Strategic Planning in Higher Education

Higher education institutions around the world are taking on more responsibility for their own future planning. As a result, they need to further strengthen their capacity for strategic performance. The narrow field of strategic planning is comprised of three steps: first the changing demands of the environment (economy, society, policy, research, etc.) are analyzed against the institution’s internal potential. Based on the analysis, various development scenarios are assessed; some are subsequently selected for formulation as concise strategic objectives. Finally, specific concrete actions for change are undertaken in order to achieve the strategic goals. This is the rational, linear approach to planning; however, it has been proven that successful strategic performance is also intuitive and emerges during the process of implementation. Altogether, there are four clearly distinctive types of strategic development: the classical approach, New Public Management, the evolutionary approach and the systematic approach. Leaders of higher education institutions have to ensure and protect the necessary flexibility to accommodate all four approaches. They are responsible for shaping the internal system of strategic planning in such a way that the approaches are both compatible and complementary. Strategic planning involves such commonly used tools as SWOT-analyses, portfolio-analyses, goaland performance cards, internal contracts, etc. Since these tools normally originate in the business sector, they each have to be adjusted to the specific context and needs of the higher education institution as a loosely coupled “expert organization”. For the last third of the 20th Century, higher education institutions around the world have been struggling under two different types of pressure: the first is financial, as the provision of public funds has been decreasing. The second refers to the political, economic and social demands on higher education, which have been increasing. Meanwhile, state governments are withdrawing from the direct regulation of and responsibility for the higher education sector. Under the paradigms of “New Public Management” and “Public Governance”, higher education institutions have been endowed with greater autonomy for a new beginning. It is now up to the institutions to bridge the gap between increasing internal and external demands for societal services and the limited available resources by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their work. The task requires professional management for all types of higher education institutions, from the Humboldtian universities with their formerly state-guaranteed budgets, personnel and organization which are forced to create at first their own management system to the Anglo-Saxon and US-American universities that have to professionalize their management system. In terms of “The Triangle of Coordination” used by Burton Clark (1983) to classify the national higher education systems according to the major influences of the state, market or academic oligarchies, the global trend clearly indicates the increasing importance of the market and competition. Consequently, the model of the “entrepreneurial university” has emerged, which then necessitated the creation of methods and instruments appropriate for institutional leadership in the higher education sector. In this context, the issue of “strategic planning” takes on new importance for higher education institutions around the world.