I. Introduction: The Seduction of Metrics
There is nothing wrong with innovation. Distance learning, asynchronous instruction, and hybrid models can genuinely expand access to professional education for people who cannot relocate or cannot attend classes during traditional hours. These are real benefits.
But innovation becomes pathological when it serves primarily to generate press releases, win awards, or attract enrollment—rather than to improve student outcomes. An institution that launches a “first-of-its-kind” program in order to claim the title, without adequate preparation or resources, is not serving its students. It is using its students as instruments of institutional vanity.
This phenomenon—the gradual displacement of an organization’s core purpose by secondary metrics—has been extensively studied in the academic literature under the heading of “mission drift.” And nowhere has its destructive potential been more dramatically illustrated than in the case of the Boeing Company, once the world’s preeminent aerospace manufacturer, now a cautionary tale of institutional decay.
The parallels between Boeing’s collapse and the failures of certain educational institutions are not superficial. They reflect a common underlying pathology: the substitution of measurable proxies for the substantive outcomes those proxies were meant to indicate.
II. The Boeing Case: From Engineering Excellence to Financial Engineering
For most of the twentieth century, Boeing was synonymous with engineering excellence. The company built the aircraft that won the Second World War, inaugurated the jet age, and carried humanity to the moon. Its culture was famously engineering-driven: decisions were made by people who understood how airplanes worked, and the company’s reputation rested on the safety and reliability of its products.
This began to change in 1997, when Boeing acquired its struggling rival McDonnell Douglas. Although Boeing was nominally the acquirer, the merged company increasingly adopted McDonnell Douglas’s management culture, which prioritized cost-cutting and financial metrics over engineering innovation. As one scholar has observed, the merger was widely seen as Boeing taking over a competitor, but in practice the corporate culture of McDonnell Douglas came to dominate at Boeing.
The transformation accelerated under CEO Harry Stonecipher, a former McDonnell Douglas executive and General Electric alumnus who took over in 2003. Stonecipher was explicit about his intentions. He declared that he wanted to change Boeing’s culture “so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” One of his consequential decisions was to reject a proposal to design an all-new single-aisle aircraft to replace Boeing’s aging 737 and 757 models. Instead of designing a new airplane incorporating all the advances in aviation technology from the past 30-40 years, Stonecipher elected to maximize profits from older models and use the cash to buy back Boeing stock.
This decision—to extract value from existing products rather than invest in new ones—would prove fatal. When Airbus introduced a more fuel-efficient competitor, Boeing was forced to respond quickly. Rather than develop a new aircraft (which would have taken years), the company decided to retrofit its 1960s-era 737 airframe with larger, more efficient engines. But the new engines did not fit properly on the old wings, requiring design compromises that would eventually kill 346 people.
The technical details of the 737 MAX disaster are complex, but the institutional failure is simple: an emphasis on short-term profitability and a move away from an “engineering-led culture toward more centralized corporate control” made Boeing engineers fearful of voicing their concerns about safety issues with managers. The culture that had once prized engineering judgment above all else had been replaced by a culture that prized schedule, cost, and shareholder returns. As one investigative reporter summarized: “Culture is a word that seems so amorphous, but it’s amazing how specific people get about it.” The culture of Boeing “became all about its schedule, its cost, its shareholder value.”
The results speak for themselves. In 2018 and 2019, two crashes involving the 737 Max resulted in the deaths of 346 people. Investigations revealed that a faulty flight-control system, driven by cost-cutting measures and inadequate oversight, was to blame. The company has not posted an annual profit since 2018. Its cumulative losses exceed $30 billion. Ironically, decisions made in the name of shareholder value over the past two decades have cost its investors $87 billion since 2018.
III. The Mechanisms of Drift: A Theoretical Framework
The Boeing case is not unique. It exemplifies a pattern that has been extensively documented in the academic literature on organizational behavior and nonprofit management.
Mission drift, as defined in the scholarly literature, occurs when an organization gradually loses sight of its core social purpose and begins to prioritize secondary objectives—typically financial metrics or institutional prestige. The concept emerged from studies of microfinance institutions, where researchers observed that organizations founded to serve the poorest borrowers often shifted over time to serving wealthier clients who were easier and more profitable to reach. But the phenomenon is far more general.
