Competition and Strategy in Higher Education: Managing Complexity and Uncertainty

Like several other nonprofit and for-profit industries, the higher education sector has been subject to a series of fundamental challenges in the past decade. Education used to be considered a public good, provided by nonprofit organizations that were unexposed to market pressure and had clear societal missions. Now, education is becoming a global service delivered by quasi-companies in an ever-more complex and competitive knowledge marketplace. To cope with these challenges, higher education institutions need an appropriate strategy, a necessity reflected in numerous calls for research on strategy in the higher education sector. This article's purpose is to contribute to this discussion by providing prescriptive guidance to higher education managers and policy makers. To this end, it proposes a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis illustrating eight key trends that will impact higher education and academia in the short-to-medium term. Drawing from these trends, three core challenges are identified that higher education institutions will face and that have fundamental implications for research and practice: (1) the need to enhance prestige and market share; (2) the need to embrace an entrepreneurial mindset; and (3) the need to expand interactions and value co-creation with key stakeholders.