By Amy Claire Heitzman, Ph.D.,
Deputy CEO and Chief Learning Officer, UPCEA

How continuing education leaders are turning institutional pressure into possibility

Higher education is under no shortage of pressure. Enrollment volatility, strained financial models, rapidly changing technologies, and evolving learner expectations are forcing institutions to reconsider whom they serve, how learning is delivered, and what sustainability will require.

But pressure does not determine what comes next. Leadership does.

That was the premise of a conversation I had the privilege of moderating at CAUCE 2026 with three thoughtful—and refreshingly candid—continuing education leaders: Christie Schultz, Dean of the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Regina; Julia Denholm, Dean of Lifelong Learning at Simon Fraser University; and Jo-Anne Clarke, Dean of the Division of Continuing Studies at the University of Victoria.

Our session, “Building Tomorrow’s University Today,” began with a question about agency: What is top of mind as you build the university we need, and how are you harnessing your power? Their answers illuminated something I have been seeing across the United States and Canada: professional and continuing education units are no longer simply responding to institutional change. Increasingly, they are helping universities imagine—and build—their way through it.

Community value is the foundation of sustainable growth

Christie opened with a tension familiar to many continuing education leaders. Universities increasingly look to these units for expansion, growth, and net revenue. Yet, as she put it, “the net revenue thing only exists when we are serving our communities.” Programs succeed only when they are high-quality, useful, and capable of making a real difference.

That distinction matters. Revenue and mission are too often framed as competing forces when, in strong professional and continuing education portfolios, they are mutually reinforcing. Financial contribution is the consequence of creating value—not a substitute for it.

Christie’s example of turning research from the University of Regina’s Child Trauma Research Centre into a microcertificate in trauma-informed pedagogies and practices brought this principle to life. The university mobilized faculty expertise into relevant professional learning, initially for educators and potentially for a wider range of professions. The model connects research, community need, and sustainable delivery rather than treating continuing education as merely a sales channel for existing content.

Her approach to revenue sharing reflects the same clarity: consider who does the work, who assumes the risk, and what infrastructure makes delivery possible. Continuing education units contribute far more than administration. They bring market knowledge, instructional design, promotion, learner support, and the ability to translate expertise into accessible education. Those capabilities are institutional assets and should be valued accordingly.

Lifelong learning must become an institutional design principle

Julia described using her institutional roles to advance a deceptively powerful idea: education does not stop at convocation. By leading university-wide work on additional credentials and the academic program lifecycle, she is helping bring a lifelong-learning perspective into decisions that might otherwise remain bounded by traditional faculties, programs, and student populations.

Her contribution also surfaced a persistent contradiction. Universities rightly defend learning for its intellectual, civic, and human value. But that should not prevent them from helping students understand how their education equips them for work. As Julia observed, learning does not need to be narrowly vocational to develop consequential skills. Institutions should nonetheless give learners the language to explain what they know and can do.

Digital credentials may help make those outcomes more visible, but the deeper work is curricular and cultural. Learning outcomes, skills language, and credential metadata matter because they enable learners to translate an educational experience across settings. They are part of the connective tissue between learning and opportunity.

This is why modularity cannot simply mean producing more short-form offerings. Julia pointed toward internal transfer, noncredit-to-credit recognition, and stackable pathways that can operate within and across institutions. Christie described the University of Regina’s noncredit and microcredential framework, which anticipates possible credit recognition when assessment is embedded. Jo-Anne shared the University of Victoria’s work to create mechanisms through which noncredit learning can be recognized when learners continue into longer credit programs.

Each institution is approaching the work differently, but the aspiration is shared: shorter learning experiences should become doors to further opportunity, not educational cul-de-sacs.

We need a more honest and expansive account of ROI

Our discussion of return on investment revealed both the urgency of measurement and the danger of oversimplification. Enrollment, revenue, margin, repeat business, learner satisfaction, and web engagement all help leaders understand performance. PCO units should know these measures well; financial and market fluency are part of the expertise they bring to their institutions.

But Jo-Anne cautioned against attributing an entire employment outcome to one short learning experience. A learner may complete a microcertificate today and advance eighteen months later because of a combination of education, experience, relationships, and opportunity. The credential may have mattered greatly without being the sole cause.

That observation is especially timely as governments, funders, and institutions seek increasingly precise evidence of workforce outcomes. Accountability is essential, but metrics must remain proportionate to the intervention and attentive to how careers actually unfold.

