Beyond scale: How universities can build their next S-curve

Scale creates opportunity and complexity

Expanding the academic portfolio is often a rational early-stage growth strategy. New programs attract different student segments, improve infrastructure utilization and reduce dependence on a limited number of disciplines. They also support the multidisciplinary aspirations of NEP 2020.

However, multi-disciplinarity should not become indiscriminate expansion. As portfolios grow, resources can become fragmented, programs may compete for similar students and the university’s value proposition becomes harder to articulate. New launches can start substituting for strategic focus.

The risk is not scale itself. It is scale without a clear point of view.

Universities frequently frame the challenge as a trade-off between growth and academic quality. The more important distinction, however, is between growth that builds on existing strengths and growth that adds complexity without creating advantage.

A university with strong management capabilities may have a credible right to expand into business analytics, financial technology, entrepreneurship or sustainability management. It can leverage existing faculty, employer relationships and alumni networks. Expansion into unrelated fields may require significant investment without reinforcing the institution’s core proposition.

A sustainable higher education strategy therefore does not ask, “where can we expand?” It asks, “where can we lead?”

Academic portfolio strategy must look beyond enrollment

Effective academic portfolio optimization should assess programs through three lenses:

• Market attractiveness and student outcomes: Is there sustained demand from students and employers, and are graduates achieving strong outcomes?
• Academic strength and strategic fit: Does the institution possess distinctive faculty, teaching, research or industry capabilities in the domain?
• Financial contribution and resource intensity: Does the program create sufficient value relative to the faculty, infrastructure and investment it requires?

This evaluation can help classify programs into four strategic categories:

• Invest: Strong demand and a clear institutional advantage
• Grow selectively: Attractive opportunities that warrant targeted capability building
• Maintain: Stable programs that continue to contribute value
• Transform or exit: Offerings that lack sufficient demand, differentiation or sustainability

The objective is not necessarily to reduce breadth. It is to determine which parts of the portfolio should define the university’s future and receive disproportionate investment.

Institutional distinctiveness goes beyond brand messaging

Terms such as “future-ready,” “industry-led,” “inter-disciplinary” and “innovation-driven” have become common across university brand positioning. Institutional distinctiveness depends not on the claims a university makes, but on how consistently those claims are reflected across its academic ecosystem.

A university seeking leadership in sustainability, for example, must embed it across curriculum, research, campus practices and industry-academia partnerships. Entrepreneurship cannot remain confined to an incubation center; it should shape teaching, mentoring, funding access and student opportunities.

Faculty capability, research priorities, international partnerships and student experience must reinforce the same strategic choices. Such alignment creates an advantage that is difficult to replicate. Focus does not require a multidisciplinary university to become smaller. It requires the institution to establish a coherent identity across disciplines. Leading universities follow different models — innovation, liberal education, global immersion or research excellence — but each makes deliberate choices about the capabilities for which it seeks recognition.

In short, distinctiveness is built through aligned choices across the value proposition of the university, not marketing messages.

Leading institutions have built distinction through differentiated models centered on innovation, experiential learning, global immersion or research excellence. While their approaches differ, each has established a clear institutional identity that extends beyond program expansion and enrollment growth.