Higher Education Systems Redesigned : From Perpetuation to Innovation to Student Success

Brings together scholars and higher education system leaders to highlight concrete examples of system change and realignment to advance student success.

Long an afterthought of the American higher education ecosystem, multi-campus systems have become more important than ever. In recent years, leading higher education systems have engaged in transforming the way they work, scaling best practices, leveraging data and analytics, and creating platforms to optimize and personalize these systems for increasingly diverse students. In Higher Education Systems Redesigned, leaders of these efforts share their insights into "systemness" and how to facilitate sustainable change in a system setting while navigating and leveraging tensions between campus and system priorities. Highlighting examples of successful realignment of these priorities with a focus on contextualized design and implementation, the book charts a shift in the aim of systems. Rather than perpetuating existing norms as they have traditionally done, systems are taking measures to spark innovation across campuses and use evidence-based practices to foster student access and completion rates, better serve communities, and drive social mobility and economic growth. Each chapter concludes with a list of takeaways to guide other system leaders and administrators. One of the few recent examinations of higher education systems, Higher Education Systems Redesigned offers a theoretical and practical framework for how systems can continually evolve.

Jonathan S. Gagliardi is Assistant Vice Chancellor of Academic Effectiveness and Innovation at the City University of New York. He is the coeditor (with Amelia Parnell and Julia Carpenter-Hubin) of The Analytics Revolution in Higher Education: Big Data, Organizational Learning, and Student Success. Jason E. Lane is Dean of the College of Education, Health, and Society at Miami University in Ohio, director of The Systems Center, and a senior fellow of the National Association of Systems. He is the coeditor (with D. Bruce Johnstone) of Higher Education Systems 3.0: Harnessing Systems, Delivering Performance and editor of Higher Education Reconsidered: Executing Change to Drive Collective Impact, both also published by SUNY Press.