Challenger Universities pt. 4: How to Build a Differentiated Challenger University — The Strategic Framework

This Emerge article series, researched in collaboration with our extensive network of education leaders, offers insights and practical advice for founders and university leaders bold enough to create new universities.

So, you want to build a new university or reinvent your current university and were wondering where to start?

If you are like me and wake up with questions around how to build and develop a differentiated, scalable university for the 21st century, then this is an article for you. Or if you are just curious and want to find out what traits we hope the university of the future will have, then please read along too.

In the previous piece of this series, we laid out the market landscape for challenger universities (here), highlighting the innovative pioneers we are excited about and the innovations they bring to the table. In this piece, we pull all of these innovations together and create a strategic framework we believe should inform the development of top challenger universities.

Informed by the key challenges in the sector (read more here), there are 4 sets of strategic questions and differentiation angles that challenger universities (and traditional universities) need to carefully consider. This blueprint sets up these questions, covering student experience, outcomes, price and audience, and provides an extensive suite of potential answers.

Before digging into these questions and the detail, a few high-level notes on differentiation.

The one-sentence differentiation test: Does your university pass it?

The question we often like to ask university leaders is: If there was just one sentence you had to describe your university — what words would you use?

If you could not use the name of your university or its location in this one sentence description, would prospective students, and even alumni, know who you were?

Most universities fail the one sentence differentiation test and even the whole paragraph test. So many descriptions focus on what universities have (inputs), rather than who they are for, how they deliver value and what they can help you achieve (outcomes). If you are a new challenger university or an existing small, financially struggling university, and you cannot answer this question persuasively, the odds are against you one day building a recognisable brand, a sizeable audience and long future.

Not so strong university brands and offerings:

Undifferentiated university brands often fail to clearly address a target audience (UConn: ‘talented students’ and ‘global community’; UM: ‘diverse and energized academic community’) and what they uniquely offer that is important to students (UConn: a ‘great university’, ‘top-ranked research’, ‘expert faculty’, ‘fuelling state economy’; UM: ‘course for future success’, ‘cutting-edge technology’, ‘state-of-the-art equipment’, ‘award-winning faculty’).

How many students go on to brag in life about how ‘state of the art technology’ and ‘awards’ their faculty have helped them in life? Apologies to UConn and UM for picking on them, but they were the first two examples I randomly selected when looking at USA’s top 100 universities!

Strong university brands and offerings:

Differentiated university brands emphasise very clearly who they are for (Foundry: working adults worried about automation; Quantic: modern leaders interested in business) and what they uniquely offer (Foundry: skills and knowledge for jobs that won’t be automated; Quantic: mobile-first business school of the future). You read the taglines and the detail about the offer and you can tell whether it is an offer for you, that will help you achieve your desired goals.

The Strategic framework for building a differentiated Challenger university — the overview

In the busiest and most competitive market in the world (read more here), we have developed a framework below that will help you think about differentiation, to develop the building blocks to pass the one sentence differentiation test, and enhance your chances of success.

As highlighted in our previous piece, the key strategic choices challenger universities face can be captured across the following 4 dimensions:

• Student experience: Offering a student-inspired, personalised, adaptive and pedagogy informed experience
• Student outcomes: Delivering objectives-driven, employer informed and focused modular degrees
• Target audience: Prioritising target populations with offers specifically suited towards life stages, passions, geographies and desired outcomes
• Teaching at scale: Rethinking the role of campus and faculty with a technology-first and often cheaper and more flexible proposition

The solution is not embracing all of these answers, but finding the right combination of answers that differentiate your challenger university and help it deliver on its mission.

Step 1: Think about which strategic pillars you want to be known for. Do you want to deliver an incredible Experience, guarantee great Outcomes, hyper-focus on a particular Audience and / or set up your university for large scale growth? In reality, you could try and target each one of these 4 pillars, however, it is difficult to ‘focus’ on everything as well as to form the one-sentence differentiation statement which has too many hooks in it.

