for university leaders is no longer “Should we invest in online education?” It is “Where does our institution have the right to win and how do we build the organizational capability to compete there?”
Q: What advice do you have for senior-level folks working at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change who are thinking about professional options after decades of working for a college or university? Can you draw some lessons for the rest of us from your own journey?
A: One of the most important lessons from my own transition is that people who have spent decades in higher education should not think of the next stage of their careers simply in terms of finding another position. They should think about where the experience, relationships, judgment and institutional knowledge they have accumulated can create value.
After 35 years at Rutgers, I had held a number of different leadership roles and had the privilege of helping build and grow continuing education, online learning, lifelong learning and other initiatives that often required working across traditional institutional boundaries. When I left Rutgers, I realized that what I was taking with me was not simply expertise in a particular administrative area. It was an understanding of how universities work—and, just as importantly, why they sometimes struggle to change.
That kind of experience has considerable value outside a traditional university leadership role.
My advice to senior leaders thinking about what comes next would begin with this: Do not define yourself by your last title. Define yourself by the problems you know how to solve.
For someone who has spent a career at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change, those problems may include helping institutions develop new revenue streams, navigate technological disruption, build lifelong-learning strategies, improve the student experience, create partnerships or rethink organizational structures and processes. Those capabilities can be applied in consulting, entrepreneurial ventures, corporate partnerships, board service, teaching, mentoring or combinations of all of them.
That has certainly been part of my own journey with EduStrategy Group. I have been able to take many of the lessons I learned inside a large, complex university and apply them across multiple institutions. In some ways, the perspective is even broader now. Instead of asking, “How do we solve this problem at Rutgers?” I can ask, “What patterns are we seeing across higher education and what can institutions learn from one another?”
There are several lessons I would draw from that experience.
First, stay intellectually curious. Seniority can sometimes tempt us to rely on what we already know. This is exactly the wrong moment to do that. Artificial intelligence, new models of lifelong learning, changing workforce expectations, demographic pressures and new competitors are reshaping higher education. Experience becomes much more valuable when it is combined with a willingness to keep learning.
Second, invest in relationships throughout your career. Higher education is an extraordinarily relationship-driven enterprise. Many of the opportunities that emerge later in a career come not from formal searches but from people who know your work, trust your judgment and want to work with you again.
Third, become comfortable moving from authority to influence. Inside an institution, a senior leader often has positional authority, staff, budgets and organizational responsibility. In consulting or advisory work, you frequently have none of those things. Your effectiveness depends on your ability to listen, ask good questions, frame problems, build trust and help leaders see possibilities they may not have considered.
Fourth, be willing to become entrepreneurial. Universities often provide substantial organizational infrastructure around senior leaders. Outside the university, you suddenly have to think about clients, markets, partnerships, value propositions, revenue models and whether someone is actually willing to pay for the expertise you are offering. That can be both challenging and energizing.
And finally, I would encourage people not to think of this stage as winding down. For many senior higher education leaders, it can actually be one of the most creative periods of their careers. You have enough experience to recognize patterns and avoid mistakes, but you also have the freedom to work across institutions, sectors and ideas in ways that may not have been possible earlier.
My own experience has reinforced something I increasingly believe: A long career in higher education does not have to culminate in retirement from the work. It can become a platform for a different kind of contribution.
The question I would encourage senior leaders to ask is not simply “What is my next job?” It is “What have I learned over the course of my career that is now uniquely valuable—and where can I put that experience to work?”
Finally, I would also consider one somewhat more personal lesson: Leave before you stop being curious. Not literally as advice to retire early, but as an argument that the best post-institutional transitions happen when someone is still energized by new ideas and wants another chapter—not when they are simply exhausted by the previous one.
