Collaboration Is Now a Strategic Necessity for Higher Ed
Colleges and universities are facing enrollment shifts, rising costs, federal funding changes, and public doubt about the value of a degree, all at the same time. For years, collaboration was something institutions did here and there, such as joint purchasing or a shared course. Under current pressures, it is becoming a strategic necessity.
In this episode, Dr. Michael Horowitz is joined by Dr. Seán Creighton, President of New American Colleges and Universities (NACU), a national network of 28 private institutions that combine liberal, professional, and civic education. Drawing on 15 years with a regional consortium in Southwest Ohio and his work leading NACU since 2019, Dr. Creighton explains how the network uses a small, geographically spread membership to build trust, shares internal staffing and spending data for benchmarking, and runs the Washington Internship Institute as shared infrastructure for member campuses. The conversation also covers what presidents are learning from mergers and why culture and governance decide whether partnerships last.
Rather than treating collaboration as something everyone already agrees on, this episode focuses on the harder work that follows: what institutions have to change, share, and give up once a partnership begins, and how to build structures that outlast the leaders who start them.
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