Innovation By Design | Intelligence Applied | Meeting Students Where They Are | Built for the Real World | Rooted in Place
New Blueprints: Rethinking How Colleges and Universities Are Built
A recurring theme in higher education today is institutional sustainability—the challenge of building models that can survive enrollment volatility, demographic shifts, and rapid technological change. Three of this year’s innovation award winners have approached this not just operationally but structurally, rethinking the architecture of how a college or university is organized, governed, and resourced. Their stories offer some of the most thought-provoking examples of what genuine institutional reinvention looks like.
When Dr. Melik Peter Khoury became Unity Environmental University’s 11th president in 2016, the institution in New Gloucester, Maine was facing an existential crisis familiar to many small, private, tuition-dependent schools: shrinking enrollment, leadership turnover, and deep resistance to change.
What followed was a radical reinvention. Rather than tinkering at the margins, Dr. Khoury restructured the entire institution around an Enterprise Model comprising semi-independent, audience-focused subsidiaries and Sustainable Education Business Units (SEBUs), supported by centralized shared services.
The results have been remarkable. What began as a survival strategy for an institution averaging 550 students has scaled to serve more than 10,000 students nationwide. Unity holds a tuition freeze through 2030, ranks in the top 1% of universities on the 2025 Social Mobility Index, and is seventh on the Forbes Advisor Best Online Environmental Science Degree Options list as the Best Accelerated Option. Its Sustainable Ventures SEBU provides retail goods and services as real-world manifestations of its curriculum, building revenue streams that reduce dependence on tuition and philanthropy.
Unity’s most recent curricular innovation is its 90-credit Applied Bachelor of Science degree—Maine’s first accreditor-approved credential of its kind, validated by NECHE and designed directly in response to employer demand for environmental professionals. By eliminating redundant credit requirements without sacrificing rigor, the degree saves students more than a year of study and over $14,000 in tuition.
The institution has also deployed Adaptive Learning, Insight & Navigation (ALIGN), a proprietary AI platform developed entirely in-house, embedding Una Guide—a Socratic AI learning assistant—directly in its LMS to scaffold student thinking rather than simply provide answers.
Institutional reinvention can also be born from a crisis. Hurricane MarÃa in 2017 was catastrophic for Puerto Rico, and transformative for the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (Sagrado) in San Juan.
Rather than simply recovering, Sagrado used the natural disaster as a catalyst for a wholesale reimagining of its mission and educational model. The result is the RBK framework, named after the Rebecca, the ship that brought the Society of the Sacred Heart’s sisters to the Americas in 1818, symbolizing innovation, courage, and purposeful action.
At the academic core, undergraduate education has been redesigned around five durable competencies: critical thinking, multimodal communication, research and exploration, innovation and entrepreneurship, and ethical reasoning grounded in social justice. These are embedded in a 39-credit general education core delivered through multidisciplinary, experiential learning.
The Pedagogical Innovation Unit (PIU), led by a senior manager who directs a specialized team and a dedicated operating budget, advances faculty-centered innovation, instructional redesign, and evidence-based teaching practices institution-wide.
Sagrado has also developed comprehensive human development consulting through the Neeuko Collaborative Innovation Center, extending the university’s expertise directly into the communities it serves. Its data-driven decision systems integrate institutional research, learning assessment, and analytics into cabinet-level planning, enabling leaders to monitor outcomes and redirect resources in real time. For Sagrado, innovation is not a strategy adopted after the storm passed—it is the ongoing process of building something more equitable in its wake.
What if an institution could be built from the ground up, unconstrained by legacy systems and inherited structures? That is precisely the opportunity that the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) was given when it welcomed its first class of students in 2009, one of only a handful of four-year public universities created in the United States this century.
Another innovative structure involves the unique two-house structure of UMR’s faculty: Tenured/Tenure-Track, and Student Based Faculty (SBFs), which allows them to minimize the hiring of adjuncts. SBFs have a clear promotional structure that enables them access to higher pay levels and increasing levels of opportunity and leadership. In order for any official policy to pass through the faculty body, it must be approved by both UMR faculty houses—the SBFs and the faculty. Due to these practices, most SBFs have been with UMR for more than 10 years, and many almost from the start of the university.
The institution operates as a single, interdisciplinary department called the Center for Learning Innovation (CLI). All faculty are hired, tenured, and promoted based primarily on their engagement with evidence-based teaching practices.
High-impact practices—community-engaged learning, first-year seminars, capstone experiences, undergraduate research, and internships—are written directly into the curriculum so they are accessible to every student, not just those who seek them out.
UMR’s Chief Academic Officer holds the title Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs and Innovation, a signal that innovation is a core institutional responsibility. The university partners with more than two dozen community organizations, including the Mayo Clinic and the Hormel Institute, creating internship and community engagement opportunities that give students meaningful access to careers in health sciences.
At UMR, the structure is the innovation, and it offers a model that more established institutions can learn from.