As a starting point, we recommend first thinking about the Scale pillar. If you want to build a venture backable business, it is essential you are set up for scale (placing yourself in the ‘Challenger Trailblazer’ category on our market map). If you are building or renting campus grounds and relying on faculty, it is likely you will need to rely on other sources of finance (philanthropy, foundation, corporate, government, private equity), that your costs and thus fees will have to be high and that opportunities for reaching a large audience will be limited. We place challenger universities that are not set up for scale but innovative across the other pillars, under our ‘Challenger Progressives’ categorisation.

When it comes to Experience, Outcomes and Audience, we believe that innovating against just one of these pillars, as the centre for gravity, can be enough to build an attractive proposition, whether coupled or not with Scale. Liberty University, as a ‘Challenger Trailblazer’, that teaches online at scale to more than 100k students, has a very clear Audience proposition as an evangelical Christian University. Pearson College, as a ‘Challenger Progressive’, that focuses on a smaller audience of 1,200 students, excels in delivering apprenticeship degrees in close co-operation with dozens of employers who hire their students.

Combinations of three differentiating focus pillars could work, however, could be challenging to successfully implement and might create a confusing value proposition. You can still have some dimensions of innovation against non-key pillars, but they do not have to be your defining features. For example, guaranteeing job outcomes at a low cost (that, for example, having no faculty allows) could be enough of a brand builder, without requiring radical investment in innovation on the experience front (which could be challenging in the first place, given no faculty).

Step 2: Once you know which strategic pillar(s) you are centres of gravity, think about how you deliver on these pillars. To help you think about the implementation strategy, informed by interviews with leading existing universities, we have built a decision framework with 6 dimensions for each of the 4 strategic pillars captured below.

There are no rules on how many dimensions are too few or too many, and it will depend on what type of university you are aiming to build. But again, it is important to be clear on where you specialise and focus your resources to become world-leading, which dimensions are not the primary focus of excellent but still relevant, and which are not in focus at all.

Some dimensions go hand in hand. For example, under Experience, to deliver a ‘Practical and relevant’ experience, it is in your interest to also ensure that you have an ‘Adaptive curriculum’ which ensures that the ‘practicalities’ of the learning are for the 21st century and not the 1980s. Similarly, if you are targeting students from developing markets (Audience), then affordability and flexibility of payments (Scale) are likely to be very important.

In contrast, some dimensions are challenging to couple together. For example, having ‘no campus’ and ‘no faculty’ (Scale) might keep your costs down but without either it might be difficult to deliver an acceptable and attractive experience. Similarly, focusing on specific industry employment guarantees (Outcomes) might force you to also prioritise your target cohort (Audience).

The Strategic framework for building a differentiated Challenger university — the pillars and dimensions

A. Experience: What type of experience am I going to offer my students?

The student experience is so much more than just attending lectures, participating in extracurriculars and using new facilities the university has invested millions into, rarely asking students for their opinion.

The majority of university promises today are that of ‘everything to everyone’ with a mass-market environment of endless concentrations, majors, degrees and courses, as well as millions of facilities and extracurricular programmes students are thrown into and expected to sink or swim through.

If you are looking to build an innovative challenger university brand centred around the student experience, we believe focusing attention on a combination of these six variables is key:

• Student inspired: Ensure students play an active role in (re)shaping their university experience on an ongoing basis
• Personalised and flexible: Make the experience more personal, giving students more attention, timing and format options that fit around them
• Pedagogy informed: Implement what we have learned about the science of learning into the day to day
• Practical and relevant: Explain how everything you teach and offer connects with the real world
• Adaptive curriculum: Make sure what you teach is up to date and adequate for your students
• Holistic experience: Acknowledge that university is so much more than just learning and facilities

B. Outcomes: What specific outcomes am I going to support my students in achieving?

Going to university used to be a thing for the elite and until recently a stress-free pathway to a good job and life. Students expected an intellectually fulfilling journey and got a job out of it too. Today this is not the case for many — the vast majority of students go to university to get a job and have a meaningful career. Too many students graduate with crippling debt that they will never repay. Too many are on pathways to academia when this was never their intention. Too many are in degrees that have very limited interest from employers and in universities with weak brands and networks that are unable to deliver on employment outcomes.

