Strategic Leadership in Higher Education: Facilitating Collaborative Learning

Introduction

Strategic leadership is a synergistic approach that incorporates the best elements of two well-known leadership approaches, namely, managerial and visionary leadership (see Figure 1). Managerial leaders are reactive and focus on conserving the existing order; they deal with the day-to-day activities and short-term financial health of the organization. Visionary leaders are proactive risk takers, innovators who develop new ideas and focus on long-term growth and survival (Rowe & Nejad, 2009). Strategic leaders follow a synergistic approach whose dual goals are short-term financial stability and long-term growth and viability. The first goal encourages budget constraints while the second requires outlay of monies for innovation, to enable the organization to keep up with changing environments. Strategic leadership, grounded in ethical behavior and value-based decisions, is able to balance the needs of both of these goals (Rowe & Nejad, 2009).

Figure 1.

Strategic leadership as a synthesis of visionary and managerial leadership

Strategic leadership steers an organization through dangerous waters toward opportunities and away from dangers; it guides the organization toward a clearly defined destination in the pursuit of its goals. Strategic leadership is about leading of the whole organization, rather than leading in it (Boal & Hooijberg, 2000).

Higher education is an arena that has been facing increasing difficulties in student retention. Steep increases in tuition costs have burdened students with huge debt (Archibald & Feldman, 2010, 2012; Reed & Cochrane, 2014). More troubling, students doubt whether a college degree prepares them for the future and the workplace – concerns shared by employers (Cai, 2013; Krueger & Dale, 2011; Rothwell & Kulkarni, 2015; Shapiro et al., 2014). Rothwell and Kulkarni (2015, p. 1) describe this concept of “value-added” in institutions of higher education as “the economic success of the college’s graduates, measured by the incomes graduates earn, the occupations in which they work, and their loan repayment rates.” According to Public Agenda (2011), a leading cause of college dropout was students’ inability to handle the combined demands of work and school. The combined load also may have contributed to students’ taking longer to graduate: the average completion time for a four-year degree was 55 months, with only 40 percent of students graduating within four years (Vedder et al., 2010).

Students are worried about taking on debt to go to college; a Public Agenda survey given to college graduates and those without a degree found that 9 in 10 young adults believed that young people had to borrow too much money to go to college. (Public Agenda, 2011). Top recommendations to reduce the debt burden included offering more student aid options to part-time students, and providing childcare on site. However, the demand for more student aid and support services comes at a time when institutions of higher education are facing significant financial problems. After reaching a record high of $89 billion in 2008, state funding was slashed dramatically and is anticipated to decline further in the future, with a new normal in which students and their families will be expected “to make increasingly greater financial sacrifices in order to complete a postsecondary education” and in which colleges will be forced to find a way to increase productivity and to absorb reductions in support while “increasing degree production without compromising quality” (SHEEO, 2014, p. 47).