What a Private University System Actually Requires
The architecture behind a private system nobody has actually finished building yet.
Picture a student who started at an environmental science college in Maine, fell in love with someone in Arizona, and had to choose between the relationship and the degree. That choice should not exist. It exists today because much of traditional higher education built itself around buildings instead of people, and the moment a person’s life moves, the institution treats that movement as a betrayal rather than a normal fact of being human. IPEDS then punishes the school as an attrition issue even though the learner might go on to graduate somewhere else.
The learner does not need a new college. They need the a system to simply exist in more than one place, with their credits intact, their advisor reachable, and their diploma unchanged. That is the entire reason higher education exists in the first place, to widen what is possible for a person’s life, not to anchor them to a zip code. Almost nothing being built across the sector right now actually solves for that. Unity intends to.
The New Vocabulary of a Sector in Trouble
Higher education has discovered a new vocabulary, and it is everywhere right now. Strategic alliance. Sole member structure. System affiliation. Shared services consortium. Walk into any conference on institutional sustainability this year and you will hear all four terms inside the first hour, usually from a consultant with a deck full of logic arrows connecting circles labeled with college names.
Sit in enough of these rooms and you will notice something else too. Half the agenda is artificial intelligence and the other half is some version of this consolidation conversation, and the two tracks never seem to talk to each other. They should. Every college discovering it cannot deploy AI well because its data lives in twelve disconnected systems is discovering the same disease that makes its merger talks go nowhere. Nobody in the room seems to notice they are listening to two different diagnoses of the same patient.
The activity behind the consolidation half of that agenda is real. More than a hundred colleges have closed or merged in the past eight years. Nearly eighty Catholic institutions alone have closed or combined in the last five. The pace is not slowing. What I want to argue is that almost none of this activity produces what its architects claim it produces, a system, and that the gap between the announcement and the actual operating result is wide enough to drive a budget deficit through.
I am not writing this as a critique from the sidelines. I am writing it because we have built the working proof of concept of the “thing” the industry keeps describing and almost never delivers. I have sat in enough boardrooms and met with enough presidents to know the private version of this conversation does not match the public statements.
In private, almost everyone admits the same thing, the agreement got buried in committee, the implementation stayed surface level, and protectionism dressed up as institutional sovereignty won out over anything that would have actually touched the cost structure. Real impact is not the norm in these conversations. It is the outlier.
I want to be precise about where we actually stand, because I have no interest in implying a network that does not yet exist. Unity Environmental University is the proof of concept. We built the Enterprise Model, we ran it at scale inside one institution, with four verticals, and we proved that ten centralized functions can run underneath genuinely differentiated operating “institutions” without collapsing into sameness.
That is the part that is finished. The part that is next is taking that same architecture and expanding it outward, first nationally and eventually globally, so that the mobility a student gets today inside Unity becomes something a student can get across an entire network of individualized institutions that are part of the Private System.
Start with what is actually happening across the sector, because the variety matters. Four structures dominate the current wave.
Sole member construct. One corporate entity becomes the controlling member of several colleges that otherwise keep operating as they always have.
Strategic alliance. Formal agreements that let students cross enroll or share a handful of programs while each campus keeps its own administration intact.
Shared services consortium. Members pool purchasing power for insurance or marketing while every institution retains its own president, its own board, and its own balance sheet.
Full merger (To be honest, mostly acquisitions with the name variation to save face). One institution legally absorbs another, sometimes renaming the surviving campus after the deal closes.
The real cost is mobility, not finance. Every one of these structures solves a narrow problem while leaving the expensive one in place. None of these models ask whether a student enrolled at one campus can walk into another campus in the same system and keep moving without losing a single credit. A strategic alliance might let two colleges share a course catalog on paper, but try transferring mid semester and watch how fast the registrar’s office turns into a wall.
A sole member arrangement gives a controlling entity legal authority over a board, but a board vote does not get a learner in Arizona seamlessly into a class they already started in Maine.
These structures were built to solve a balance sheet problem. They were never built to solve the human one.