If delivering strong outcomes is a key pillar and promise you want to deliver on for your students, we believe it is key to think the following dimensions:

• Objectives-focused: Help students define and redefine their goals and think about outcomes, development and careers from day one
• Better assessment: Acknowledge that students learn in different ways, and different paces and adjust testing accordingly
• Employer informed: Ensure employers and industry professionals play an active role in shaping the course design and experience
• Employment as the norm: Instead of career services being one of many departments, think how it becomes the core ethos of our institution
• Modular career off-ramps: Create multiple opportunities for students to achieve career goals, be it after the first semester or after the full 1-4 years
• Education as an employment extension: Think about how university can complement employment and fit around specific employer needs

C. Audience: Who am I offering this experience and outcomes to and how am I tailoring towards different and changing demands?

It is rare to find organisations with $100m+ in annual revenue that do not understand their customers and do not know how to attract them. Many universities are exactly this. They have limited marketing knowledge and capability, often rely on third parties to attract students and once students show up on campus, they try to understand what motivated them to come. The common university differentiation is either to be super regional and tailor towards commuter students that live nearby or to build an incredibly diverse audience tied together by the often-used term of ‘intellectual curiosity’.

While there are a lot of benefits in extreme diversity of the talent pool, we believe that there is a lot of potential to maintain these benefits whilst creating centres of gravity that resonate with target personas. These are offerings that are made specifically for YOU, given your background, interest and passions, not for your Average ‘Intellectually Curious’ Joe.

This is no way means creating a brand that says no to students based on who they are, but instead a brand that moves away from just ‘what’ it offers (eg a university with a leading geography research department, among 100 other departments) to focusing more on the ‘who’ it helps unlock their potential through a unique centre of gravity (eg a university for those that want to stop climate change, not just through research, but through every other discipline too). Such an approach should think about one or a combination of the following ways of segmenting target personas, with offerings that tailor towards students with common:

• Values and beliefs: Common beliefs and values that together can generate strong bonds and augment the university experience
• Backgrounds: Common backgrounds including careers and life journeys that build solidarity and alignment amount students
• Desirable outcomes: Specific life and career outcome goals that the university can deliver on and students can support themselves in
• Life stages: Similar career stages, going through similar questions and hurdles, best answered with alongside someone in their same shoes
• Interests and passions: The same, interests, motivations and passions, sometimes closely related to a world problem and industry
• Geography: Similar geographies where the students come from or want to live and work in

D. Scale: How do I build a scalable proposition?

While there are many large universities by revenue, there are not many large universities by number of students. University is either very expensive or very regional. It’s expensive whether it is the individual that is paying for it (most of the time in the world) or whether the government is picking up the tab either upfront or by covering student loan defaults (again, most of the time in the world). In our first piece, we argued that building more physical institutions is not going to feed the growing demand from another 100m students in the next decade. Running expensive, faculty lead online courses will not either.

In order to build a unique scalable proposition, challenger universities need to think about the following access barriers, cost blockers and growth limiters:

• Affordable: Offer the same quality experience as your closest competitor, but make it cheaper
• Flexible payments: Give students payment flexibilities, eliminating year-long contracts and an adulthood of debt upon completion of studies
• No campuses: Go fully online or think about creative usage of space that does not require huge infrastructure or long-term rent contracts
• No faculty: Reduce or eliminate the role of tenured faculty and departments, increasing the importance and role of facilitators and peers
• Digitised processes and learning: Eliminate expensive and inefficient administrative processes and move content and learning online
• Facilitated student interaction: Enable meaningful opportunities for social interaction and building of social capital, especially if you are online-first

Stay tuned for a new article in the series every week. Next week we will start our focus on each one of the 4 strategic choices universities face, providing more detail into the 6 dimensions of each strategic choice and sharing insights and examples from leading challenger universities.

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While starting a new university is probably one of the most difficult and likely to fail ideas that you can have, it is such crazy ideas that excite us at Emerge. If you are a daring founder in this space or a university leader on the path to improving or reinventing the core student experience, we would love to talk and see how we can help. Send me an e-mail on mario.barosevcic@emerge.education, or feel free to follow me on LinkedIn or Medium and sign up to our newsletter here.