Capabilities Before Credentials

The Problem With Online Program Growth

In her first week as Chief Online Learning Officer at a mid-sized private university, Claire learned quickly what the job was really about.

• Enrollment was declining.

• Competition from large, out-of-state online providers like SNHU, WGU, and Grand Canyon was intensifying.

• The university needed a boost—and more revenue, fast.

In meeting after meeting, each time the conversation turned to “growth,” it landed in the same place.

Online learning—and more specifically, online programs. “Growth” was expected to show up through launching new programs, expanding existing programs, and developing new offerings such as certificates and micro-credentials that could be marketed, measured, and reported.

According to the CHLOE 10 Report produced by Quality Matters, Eduventures, and EDUCAUSE, growth through online program expansion has become the de facto strategy for most institutions.

Nearly nine in ten colleges, their research found, plan to expand their online program offerings in the next three years.

That Strategy Doesn’t Scale

That kind of consensus would be reassuring if program expansion alone could reliably produce the growth colleges and universities need right now—but in a market this crowded, complex, and competitive, it rarely does.

Online learning may be where nine in ten institutions are placing their bets, but it’s a mistake to assume growth will follow simply by identifying and launching the right programs.

I’ve been studying the online market for nearly two decades, and I can say for sure that this market simply doesn’t behave like that—and hasn’t for a long time.

Programs don’t scale. Organizations do. Growth in higher education now depends on deliberate organizational development.

When Every Path Leads to Programs

Within days, Claire inherited a short list of online programs a consultant had identified as the university’s best growth opportunities.

• Cybersecurity

• Data science

• Health Sciences

Each entry came with national demand curves and logos from peer institutions already in the market. The analysis was careful, and, from Claire's perspective, the data held up. The consultant’s growth projections weren’t the problem; it was everything those numbers assumed.

Each program recommendation carried requirements that extended well beyond the curriculum. Faculty expertise was already scarce. Compensation structures that didn’t exist. Ongoing investments in labs, software licenses, and security protocols. Instructional design capacity needed to scale continuously. Student support models built for very different learner expectations.

As Claire worked through the list, the same questions kept resurfacing:

1. Who would teach these courses?

2. How would faculty be recruited and supported?

3. What would it take to design, launch, and sustain them at scale?

Every question led to the same bottleneck: all the organizational capabilities Claire needed for any of these programs to succeed.

The Scaling Constraint

The problem Claire faced in this moment has a name: a scaling constraint. This concept, most closely associated with Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, holds that growth is limited not by market demand or even individual effort, but by the capacity of the underlying systems responsible for growth.

Activity can increase. Inputs can multiply. Programs can launch. Yet “growth” can still fail to materialize if systems cannot respond to demand, absorb change, and expand organically as volume increases.

Back to Claire. The programs on the consultant’s list weren’t unrealistic. Demand was real. The opportunity was there. What wasn’t there were the operating conditions required to carry those programs once they launched.

That’s a scaling constraint in practice: demand on one side, fixed organizational capacity on the other.

Where demand exists, work follows. Where growth is expected, pressure accumulates. Results only compound when the system absorbing that work can expand along with it.

Until the capacity constraint is removed, adding more programs doesn’t create growth. It concentrates strain inside an organization built for stability, not scale.

Choosing the right program will never solve higher ed’s growth problem if we lack the capacity to support and scale what we launch.

What “Growth” Actually Requires

Choosing the right programs is not a hard decision. The harder decision—the “problem to be solved”—is whether operating capacity can absorb program expansion without overwhelming faculty, staff, or core organizational structures and systems. To “grow” in today’s online education market, our institutions will need the capabilities to:

• Translate demand into delivery systems that do not overload existing structures

• Repeat success instead of rebuilding from scratch each time

• Absorb complexity as online program offerings, partners, and learner needs multiply

• Adapt as markets, technologies, and expectations shift

The table below surfaces the capabilities I believe help remove scaling constraints and allow growth to compound rather than stall.

Developed by Brian Fleming, Design Futures, LLC

A Different Way to Decide

At that point, choosing the next program stops being the hard decision.

Before approving a new initiative, you have to ask:

• What capability does this decision strengthen?

• Does that capability travel across programs, markets, or partnerships?

• What future decisions does this make easier?

Programs can still make sense. But when programs become the primary response, they are often compensating for limits elsewhere in the system.

Three Things You Can Do Now

1. Name the capability required to scale the program.

If you can’t say what capability is being built, the conversation is happening at the wrong level.

2. Audit recent growth decisions (e.g., launch new programs, develop microcredentials) through a capability lens.

Look back. What did those decisions strengthen? What did they bypass?

3. Treat program growth as an organizational development strategy, not a bet.

Organizational development language changes how you understand risk and how you value constraints and learning.

Closing Thought

You don’t have to abandon programs to move beyond program-centered thinking. But if programs remain the primary way you pursue growth, activity will continue to increase without increasing capacity.

The real work ahead isn’t choosing the next credential.

It’s building the capabilities needed to support whatever comes next.