Impact Beyond the Institution: What Perspective Reveals about Change in Higher Education

For much of my career, I believed impact in higher education meant proximity to students. 

Like many who entered the field through student affairs or advising, I was drawn to the immediacy of the work - seeing students succeed because of conversations, guidance, involvement, or support that I was able to provide. Impact felt tangible and personal. Though, over time, my understanding of and desire for deeper impact changed.

As my roles expanded beyond a single campus into system-level work, and later into national postsecondary philanthropy and now at Student-Ready Strategies, I began to realize something important: impact and improving student success does not live within any one role, institution, or strategy. It lives across an ecosystem. And where you sit in that ecosystem fundamentally shapes how change looks, feels, and unfolds.

Creating Impact Across The Higher Education Ecosystem

Institutional perspective

On campuses, impact takes shape in the daily work of turning ideas into practice. Leaders, faculty, and staff navigate resource constraints, competing priorities, technology challenges, and initiative fatigue - all while serving students whose needs cannot wait for perfect policy alignment. Initiatives that appear straightforward on paper must survive daily campus realities. Culture, capacity, and trust matter as much as, if not more than, strategy. The well-known Peter Drucker phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is extremely relevant here.

From this vantage point, the challenge is rarely knowing what needs to change. Institutions understand the importance of redesigning advising, simplifying pathways, improving transfer, and removing barriers to completion. The real challenge is having the time, capacity, and sustained support to do that work well. What can look like resistance to change is often a reflection of increased expectations that outpace current capacity and infrastructure to support implementation.

System/state-level perspective

At the system- or state-level, the perception of impact widens. Patterns emerge across institutions despite their different missions or contexts. At this level, systems can generate institutional alignment and momentum around a particular reform or strategy, but scaling change across a system requires adapting to institutional culture, resources, and readiness. 

Additionally, even well-designed system or state initiatives will struggle to take hold if they do not include sustained implementation support for institutions. However, system-level leaders often cite implementation challenges related to the tension between system-level coordination and institutional autonomy. This tension, paired with system resource and capacity constraints, contributes to the persistent gap between strategy and ability to implement and execute.

National perspective

Zooming out further to a national perspective, that gap becomes impossible to ignore. Institutional problems begin to look structural. Across states and governance models, institutions encounter remarkably similar barriers - misaligned incentives, fragmented policy, funding constraints, and limited capacity for sustained transformation. From this vantage point, it becomes clear that innovation rarely fails because of a lack of commitment, but rather, systems were not designed or resourced to support large-scale reform.

In my previous role with a national postsecondary philanthropy, I saw why the field so often cycles through promising reforms that struggle to endure. Promising pilots stall after initial funding ends. Leadership transitions reset progress and/or shift priorities. Programs labeled “scalable” falter when local culture and conditions are overlooked. Sustainable reform depends less on launching new initiatives and more on building conditions where transformation can endure changes in funding, leaders, or political priorities.

Leveraging Perspectives for Student Success

All of these lenses together generate a consistent theme for me: we largely know what works, yet struggle to implement it consistently. Each perspective–institutional, system/state, and national–faces its own pressures, yet all are working toward the same goal. Big “c” change across the field requires us all to align urgency with patience - transformation and change takes a long time (it isn’t just a myth that change in higher education takes a long time) and even more time to see outcomes. We need to pair ambitious reform with realistic investment and intentional support for institutional capacity. 

The farther I moved from a single institution, the more clearly I could see how interconnected student success truly is. Institutions implement change, systems coordinate it, intermediaries and technical assistance providers support it, and funders resource it. None can succeed alone.

So…what actions can leaders take based on where they sit in the ecosystem?  

Advice for Institutional Leaders

Consider all of the initiatives underway on your campus. You are likely spending countless hours in meetings (some strategic, some responsive, and many informative). Resources are tight, faculty and staff are burned out, and the work ahead is clear. You and your faculty and staff know what needs to be done. The challenge is not awareness - it is capacity.

One place to start exploring for added capacity is how you allocate your time and attention. If transformation is the goal, leaders must make space in their schedule for the deep work that makes change possible - things like developing culture, building capacity, and strengthening trust across the organization. 

I often think about a lesson I used to share with first-year students around time management, and it is applicable here. Imagine your time as a jar that will be filled with rocks, pebbles, and sand. The rocks represent your most important priorities - the work that truly moves your institution forward. Pebbles are supporting tasks that help sustain the work, and finally, sand is everything else - the constant demands on your attention. If you fill the jar with sand first, you have limited space left for the rocks. However, if you place the rocks first, the pebbles and sand can settle around them. What are your institution’s rocks? What are your department/division’s rocks? A good routine practice is conducting a calendar review using this framework: where is my time actually going each month, and does it reflect my true priorities?