What Gets Built Differently Here
Here is what the system I am building will do differently, and I want to get specific instead of staying in the abstraction, because the abstraction is exactly what makes every other alliance sound the same. Every institution that becomes part of the system will map its course substitutions against every other member, at the system level, not as a future integration milestone buried in a five year plan. A student will be able to move physically, change majors, change pace, or simply change their mind, and the credit moves with them because the mapping already exists.
The online layer connecting these institutions is not a separate competing division either. It is connective tissue. It is built to run synchronous and asynchronous instruction that link every physical location together, so a student at a small in person campus can take a course that only exists online without that campus losing revenue or a shred of the relationship. In the traditional model, online is the rival that quietly drains the campus. In this one, it is the rising tide that lifts every boat in the system at once.
Budget, facilities, governance, and debt work the same way as everything else in this design. The system owns them. The vertical accounts for them. A building gets financed and held on the parent’s balance sheet, not tied to a single institution’s name, because a campus carrying its own mortgage is exactly the kind of fragility that closes colleges the moment enrollment dips for two bad years in a row. Centralizing the debt is what lets one underperforming location get restructured or repurposed without taking the rest of the system down with it.
But owning the debt centrally does not mean the cost disappears for the vertical living inside that space. Every vertical gets charged its real share of the facility and debt service it actually uses, the same way an internal business unit gets billed for the office space it occupies, so nobody is running a budget that pretends space and capital are free. The system absorbs the risk. The vertical carries the accountability for its own number. That split is what keeps one bad semester at one location from turning into a covenant violation that threatens everyone else, while still keeping every vertical honest about what it actually costs to operate.
People hear operational efficiency and discipline applied across many institutions and their minds jump straight to franchise, and I understand why, but it is the wrong comparison and I want to address it early. A franchise sells sameness. Walk into any location of a fast food chain and the entire value proposition is that nothing surprises you. That is precisely what I am not building.
Centralized Is Not Uniform. Decentralized Is Not Unsupervised.
Think Unilever, not a franchise. A company like Unilever runs one parent, one capital structure, one set of operating disciplines underneath dozens of brands that share almost nothing in flavor, positioning, or personality with each other on the surface. Nobody walking into a grocery store experiences those brands as the same thing wearing different packaging, because they are not.
What they share is the machinery nobody sees, the supply chain, the finance discipline, the operating excellence that makes each brand viable on its own terms. That is the model I am building toward. Every institution keeps its name. Every institution keeps its mascot, its traditions, its mission, the exact texture that made students choose it in the first place. What changes is everything underneath that a student never has to think about.
This is also where the architecture has to get concrete rather than aspirational, because we already proved the hardest part works inside Unity. Our entire Governance and Operating Structure, recognized with the J.W. Nason Award for bold leadership in 2018, runs on centralized and decentralized Units embedded in ten functions, not on silos stacked underneath individual leaders reinventing the same functions in ten different ways.
A finance function. A technology function. A marketing function. An academic funtion. Each one built once and deployed everywhere it is needed. I am deliberately not laying out the full decision matrix for every function and unit here. That is a series of papers, not a paragraph, and walking through it would bury the argument this piece is actually making. Some of it is already visible in the Enterprise Model on our site for anyone who wants to see how the pieces fit before the rest is written.
If you want this validated by something other than my own telling, an outside profile of Unity’s enterprise model, published by AcOps titled: Reimagining the Academy: Unity Environmental University on Breaking the Higher Ed Mold describes the same architecture from the inside, centralized services supporting distinct verticals, instruction deliberately decentralized because different audiences need different teaching, and traditional committees replaced by working groups that each carry a single decision maker. That last part matters most. The reason Unity can stand up a specialized degree in three to four months while most institutions take years is not talent or luck. It is that someone in the room actually owns the decision. Surface level alliances reproduce the opposite, more people in more rooms and no one who can say yes.
The test is simple. The function existing centrally does not mean every output looks identical everywhere it shows up, and this is the distinction most people building these structures get wrong.
If the decision is made by the system, it is centralized.
If the decision is made by the campus and the vertical it serves, it is decentralized.
A centralized unit can still deliver a fully differentiated service to a particular location, the decision about how that service is built and delivered simply does not sit with that location.
Decentralized does not mean the system steps back and hopes for the best either. For everything left to the campus and the vertical, the system still builds the guardrails and the foundational components that decision gets made inside of.
