In 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune opened a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach with five students, $1.50, crates for chairs, and a discarded barrel for a desk. At a time when segregation placed formidable limits on who could learn and where, Bethune refused to treat those limits as permanent. The school she founded would eventually become Bethune-Cookman University.

Her story is extraordinary, but the instinct behind it is woven throughout the history of higher education. When existing models no longer met the needs of the moment, educators and institutional leaders created new ones. They expanded access, reimagined how learning is delivered, launched entirely new institutions, and responded to social and economic shifts that earlier generations could not have anticipated. Higher education has never advanced only under favorable conditions.

That history feels particularly relevant today, because the conditions confronting colleges and universities are as demanding as any the sector has faced in decades. The pressures are no longer hypothetical, and they are no longer confined to the most vulnerable institutions. In a fall 2025 survey of 275 administrators conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education, more than 75% said they would need to make changes to their budgets simply to fulfill their mission, and more than a third said those changes would require significant cuts or significant new revenue. Nearly 40% of public four-year institutions reported that they either need to make significant cuts or are facing an imminent budget crisis.

The strain now reaches institutions long assumed to be secure. Deloitte's 2026 Higher Education Trends report notes that the University of Southern California laid off more than 900 employees, Stanford cut 363, and Northwestern eliminated roughly 5% of its workforce. citeturn3view1 As recently as this summer, Inside Higher Ed reported that Harvard began restructuring its Faculty of Arts and Sciences amid a projected structural deficit of $365 million. When the nation's wealthiest institutions are reducing staff, it is clear that financial pressure has become a shared condition rather than an isolated one.

In moments like these, attention understandably turns to resources. Boards concentrate on financial sustainability. Administrators evaluate program portfolios. Leaders scrutinize enrollment forecasts, staffing models, and technology investments. All of these conversations are necessary. Yet institutions rarely succeed or fail on the basis of resources alone. More often, outcomes are shaped by what an institution is able to do with the resources it has.

That capability is what I think of as the hidden infrastructure of institutional resilience.

When resilience is discussed in higher education, we tend to describe visible assets: budgets, facilities, endowments, technology platforms, and strategic plans. Important as those assets are, they are ultimately tools. What determines whether an institution can adapt, execute, and evolve is the leadership and talent infrastructure that sits beneath them — the systems, relationships, institutional knowledge, and organizational capabilities that allow a college or university to move from intention to action.

This distinction matters because many of the decisions facing higher education today are not purely financial. They are organizational. Institutions are being asked to rethink academic offerings, workforce models, partnerships, research priorities, and student-support strategies at the same time, and often under conditions that keep shifting beneath the plan. Deloitte's research captures the mood precisely in a quote from one participant at its New Era Forum: "How do we hope for the best and plan for the worst? Nobody wants to be the leader that makes a cut that turns out to be unnecessary. But also no one wants to be the one who didn't make cuts and ends up forcing drastic moves later on." citeturn3view1 Increasingly, leaders are finding that the hardest challenge is not identifying what needs to change. It is building an organization capable of carrying that change forward.

That challenge becomes especially visible during periods of transition, and transition has become a defining feature of the sector. Deloitte reports that turnover in top leadership positions reached an unprecedented rate of more than 20% between 2022 and 2024, that the average tenure of a chief academic officer has fallen to roughly 4.7 years, and that institutions are increasingly turning to multiyear interim appointments to maintain continuity while they search for permanent leaders.

Too often, those transitions are treated primarily as succession events. The strongest institutions treat them as tests of institutional capability. Can the organization maintain momentum when a key leader departs? Can strategic priorities survive beyond the tenure of the person who launched them? Does institutional knowledge reside with a handful of individuals, or is it distributed across the enterprise? The answers depend far less on individual leadership performance than on the infrastructure surrounding leadership itself.

From our vantage point working with colleges and universities across the country, the institutions best positioned for what comes next are not always those with the largest endowments or the strongest balance sheets. They are frequently the ones that have invested deliberately in leadership continuity, succession planning, cross-functional decision-making, and organizational adaptability. They have built systems that allow talent to be developed rather than merely recruited and cultures that distribute responsibility rather than concentrating it. They understand that resilience is not a quality of a single leader, but a resounding ethos demonstrated throughout the institution. Increasingly, that resilience also depends on an institution’s ability to look beyond the immediate pressures and make deliberate choices about the future it is preparing for. Colleges and universities will need to decide how their missions can best respond to changing societal needs, then align leadership, talent, capital, programs, and partnerships behind those choices. The institutions most likely to endure will be those that understand where they are uniquely positioned to matter and organize themselves accordingly.

Three capabilities consistently emerge in those environments. The first is agility — not agility as speed, but as the ability to adapt while remaining anchored to purpose, including the willingness to reconsider how that purpose should be expressed as the needs of society change. This instinct is already evident in how leaders are responding to volatility; the same Chronicle survey found that 58% of institutions plan to model a wider array of revenue scenarios and 64% intend to begin budgeting earlier, signs of organizations learning to plan for a moving target rather than waiting for stability to return. The second is tolerance for ambiguity, because many of the questions confronting higher education today have no obvious answers, and progress increasingly depends on leaders willing to act thoughtfully before every variable is known. The third is enterprise thinking, since the issues facing institutions rarely stay within the boundaries of a single division — enrollment shapes finance, finance shapes academic strategy, and academic strategy shapes workforce planning. These capabilities matter less as traits of individual leaders than as characteristics of organizations, and institutions become more durable when they are embedded in how decisions are made, how information is shared, and how leadership is developed at every level.

This brings us back to Bethune. What made her achievement remarkable was not determination alone. It was her ability to see possibility where others saw limitation. She began with a clear understanding of whom the institution needed to serve and built outward from that purpose. Resources followed. Partnerships followed. Growth followed, but purpose, and the will to build, came first.

Higher education faces a very different set of circumstances today, but the underlying challenge is not entirely unfamiliar. The question before colleges and universities is not whether every structure inherited from the past can or should be preserved. Many institutions are already confronting difficult choices about what to change and what to set aside. The more hopeful and consequential question is what they can create when mission, leadership, and resources are brought into clearer alignment. That begins with making choices now about how an institution can best fulfill its mission as the needs of its students, its community, and society continue to evolve. Resilience will increasingly require institutions to identify the needs they are uniquely positioned to address, make meaningful bets on those areas, and concentrate resources behind them.

The institutions that thrive in the years ahead will not be defined solely by their capacity to withstand pressure. They will be defined by their ability to use moments of uncertainty to build new forms of value, new models of service, and new pathways to impact. The hidden infrastructure of institutional resilience is not found in a budget, a building, or a strategic plan. It is found in an institution's capacity to imagine what comes next — and in the leadership it builds to make that future possible.

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