After looking inward, look outward for support. If you are part of a system, what resources or expertise might be available there? Are there grants that could support and offer additional resources for this work? Could a technical assistance partner, such as Student-Ready Strategies, help add capacity to your team? Are there peer institutions pursuing similar goals that could serve as thought partners along the way? Transformation does not have to happen in isolation and many institutions are struggling with the same challenges and making similar changes on campus.

Advice for System & State-Level Leaders 

You see the pressures campuses face regularly - capacity, resources, and morale. You are well aware of the initiative fatigue that sets in across your system due to a new technology being deployed, a new legislative mandate, leadership turnover, or enrollment challenges. You have a unique vantage point and an important responsibility to protect institutional capacity while still advancing system or statewide goals.

Identify the Why

One of the more powerful actions you can take is to begin asking why before launching new initiatives - particularly those that are not legislatively mandated. Most systems already have a clearly articulated strategic vision and mission - their big “why.” Asking “why” is less about questioning the value of new ideas and more about checking for alignment with that larger purpose. Does this initiative advance our core priorities? Is it something institutions truly need right now? What would happen if it waited a year? In many cases, the most strategic answer may be “not right now.” Creating space for institutions to focus deeply on a smaller number of priorities can ultimately lead to stronger implementation and more sustainable outcomes. 

Figure Out How

When proposed initiatives do align with the big “why,” the next question becomes how capacity will be built at the institutional level. System offices can play a critical role here by creating structures that make the work more manageable and collaborative. This might include shared learning opportunities across institutions, resource-sharing models, or cohort-based communities of practice that allow campuses to learn from each other as they implement.

Find Clarity by Addressing Barriers

Another important action item is addressing the often-unspoken tension between system/state offices and institutions - when to lead from in front and when to lean on institutional autonomy. I saw this directly during the COVID-19 pandemic and responding to the social unrest due to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis - campuses wanted more direction, leadership, and guidance from the system office. Rather than allowing this tension to remain, system/state leaders can open direct conversations with campus leaders for clarity. How would institutions prefer to be supported? Where do they value system coordination, and where do they want greater autonomy? These conversations can be difficult and uncomfortable, but clarity ultimately strengthens partnerships. As one of my favorites, Brené Brown, reminds us “clear is kind.”

Finally, system and state leaders can help ensure initiatives are matched with appropriate resources required to implement them effectively before the initiative is announced to campuses. Too often, campuses are asked to take on new priorities without additional financial or human resources. Whenever possible, systems can build support into their budgets - whether through targeted funding, shared staff capacity, or centralized expertise that institutions can access. These investments signal that transformation is not simply expected, but supported.

Advice for National Leaders

National leaders, foundations, and field-level organizations play an influential role in shaping the priorities and pace of change across postsecondary education. Through research, funding, convenings, and thought leadership, these organizations help elevate new ideas and push the field forward. Now, with that influence certainly comes responsibility. A responsibility to consider how national priorities translate into action on campuses and within systems that are already navigating resource constraints. 

National leaders can think more intentionally about how capacity is built across the ecosystem. Particularly in philanthropy, there is a strong emphasis on systems change, and as a result, funding and support frequently flow toward state or system-level efforts or intermediaries. The assumption with this path is that if capacity is strengthened at those levels, then it will trickle down to the campus level, but in practice this may not always happen and if it does, it may not be equitable. How can field-facing organizations strategically support both levels simultaneously? 

A solution to the above question may be greater collaboration across national and field-based organizations themselves (although I hope that collaboration will also occur at a broader, as well as deeper level). Many of us in the national realm share similar “whys” such as improving student outcomes, expanding opportunity, and helping institutions better serve today’s learners. Yet there is a sense of competition and separation, at times, across the national landscape. Not everyone needs (or can) do everything, so how do we leverage each other’s distinct strengths, expertise, networks, and technology to support the field more strategically and mutually benefit? When organizations align their efforts and build on one another’s work, we truly will see the systems change occur across the postsecondary landscape.

Changing Conditions

Across these perspectives, the lesson I continue to carry is this: impact in higher education is not defined by proximity to students, but by contribution to the conditions that allow students to succeed. 

And those conditions are created collectively.