Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
The Motivation Problem Nobody Names Out Loud
Here is a number worth sitting with. The average private nonprofit college in America now awards roughly 56 cents in grant aid for every dollar of tuition it charges, a record high according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Operating costs have grown 27 percent over the past four years, outpacing inflation by a significant margin. In 2024, colleges were closing at a rate of roughly one per week. These are not isolated failures. They are the logical conclusion of a sector that confused having a mission with having a strategy.
Same Dysfunction, Different Letterhead
If you read my recent piece, “Education Was Never an Industry. That Is Exactly the Problem,” you know this country has never resolved what education is for. That blur is the root of everything that follows. You cannot motivate people around a purpose that the culture itself refuses to define.
That unresolved national question does not stay in the abstract. It walks directly into the nonprofit higher education institution and becomes operational. It becomes the reason a staff meeting about enrollment targets turns into a debate about institutional values. And it becomes the reason the motivation problem I am about to describe has survived for decades without being named.
A nonprofit is still a corporation. The tax designation describes how surplus is distributed, not whether the people inside are motivated by the right things or held accountable for the right outcomes. Misaligned motivation exists just as easily behind a mission statement as behind a quarterly earnings report. And until we settle what education is actually for, we cannot let the nonprofit designation substitute for that answer or excuse the leaders who use it to avoid being measured.
Nonprofit is a tax status. It was never meant to be an alibi.
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