Leaders in higher education grapple with a paradox: despite declining confidence, funding, and capacity, the expectations for improving student outcomes continue to rise. Within this tension lies an opportunity. The Pursuing Alignment for Student Success (PASS) project, a partnership between the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and Sova Solutions, generously funded by the Ascendium Education Group, engaged chief academic officers (CAOs) and state academic officers (SAOs) from four states.
Lessons learned from participating states — Wyoming, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina — found that collaboration, when designed with intention and rooted in shared purpose, can turn systemic pressures into systems-level change. This brief provides concrete methods for fostering and designing effective partnerships among institutions and state systems. Insights from the PASS project are distilled into actionable advice intended to help state higher education offices, institutional CAOs, and other leaders create sustainable partnerships that improve student outcomes, stimulate innovation, and strengthen public confidence in postsecondary education.
The Context: Collaboration in a Competitive Environment
Higher education broadly is in the midst of a major transformation. Fluctuating enrollments, employer demand for reskilling, and the opportunities and mysteries of artificial intelligence (AI) are among the realities of shifting institutional priorities. At the same time, political scrutiny has intensified, positioning higher education at the intersection of economic policy, culture, and public accountability.
Colleges and universities often compete for students, funding, and prestige. But the problems they confront — equity gaps, affordability pressures, and student mobility — are shared across all sectors. State systems, coordinating boards, and higher education councils strive to advance collective attainment and workforce goals, while institutions preserve their autonomy and identity. This creates a fundamental tension between coordination and competition.
In this context, collaboration between institutions and state higher education agencies or systems is not only desirable but essential. Efforts to enhance student outcomes, including closing gaps, expanding completion, and matching credentials with labor market demand, require a unified effort. Systemic improvements depend on state and institutional leaders functioning as a networked system, not as isolated actors.
The Untapped Influence of the Chief Academic Officer
At the heart of academia, Chief Academic Officers (CAOs) are uniquely positioned to drive sustainable student success. With oversight of the institution’s core academic mission — including curriculum, faculty, and the learning enterprise — they are central to implementing lasting change. While critical, the CAO role is often perceived as having less influence on improving student success outcomes compared to their counterparts in student affairs or student success. CAOs are frequently undervalued in state and institutional planning and often do not receive the necessary support within their own institutions.
Institutional culture is deeply shaped by leadership, and CAOs are pivotal catalysts for tangible, lasting change. CAOs who model curiosity, inclusion, and collaboration construct the cultural framework within which an institution operates and its ability to adapt, learn, and realize its mission of student success and educational impact.
Student success starts in the classroom, where faculty engagement and departmental leadership directly impact the success of students. These roles and voices are, however, often marginalized in system-level discussions of strategy. Cultivating a growth mindset among faculty and a belief that learning and improvement happen through challenge and failure is an integral part of becoming a student-centered institution.
Equally important is the CAO’s own professional and emotional context. The role can be isolating, characterized by demands from above and below. The PASS project showed that peer networks — spaces in which CAOs can share ideas, commiserate, and problem-solve — are critical for building trust and confidence. These communities transform leadership from a solitary act to a collective one.
Collaboration by Design, Not Default
A core lesson from PASS is that effective collaboration cannot be assumed but must be deliberately designed. When state-institution partnerships rely on mandates, they often suffer from limited buy-in and limited innovation. Conversely, collaborations grounded in shared purpose and mutuality foster alignment and action.
Key strategies emerging from the project:
- Collaboration begins with mindsets, not mandates: Encourage and nurture shared language, perspective-taking, and a growth-oriented mindset at all levels before launching any projects or policies.
- Understand the possibilities and challenges in each role and context (state and institutional): Roles and institutions possess inherent qualities that can both foster and impede collaboration, often due to their foundational structure rather than deliberate intent. To enhance mutual understanding across various roles and contexts, consider the limitations and opportunities each role presents when engaging in collaborative efforts.
