Why Are We Trying to Grow?

There is a particular idea that has become so embedded in contemporary higher education that we rarely stop to examine it: universities need to grow.

Grow enrolments. Grow international students. Grow research income. Grow partnerships, programs, campuses, and revenue.

There are obvious reasons for this mindset. Universities have substantial fixed costs, employ large numbers of people, and operate in an increasingly competitive and financially constrained environment. Revenue matters. Solvency matters. No serious university leader can ignore either.

But financial sustainability and organisational growth are not the same thing.

I have been thinking recently about the enthusiasm for “hypergrowth” in the business world – the idea that successful organisations are those capable of expanding extraordinarily quickly. There is certainly a logic to it. Growth can create resources, opportunity, and scale. But rapid growth also creates problems. Systems that work at one scale may not work at another. Complexity increases, culture can become diluted, costs rise, coordination becomes harder, and quality can become more difficult to maintain. Sometimes growth creates strength. Sometimes it simply makes an organisation larger.

It seems to me that higher education could benefit from asking the same question.

When a university announces a strategy to increase enrolments, I often wonder what sits behind the target. Is the institution trying to improve its financial resilience? Respond to demographic change? Increase access? Meet workforce needs? Build research capability? Strengthen its regional contribution? Or has growth itself become a proxy for institutional health?

These are quite different value propositions.

If the problem is financial sustainability, then the strategy should be about sustainability. Increasing enrolments might be part of the answer, but so might reducing unnecessary costs, concentrating investment, reconsidering the academic portfolio, developing different revenue streams, improving retention, or deciding what the institution no longer needs to do. If the problem is competitive positioning, becoming more distinctive may be more valuable than becoming larger. And if the problem is that an institution has lost sight of what makes it valuable, increasing its scale may simply make that problem harder to solve.

Yet the language of growth can become so pervasive that these questions disappear. The strategic conversation becomes less about what kind of institution should we be? and more about how do we get more students?

That is an important question. It is not necessarily the most important one.

The attraction of more

Part of the problem is that growth is an unusually convenient measure of progress. Universities are constantly measured and compared. Boards want evidence of performance. Governments want targets. Executives need to demonstrate momentum. Strategic plans require numbers. Student enrolments, revenue, research income, and market share can all be put neatly into a dashboard.

And numbers tend to point in one direction: up.

There is also a powerful institutional psychology at work. Growth feels like progress. Contraction feels like failure. It is much easier to celebrate expansion than to explain why an institution has deliberately chosen to become more focused.

But growth can also create its own treadmill. More students require more staff and infrastructure. More infrastructure creates more costs. More costs create pressure for more revenue. More revenue creates pressure for further growth. At some point, an institution can find itself growing simply to sustain the organisational model that previous growth created.

That is not necessarily strategic growth. It may just be institutional momentum.

What if strength mattered more than scale?

The more interesting question for some universities is not how they can become larger, but how they can become stronger.

Imagine a university deciding that it does not need to be excellent at everything. Instead, it identifies the areas in which it has genuine intellectual, professional, or community strength and concentrates resources there. Imagine it becoming known for particular forms of teaching, research, or engagement rather than continually expanding its portfolio. Imagine deeper relationships with the communities and industries for which it can make a distinctive contribution.

There is a paradox here: an institution can sometimes become more valuable by doing less.

That requires confidence. Concentration means saying no. Distinctiveness means accepting that other institutions may do some things better. Resilience may mean resisting opportunities that look attractive individually but add complexity without strengthening the core.

This is difficult in a sector where breadth and scale are so often treated as evidence of ambition. But perhaps less can sometimes be the more ambitious strategy.

Who is asking why?

Ultimately, this is a question of leadership and governance.

University leaders are under enormous pressure to demonstrate growth. Governments, boards, rankings, competitors and markets all create incentives for expansion. Those pressures are real, and they cannot simply be wished away. But leadership is not only about responding to external pressures. It is also about deciding which pressures should shape the institution.

That means asking a deceptively simple question: Why are we trying to grow?

If the answer is compelling, growth may well be the right strategy. But if the answer is simply that other universities are growing, that previous targets have created an expectation of continued growth, or that growth is the most visible way of demonstrating progress, perhaps we need to pause.

The purpose of strategy is not to produce a larger institution. It is to produce a stronger one.

The goal should be to thrive

I am not arguing that universities should stop growing. A university that can sustainably educate more students, conduct more research, and serve more communities should probably do so.

The point is that growth should be a consequence of good strategy, not a substitute for one.

For me, the better questions are: What kind of institution do we want to be? What size allows us to deliver our mission well? Where are we genuinely distinctive? Which activities create the greatest value? What should we stop doing? Where would deeper capability matter more than greater scale? What level of financial strength would allow us to withstand shocks without constantly chasing the next source of revenue?

These questions may lead to growth. They may lead to contraction. They may lead to something more interesting: an institution that is deliberately shaped around its purpose rather than around an abstract expectation of becoming bigger.

Higher education will remain a difficult environment. Universities will need to adapt, and some will need to grow. But adaptation does not have to mean expansion.

Perhaps the universities that thrive will not necessarily be those that grow fastest, but those that understand what they are for, know where they create distinctive value, and have the discipline to build strength around it.

In a sector increasingly focused on what comes next, there may be considerable wisdom in asking what is already worth protecting – and what could become much stronger if we stopped trying to make it bigger.