A vertical can run its own academic calendar, set its own tuition structure, define its own term length, and build its own expectations for how a student moves through a program, because curriculum design itself happens at the system level, mapped to a single master outcomes matrix every program has to satisfy, while each vertical builds its own version of how that curriculum actually reaches its own audience.
Centralized is not a synonym for uniform, and decentralized is not a synonym for unsupervised. One means the system holds the decision. The other means the campus and the vertical hold it, inside a structure the system already built for them to hold it safely.
None of this has to be only a traditional campus, and I think this is the piece people miss most often when they hear system and picture a row of quads. It can be a campus, and it can also be any underutilized space willing to take on a defined academic purpose, a shuttered retail floor, a corporate training center sitting empty most of the week, a building that only fills on weekends.
This is not only my framing of it. A 2025 EDUCAUSE Review case study describes the same model from the outside, a board endorsed governance structure that gives each business unit clear authority while centralizing shared services, built so the “system” can launch programs and partnerships in new domestic and international markets in record time.
The phrase that matters is record time. The whole point of centralizing the operating platform is that standing up something new stops being a multi year governance ordeal and becomes a matter of months. In a sector closing institutions every month, that speed is the difference between adapting and disappearing.
We have already piloted exactly this kind of construct, a defined space built to serve one academic vertical and engineered so it can be repurposed for another the moment demand shifts, rather than sitting half used because it was built for a single fixed program. That pilot is the proof that the system does not need new buildings built in its image. It needs existing space willing to run on the operating discipline underneath it. That is a much shorter runway to national scale than anyone waiting for new campus construction is accounting for.
None of this is easy, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A tiered legal architecture where one accredited parent entity holds compliance, audit, and the balance sheet while institutions retain their own individualized brand identity underneath it takes real precision to build correctly, and it has to be built correctly.
Every member of the system will answer to one prime directive, scalability and operational excellence, and an institution joining this system gives up the right to run a separate, redundant version of anything that gets cheaper and more reliable the moment it sits on a shared platform.
That line will not move for sentiment. Some of what makes small colleges genuinely good, a hand built financial aid packaging process that only works because one director has carried the institutional memory for twenty years, a registration workaround nobody wrote down because the person who built it never left, simply will not travel intact across a network this size without breaking the moment that one person is no longer in the room.
I would rather tell an institution the truth about what does not scale than sell them a fantasy that gets them to sign and fails them in year three.
The Proof of Concept Already Stands
By the middle of this piece, someone leading a struggling institution recognized their own situation. The board conversation last quarter. The alliance that generated a retreat, a working group, and nothing else. If that is you, the question worth sitting with is not whether this model makes sense on paper.
It is whether you are willing to do the one thing every surface level agreement is designed to avoid. Give up the decision rights that are costing you money to protect. That is the actual work. Our mission has always pointed toward this, that a sustainable future requires institutions capable of operating at scale, not just talking about it. Into the World, our next strategic plan, is the moment we stop describing that and start building it beyond Maine, because the sector does not need another well written argument for why systems work. It needs a system that actually does.
That ambition follows directly from an argument I have been making for some time now, that education, government, and industry are interdependent systems rather than separate concerns.
The point was never to prove the Enterprise Model works at one institution in Maine and stop there. But as a proof of concept for a “Private University System” that can scale without losing local flavor.
The point now is to build the platform precisely enough that another institution, one tired of forming committees that produce nothing, can plug a student into a network where they can move freely across campuses and underutilized spaces alike, keep their credits, keep their relationships, and never once have to explain themselves to a transfer office again.
That is what only a few in this conversation are actually building. They are building alliances. I am building the connective tissue underneath an entire system of institutions that are individualized in identity and interdependent in operation.
Sovereign in everything students experience, shared in everything they do not. Starting from one proven node and expanding outward, nationally first and then beyond.
Success will not look like a merger press release. It will look like that student in Arizona completing the program they were supposed to lose, finding their credits transferred themselves before they even asked, and never once having heard the term strategic alliance. The work now is building this large enough, and proving it specific enough, that the next conference panel stops talking only about AI and starts talking about the operating system that was sitting next to it the whole time.