Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Some Colleges may be affordable and still difficult to pay for. The next competitive advantage is fixing that.
The Pattern Nobody Names
Every era in this sector has been won by a back office nobody thought was strategic. First it was the Registrar. Then it was Financial Aid. I think the next one is the Bursar, and I think most of the sector will arrive there five years after the institutions that get there first have already banked the gain.
That is a prediction, and I want to be clear about it up front. This is not a report on something already visible in the data. It is a pattern argument, built on how other industries matured and on what I can see inside a tuition driven enterprise I have been rebuilding for more than a decade. Treat it as a forecast you can pressure test.
Era One Belonged to the Registrar
For a long stretch, the advantage in adult and post traditional education belonged to whoever could move credit fastest.
Institutions that built real articulation agreements, fast transfer evaluation, credit for prior learning, and clean crosswalks for military and corporate training pulled students away from institutions that made people earn a second time what they already knew. The advantage was never academic. It was operational. Two institutions with nearly identical curricula produced wildly different time to degree, because one had a Registrar empowered to say yes in five business days and the other had a committee that met twice a semester and treated a transfer petition as a threat.
We pushed that logic further than most. Unity built a 90 credit bachelor’s degree while the sector held at 120. That was a Registrar era decision about credit architecture, and it still pays.
Then everybody caught up. States legislated articulation. Systems standardized block transfer. Credential evaluation went digital and then went machine assisted. Transfer friendliness became a compliance floor. Nobody wins a student in 2026 by being pleasant about transfer credit. You just lose one by being difficult about it.
To continue reading, view the full post here
