Why revenue diversification keeps failing and what senior leaders must do differently before the model collapses completely. Brief 2 of 5
Tuition dependence is not a revenue risk that can be managed at the margins. It is a strategic trap that has progressively constrained the institutional capacity to do the very things that would allow escape. Decades of optimising for enrolment growth have produced governance structures, cost bases, and organisational cultures oriented around a single revenue logic. When that logic is disrupted by demography, policy, or geopolitics, the institutions most exposed are not those with the highest tuition dependency ratios, but those whose boards and executive teams lack the governance capacity to execute meaningful diversification. The problem is not that institutions have failed to diversify. They have tried to diversify without first reforming the governance conditions under which diversification must occur. This brief argues that revenue diversification is a governance challenge before it is a financial or commercial one, and that senior leaders who approach it otherwise will continue to fail. Access the free Substack here.