- Engage early and often: Collaboration should begin during problem definition and design, not during implementation. Chief Academic Officers can determine who from the institution is best positioned to contribute, considering diverse stakeholders from faculty, staff, and students.
- Balance autonomy and alignment: Define common outcomes while allowing flexibility for institutional adaptation and implementation. This balance honors local context while promoting common goals.
- Data-driven collaboration drives innovation, avoids duplication, and improves transparency: When used generatively, data can connect insights with the perspectives and stories that bring it to life, hence effectively using evidence as a vehicle for collaboration, not compliance.
- Establish structured collaboration approaches: Establish clear communication channels and protocols, cross-functional working groups, strategic agendas with roles, timelines, and milestones, and professional development workshops, all to facilitate a structured, inclusive approach to the design and implementation of state and institutional projects and partnerships. Oftentimes, a third-party can be instrumental in facilitating difficult discussions and helping to manage a project effectively while supporting both roles and entities in meeting the stated goals.
Across the project, these strategies created real awareness and trust, accelerated progress towards goals, and reduced duplication of effort. Most notably, they fostered a cultural shift from transactional approaches to more relational collaboration, where learning and partnership replace directive oversight.
Building Relational Infrastructure for Shared Success
Relationships are not the by-product of strategy — they are the strategy. The PASS project demonstrated how strong, trust-based relationships between state and institutional leaders can facilitate sustained partnership, even amid leadership turnover and political change.
What works:
- Co-creating projects that give CAOs ownership over design and implementation.
- Sustained and structured dialogues through established two-way communication channels, councils, and workgroups.
- Active engagement of state leaders at institutional convenings and initiatives, ensuring diverse representation across stakeholder groups.
These intentional approaches transform partnerships from compliance to co-creation. They also signal that leadership intends to establish a collaborative culture across each of the institutions, one that is transparent, iterative, and student-centered.
Creating a relational infrastructure also means redefining metrics of success. Rather than focusing solely on completion rates or attainment targets, collaborative systems focus on the quality of communication, shared decision-making, and trust that are all necessary for long-term, sustained opportunities to improve student success.
The Leadership Imperative: Modeling the Future
Collaboration is leadership. Both CAOs and SAOs have distinct but complementary roles in modeling collaboration. CAOs and SAOs modeling humility, flexibility, and inclusion provide a clear message and approach to what shared leadership looks like to faculty, students, and policymakers. Yet, achieving meaningful progress requires structure and intention with clear timelines, consistent communication, and a focus on learning and listening.
For CAOs:
- Focus intentionally on improving course outcomes by examining systems that discourage faculty from innovating or experimenting in teaching, curriculum design, and course evaluation.
- Examine your own growth mindset and take deliberate actions to enhance it for the betterment of yourself and the faculty you lead.
- Partner with campus experts to develop professional learning programs for faculty, department chairs, and other academic leaders.
For SAOs and state leaders:
- Engage campuses as co-designers, not only implementers, of statewide initiatives.
- Design foundational structures, processes, and communication channels intended to facilitate perspective-taking and collaboration in every initiative.
- Invest in professional development and relationship infrastructure that sustains long-term partnerships across institutions.
- Explore how the state or system platform can elevate the successes, challenges, dialogue, and continued improvements of institutional student success efforts.
The lesson is simple but profound: alignment cannot be imposed — it must be cultivated. The future of student success depends not only on policies or programs, but on the relationships that carry them forward. When designed and implemented intentionally, collaboration is not a compromise but an act of shared leadership.
Melissa Welker is the Founder & CEO for Growth by Design, and works with Sova as a Project Director for the Pursuing Alignment for Student Success (PASS) program supported by Ascendium Education Group. She has led the PASS program over the last two years and has supported university personnel in improving their leadership practices and change management approaches, enabling reflection and the redesign of new approaches to improve students’ experiences and outcomes. George Mehaffy, currently a Senior Consultant for Sova, has worked throughout his distinguished career with the American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU) as VP for Academic Leadership and, before that, in higher education as a faculty member, department chair, and Provost.
