Beyond the Ivory Tower explores what higher education can learn from the wider world. Each episode examines how other industries solve complex challenges and what those ideas might mean for the future of colleges and universities.
Most colleges don’t have a growth problem, they have a “newness” habit. When enrollment gets tight, we default to launching a new program or chasing a new audience, then act surprised when learners see it as interchangeable and marketing has to work overtime to explain why we’re different. I’m Maya Evans, and I’ve been thinking a lot about learner lifetime value and what changes when we stop treating one enrollment as the entire relationship. We unpack what a growth strategy is supposed to d...
29 Jun 2026
How To Earn Prestige Without Cosplaying Elite
Prestige can save a tuition-dependent institution, but chasing it the wrong way can quietly wreck enrollment, trust, and identity. We start with a surprising business lesson from Coach: it didn’t “lose” to Louis Vuitton, it refused to play the European heritage game and built democratized luxury instead. That framing unlocks a better question for colleges, universities, and education brands: what if you’re not failing at prestige, you’re just trying to win the wrong version of it? From there...
18 May 2026
The Strategic Plan Problem
Your strategic plan might be polished, inspiring, and endorsed by everyone, and still be doing almost nothing. We start with a simple challenge: if most colleges list the same priorities, can any of them honestly call that strategy? From student success and belonging to online growth, graduate expansion, technology upgrades, and the obligatory AI mention, the familiar template can feel responsible while quietly avoiding the hardest work: making consequential choices. We dig into why higher e...
11 May 2026
What The NFL And Women’s Sports Can Teach Higher Education About Growth
The most dangerous assumption in higher education right now is that demand is gone. A better question is whether demand is hidden, suppressed by friction, and made invisible by how we package, explain, and deliver learning. We pull leadership lessons from the loudest strategy laboratory on earth: professional sports. Starting with the NFL, we break down the shift from inevitability to intentionality as streaming forces fans to actively choose, pay, and stay. That change pushes the league to ...
4 May 2026
The Talent War Universities Don’t Realize They’re In
A 19-year-old with a camera and a comment section can shape how students think about money, careers, and even identity faster than a world-class faculty. That idea sounds outrageous until you look at where Gen Z actually goes for guidance: TikTok, YouTube, Threads, Discord, Reddit, podcasts, and increasingly conversational AI that never sleeps. We follow the attention math behind that shift and unpack why “authority” now behaves less like a credential and more like daily trust plus distributi...
27 Apr 2026
Does Higher Ed Have to Build New Things to Grow?
Higher ed growth shouldn’t feel like digging a brand-new well every time we want to expand, yet that’s exactly how many colleges and universities operate: launch another program, rebuild another process, stand up another mini-system, and hope the portfolio adds up. We challenge that model and ask a sharper question: Are we scaling what we do, or are we scaling what we make possible? We pull lessons from Airbnb, Shopify, and OpenAI to explain platform strategy in plain language, then translat...
20 Apr 2026
Why Learner Lifetime Value Changes What an Alma Mater Should Be
13 Apr 2026
What If Higher Ed Learned Before It Committed?
Universities aren’t slow because people inside them don’t care. They’re slow because they’re built to protect expertise, quality, and legitimate process, and that operating design makes fast change unusually hard. I walk through Henry Mintzberg’s idea of the professional bureaucracy and the trade-off it creates: higher education gets reliability and rigor, but it struggles when the world outside starts changing faster than our cycles of approval, coordination, and shared governance. From the...
6 Apr 2026
What Higher Ed Leaders Can Learn From the Trust Collapse
Trust in institutions hasn’t just declined. It has collapsed. In this episode of Beyond the Ivory Tower, I explore what that collapse actually means for higher education and why most institutions are responding to it in the wrong way. We tend to treat trust like perception. Something that can be improved through messaging, branding, or storytelling. But trust doesn’t work that way. Trust is operational. Through examples from media, government, and everyday institutional experiences, thi...
26 Mar 2026
Introducing Beyond the Ivory Tower
Imagine a room full of highly experienced university leaders. There are millions of dollars on the line. Entire academic programs. The futures of students. Everyone has data. Everyone has strong opinions. Everyone cares deeply. And no one can agree on what to do next. In higher education, we are surrounded by intelligence, expertise, and commitment. But when it comes to solving our most complex challenges, we often draw from the same set of ideas, the same peer institutions, and the same play...
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