CAUCE’s work to strengthen sector-wide data collection offers an important path forward, as do Christie’s comments about developing better learner surveys and Julia’s work to define ROI within the academic program lifecycle. Quantitative measures can show scale, progression, and financial contribution. Learner stories can reveal forms of impact that lagging indicators or narrow causal claims may miss. We need both—and we need enough humility to distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what we merely hope it means.

Institutional friction is not an excuse; it is a design challenge

The panelists were frank about the structures that slow innovation: disconnected credit and noncredit systems, cumbersome approval processes, unclear organizational ownership, and academic units that sometimes attempt to recreate capabilities continuing education teams have spent years developing.

Still, none spoke as if friction were immutable. Jo-Anne described carefully opening pathways between noncredit and credit learning by working first with willing faculty champions. Julia reflected on streamlining an internal approval process that had initially become too detailed and cumbersome. Christie raised a more political challenge: when a continuing education unit succeeds, its work may suddenly appear “poachable” amid financial constraint.

Her observation points to a question larger than organizational turf. If universities want to redistribute resources or responsibilities, they should do so with a clear understanding of the capabilities, labor, and risk behind successful programs. Moving visible revenue without preserving the less visible infrastructure that produced it is not transformation. It is erosion.

The leaders in our conversation instead modeled disciplined coalition-building: start where there is readiness, make progress visible, clarify roles, and use early successes to widen the path. Institutional change rarely arrives through one sweeping decision. More often, it advances through a series of credible openings.

PCO units possess enterprise expertise universities urgently need

One of the most consequential moments in the discussion came when Julia described what her academic program lifecycle work was revealing: continuing studies units know how to cost and price programs, identify meaningful performance indicators, review portfolios, and make difficult decisions about suspension or discontinuance. Traditional faculties do not always possess the same operational fluency.

This is an important reframing. PCO units are sometimes characterized as entrepreneurial because they move quickly or generate revenue. Their deeper contribution is that they integrate academic design, market evidence, learner experience, partnership development, financial stewardship, and delivery operations. They know how to translate an idea into a viable educational offering—and how to determine when it should change or end.

Jo-Anne’s new program and partnership unit at the University of Victoria creates a structured place for working with faculties on emerging ideas while assessing which have genuine potential. Christie’s revenue-sharing models align contribution and risk. Julia’s institutional committee leadership brings PCO knowledge into enterprise decisions. These are not examples of units seeking relevance at the margins. They are examples of universities beginning to use expertise already present within them.

From positionality to indispensability

We closed the session by asking participants to focus not on the campus conditions they could not control, but on their own agency: What are you doing to improve your positionality and your indispensability to your institution?

I keep returning to that question because it resists both defensiveness and passivity. Indispensability is not achieved by declaring that others should appreciate our work. It is built by solving consequential problems, communicating value, forming coalitions, and making institutional aspirations executable.

For professional and continuing education leaders, this moment contains real risk. Successful units may be asked to produce more with less, absorb responsibilities without corresponding investment, or surrender capabilities to structures that do not fully understand them. But the moment also contains extraordinary possibility. The pressures confronting higher education are precisely the ones our field has long been equipped to address: serving learners across a lifetime, designing flexible and relevant education, working across boundaries, understanding markets without abandoning mission, and building sustainable models around access.

Christie, Julia, and Jo-Anne each offered a different expression of that leadership. Christie reminded us that sustainable growth begins with usefulness and community value. Julia showed how lifelong learning can inform institution-wide academic strategy. Jo-Anne urged the field to seize the moment, build the networks, and claim a place at the table—not only for individual units, but collectively.

My own takeaway is that tomorrow’s university will not be built by preserving a rigid distinction between the institution’s academic core and the units that connect it to adult learners, employers, and communities. It will be built by integrating those capabilities into a more responsive whole.

The opportunity is here. Our task is not simply to illuminate hope in higher education, but to give that hope structure: pathways learners can navigate, partnerships that create shared value, operating models that sustain the mission, and institutions capable of learning throughout their own lives.

Acknowledgment

With gratitude to Christie Schultz, Julia Denholm, and Jo-Anne Clarke for sharing their institutional experiences so candidly at CAUCE 2026—and to the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education for creating a community in which colleagues can learn openly from one another. The conversation was inspired in part by UPCEA’s The Future Is Now: Essential Conversations for Building Tomorrow’s University Today, which explores many of these same questions about the role PCO leaders can play in shaping their institutions’ futures.

Amy Heitzman, Ph.D., is Chief Learning Officer and Deputy CEO of UPCEA and an ACE Fellow, leading work at the intersection of research, policy, and innovation in professional, continuing, and online education.

Content was refined with assistance from ChatGPT.