Our Work

Driving higher levels of performance in higher education.

Our practice is built on deep expertise across five connected areas. We meet leaders where they are and design for their mission, politics, and culture.

Service Areas

Five connected areas of expertise.

Strategy and Finance

Aligning strategy, planning, and finance creates a cohesive engine for organizational performance and resource efficiency.

Market analysis to identify differentiation and secure a sustainable position.
Governance frameworks that keep the board and executive leadership aligned.
Strategic goals translated into tactical roadmaps with clear owners.
Zero-based or priority-based budgeting that directs funds to strategic imperatives.
Financial dashboards that surface the leading indicators of institutional health.

Strategy creates value only when budgets and daily work are built to deliver it.

Enrollment Management

A learner-centric, data-driven approach across the full student lifecycle, from awareness through completion.

One connected funnel from awareness and interest through enrollment and completion.
Distinct strategies for first-time, transfer, stop-out, and graduate students.
Advanced analytics to find where students are lost and where to intervene.
Enrollment and student success run as a single, connected system.

Enrollment works best when recruitment and student success share one system and one set of metrics.

AI-Powered Institutions

AI is an institutional strategy led from the executive suite and deployed across the full breadth of operations.

Institutional insights and performance management drawn from real-time data.
Recruitment yield and financial aid sharpened with predictive modeling.
Adaptive teaching, tutoring, and assessment that personalize learning at scale.
Campus operations, advancement, and research made faster and more efficient.

With AI, institutions can transform many parts of the organization at once.

Institutional Transformation

Transformation changes how work gets done, built on four elements addressed together.

High-value operations: streamline and optimize the work that delivers the most value.
Performance management: measure what matters and act on it.
Enablers: the technology, data, skills, and structures that support the model.
Culture: the shared behaviors that decide whether change takes root.

Lasting change reaches operations, performance, enablers, and culture together.

Organization and People

Driving institutional performance through integrated people and cultural interventions.

Leadership transitions and First 100 Days plans that secure early wins.
Change management that turns strategy into adoption.
Capability building and succession for the next generation of leaders.
Cultural diagnostics that close the gap between today and the strategic vision.

Strategy succeeds when people have the capability and the culture to deliver it.

Selected impact

Work that left institutions stronger.

One of the largest urban community college systems in the United States

A systemwide reinvention

Facing low completion, fragmented pathways, and resources misaligned with outcomes, the system undertook a multi-year reinvention: structured and guided pathways, programs realigned to transfer and workforce outcomes, performance management, and sustained culture change.

The graduation rate nearly tripled within seven years, annual degrees doubled within five, and time to completion fell sharply.

Led as Chief Academic and Chief Strategy Officer

A large public research university widely recognized for innovation

Credit mobility at scale

Students were losing credits and momentum in transfer. We redesigned transfer credit evaluation through technology, built credit mobility frameworks across institutions, and applied adaptive, data-informed approaches to keep learners on track.

Students kept more of their credits and reached their degrees with less lost time and cost.

Led as executives

A leading global philanthropic organization focused on U.S. higher education

A metrics architecture leaders could act on

The foundation needed to connect strategy to outcomes across a large portfolio. We designed the metrics architecture and leading indicators, and stood up a performance management cadence with dashboards that informed real decisions.

Leaders gained a clear, shared view of whether the strategy was working and where to move next.

Advisory engagement

A large urban public university system serving several hundred thousand students

From data to action across a system

The system needed to turn data into action across many campuses while navigating a complex set of stakeholders. We built a data-to-action performance framework, aligned stakeholders around shared priorities and metrics, and coached the executive team.

The system moved from dashboards to decisions, with stakeholders aligned around a common agenda.

Advisory engagement

A national nonprofit collaborative advancing digital learning

Long-term program management

A complex, multi-workstream initiative needed disciplined management to deliver on time and keep partners aligned. We provide sustained program and project management, governance, milestone delivery, and coordination across partners.

The program stays on course and its partners stay aligned around the outcomes that matter.

Advisory engagement

A leading national philanthropic organization focused on U.S. higher education

Framing learning mobility

The foundation needed to define and frame a long-term concept to guide its strategy and the field's understanding of learning mobility. We developed the strategy, framed the concept, synthesized the evidence, and socialized it with leaders across the field.

The framing now shapes how the field thinks about mobility, backed by a strategy to advance it.

Advisory engagement

In their words

Reinvention changed how the entire system worked, from the pathways students followed to the way we held ourselves accountable for their success. The results were real and they lasted.

Chancellor, very large urban community college system

We finally had a measurement system that told us whether our strategy was working and where to move next. It sharpened every conversation we had about impact.

Director, national philanthropic organization

They gave us a way to move from dashboards to decisions across a very large and complex system, and they did it while keeping every stakeholder at the table.

Executive Vice Chancellor, large urban public university system