JAN. 2026

from W. Kent Barnds and Augustana College
#1 for innovation among liberal arts colleges in Illinois

Welcome to Issue 8 of Innovation and Strategy for the Small American College.

This past weekend we hosted our every-other-year shared governance retreat on campus. This meeting, which Augustana has been doing for about 15 years, includes an equal number of trustees and campus employees (faculty, staff and administration). The valuable time we spend together is aimed at aligning our collective efforts to strengthen Augustana College.

This year’s meeting included an especially heavy lift for me and my team. The trustee who chairs Augustana’s Board Committee on Innovation and Competitive Position had asked me to present and lead a discussion on Augustana’s competitive position within the marketplace.

The opportunity and the challenge of diving into Augustana’s competitive position reinforced the critical impact that our strategy and strategic plan, Bold & Boundless, brings to bear on our competitive position. Moreover, it was a reminder to all of us in the retreat that the main reason for a strategic plan is not just to do stuff, but to strengthen an organization's position within its chosen market.

This edition shares a little bit about how we evaluated our competitive position. 

I hope you will find this useful, no matter where you are in your strategy journey.

W. Kent Barnds
Executive Vice President for Strategy and Innovation 
Augustana College, Rock Island, Ill.

To help our community understand Augustana’s current competitive position, we considered the following questions:

Admittedly, it was challenging to answer all of these questions! Below are some of the things we considered to formulate answers, which ultimately provided our board and the other attendees with a clear picture of our current position in the market.

1. Internal indicators of competitive position

This included application and enrollment data, Early Decision trends, yield, demographics, retention rates, graduation rates, top majors, rankings and reputation scores.

2. Our competitors

We looked at our top 10 competitors based on National Clearinghouse data in categories such as overall competitors, highest-achieving students, bottom 20% of our admitted pool, recruited student-athletes and Latino/Latina students.

3. How we are doing

Over the years, we’ve learned that when discussing Augustana’s competitive position, most people want to know: How well are we doing in comparison to others? We made a deliberate decision to measure our performance against four different sets of institutions.

First, we compared our enrollment trends, which we believe is a good proxy for competitive position in the simplest of terms, against our Top 10 National Clearinghouse competitors, our “benchmark colleges,” the Top 50 U.S. News & World Report National Liberal Arts Colleges, and the next 50 U.S. News & World Report National Liberal Arts Colleges.

We also compared Augustana to others in areas like admit rate, yield, enrollment from within 100 miles, students from families with incomes of $250,000+, percentage of Early Decision applicants and percentage of international students. 

One of the most interesting outcomes of the discussion of Augustana’s competitive position was the discussion surrounding the idea of what was described as the “flywheel effect” and its impact on competitive position.

We used this graphic to illustrate a flywheel: 

To review a flywheel can be discouraging for institutions that are not among the wealthiest, enabled by an endowment that allows for the flywheel effect.

And yet, the discussion at Augustana was encouraging because we focused on creating our own flywheel grounded in our Bold & Boundless strategic plan.

One question and four statements on our senior survey — which together provide a measure of student success and constitute a net promoter score — comprise the components of our flywheel:

This is Augustana’s flywheel.

This newsletter is designed to showcase strategy, strategic planning and innovation in action at a small college. I would love your feedback and I invite you to let me know if this is helpful to you. Please respond to this three-question survey.

Are you a chief strategy officer? Share what’s guiding you in your work for your institution.

Let's connect.

W. Kent Barnds
Executive Vice President for Strategy & Innovation
Vice President of Enrollment & Communication
Augustana College, Rock Island, IL 61201
wkentbarnds@augustana.edu

This message is sent on behalf of Augustana College