I’ve been working on a project recently, looking at current university strategic plans around the world, and particularly those of leading “world-class” universities. One of the key things I am looking at is what you might call “strategic horizons”— how long do institutions see or plan ahead?

My sample for this is the Top 100 universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), done by the Shanghai Rankings organization (minus the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, which is not a university in any meaningful sense). I also skip over, for the moment, the 13 Chinese universities in the top 100. So far as I can tell, none of the big Chinese universities have strategic plans, either, though it is possible that they are simply not available in translation. I have seen references on Chinese websites to “five-year plans” or “development plans” which sound a lot like strategic plans, but such documents do not appear to be available on institutional websites (they may be available in Chinese on these universities’ “transparency websites”—separate sites universities in the PRC are required to maintain and display some key aspects of their activities, like their financial statements, their entry standards and so on). So that leaves 86 universities.

Of these 86, eleven have no university-wide strategic plans. These are primarily US private institutions, like Harvard, Cornell, Penn (UC Santa Barbara is the only public institution without a strategic plan), plus non-US institutions McGill and Cambridge. I suspect that for some of these institutions, the reason they have no plan is because they are already where they want to be:  at the top of the heap. Five of the no-plan institutions are in the top ten overall. And after all, strategy is about changing your situation: why do so if you are satisfied with your lot? (That said, I think this raises a lot of questions about why McGill does not do any of this planning.)

That doesn’t mean there is no strategic planning at these institutions. MIT wrote itself a very specific time-limited plan during COVID, for instance. Yale College, Columbia College, and Harvard Arts and Sciences all have plans, but the larger institutions of which these are the core do not. To some extent, what this reveals, I think, is that big US private universities are quite loose factions of academic and professional programs who either can’t agree on or, possibly, are in mutual agreement that no institutional plan could serve all factions. 

Among the top 100 institutions, the most common strategic plan length is eight to ten years: just over a quarter of all institutions seem to have that as a planning horizon (among these, UBC is the only one that has decided to have a “refresh” within the ten-year period). Another quarter or so have strategic plans of under 8 years in length: most at either four or five years. I should note here that institutions with four-year plans are pretty much exclusively Australian, and in some ways, I would argue that there is a lot of cross-over with the institutions with indefinite plans plus refreshes. Institutions with very short strategic plans aren’t changing their strategy very much, just updating their short-term goals and objectives. 

These 5/10-year plans are pretty much all of a single mould, one you would be familiar with if you read a lot of strategic plans: statements about research ambitions, statements about graduating students who will make a difference, etc., etc. I am not saying here that these strategies are interchangeable: individual institutions still have different strengths and priorities that mark them out from one another. But they do kind of rhyme. 

There are a few institutions that stand out as being in none of these categories, or which straddle more than one category. It is not clear to me, for instance, if Caltech has a strategy or just a few priorities that they can dust off when someone asks. Seoul National University has what looks like an “indefinite” strategy on the Japanese style (i.e. a fairly banal statement of values/vision/priorities), but it also has a fairly ambitions 10-year plan to focus on a number of its most promising areas of concentration which looks like a serious actual strategy even if it doesn’t quite cover the whole institution.

After that, eighteen institutions have what I call “indefinite” strategic plans (Toronto is one of these). That doesn’t mean these plans never get revised; rather, it just means that the plan has no built-in sunset date. In some cases (in particular at the top Japanese universities), these are not much better than motherhood vision statements. In some cases, they are more detailed statements of ambition and priorities, and the only difference between these and a ten-year plan is simply the lack of a time frame on the plan. In a few cases, institutions have indefinite plans (sometimes referred to as “planning frameworks), but issue “refreshes” every so often, as circumstances dictate: Princeton is the most prominent of these, and its plans/refreshes are worth a look simply because of the way that they are the antithesis of most university strategic plans: no graphics, no photos—just a bunch of pages covered in dense 11 point Times Roman font. This is what plans can look like if you are prestigious enough not to need plans as communications documents for governments or philanthropists.

Finally, there are the German universities which have effectively a unique planning culture of their own. If you go down the list of top German universities, what you will most often come across is something called an “Excellence Strategy.” It’s not quite what you think it is. For the last 20 years or so, the German government has run a set of “excellence initiatives.” These have been largely about getting universities to act corporately rather than as a holding company for a set of individual professorial research priorities. And so, to get money from these programs, institutions have to be able to talk convincingly and thematically about their research missions—hence the “excellence” tag. For the most part, these plans are “indefinite” or at least 10 years plus in duration, but what distinguishes them from plans in other countries is that they are much more focused on research and internationalization and much less focused on undergraduate teaching and community relations. But simply having an excellence strategy does not preclude a university from having other types of plans simultaneously: Heidelberg has both an indefinite “vision” and an excellence strategy, while Bonn has both an excellence strategy and something approaching a typical five-year strategy.

A final interesting point: a significant chunk of these strategies are built around round numbers: I count 18 universities with plans that either start or end in 2025, and about the same for 2030, more than you’d expect by random chance. I look forward to having a lot of new strategies to review later in the year.