Jones (2007), in a foundational article in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, identified “multiple sources of mission drift,” including funding pressures, competitive dynamics, and the gradual displacement of mission-oriented staff by professionally trained managers with different priorities. Bennett and Savani (2011) documented how charities dependent on government contracts often reshape their programs to match funder priorities rather than client needs. Ebrahim, Battilana, and Mair (2014) explored how “hybrid organizations”—those that combine social and commercial objectives—face particularly acute risks of drift as financial imperatives crowd out social ones.
More recent work has refined these insights. Grimes, Williams, and Zhao (2019), in the Academy of Management Review, identified the “sources, variety, and challenges of mission drift,” emphasizing that drift is often gradual and invisible to those experiencing it. Bruder (2025) introduced the concept of “practice drift” to describe how drift often occurs not through deliberate shifts in mission but through gradual operational changes that disconnect day-to-day activities from original ethical commitments.
What makes mission drift so insidious is that it is often invisible to the people within the organization. Each individual decision may seem reasonable in isolation: to meet a funder’s reporting requirements, to hit a quarterly target, to launch an innovative program that will generate positive publicity. It is only in retrospect that the cumulative effect becomes visible: the organization has drifted far from its original purpose, and no one can identify the precise moment when the drift began.
IV. Mission Drift in Educational Institutions
Educational institutions are particularly susceptible to mission drift because the outcomes they are meant to produce—educated graduates, competent professionals, informed citizens—are difficult to measure directly. In the absence of direct measures, institutions rely on proxies: enrollment numbers, graduation rates, rankings, awards, and (for professional schools) licensing examination passage rates.
The danger is that these proxies can be optimized in ways that do not actually improve—and may even undermine—the substantive outcomes they are meant to indicate.
Consider enrollment numbers. An institution that wishes to increase enrollment can lower admission standards, increase marketing expenditure, or launch new programs (such as online or hybrid offerings) that reach students who would not otherwise attend. All of these strategies will increase enrollment. But none of them necessarily improves the quality of education provided. And some of them—particularly the lowering of admission standards or the launch of under-resourced programs—may actively harm students by admitting them to programs they are unlikely to complete successfully.
Consider graduation rates. An institution that wishes to improve its graduation rate can provide better support services, improve curriculum design, and hire more effective instructors. But it can also lower academic standards, making it easier for struggling students to pass. The former strategies improve educational quality; the latter degrades it. Both improve the metric.
Consider rankings. An institution that wishes to improve its ranking can invest in faculty research, student services, and facilities. But it can also game the metrics on which rankings are based—manipulating class sizes, inflating reported expenditures, or selectively reporting data. Again, some strategies improve quality; others merely improve the appearance of quality.
The pattern should by now be familiar. When institutions optimize for proxies rather than outcomes, they create pressure to achieve the metric by whatever means are most convenient—even if those means undermine the substantive purpose the metric was meant to capture.
This is precisely what happened at Boeing. The company optimized for schedule, cost, and stock price. It achieved impressive results on all three metrics—right up until the moment when its airplanes started falling out of the sky.
V. Practical Lessons: Indicators of Institutional Drift
How can educational leaders in emerging contexts—Damascus, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, or elsewhere—recognize and resist mission drift before it becomes catastrophic?
The following indicators should prompt serious institutional self-examination:
1. The displacement of substantive expertise by generic management.
When institutions begin to prioritize “professional management” over subject-matter expertise in leadership positions, drift often follows. Boeing’s troubles began when engineers were displaced from leadership by executives whose expertise was in finance and operations. The same pattern is visible in educational institutions where deans and provosts are selected for their fundraising ability or administrative credentials rather than their academic distinction.
This is not to say that management skills are unimportant. But an institution whose leaders do not deeply understand its core work—whether that work is building airplanes or educating lawyers—is an institution at risk. Leaders who do not understand the substance cannot distinguish between innovations that improve outcomes and innovations that merely improve metrics.
Practical implication: In hiring and promotion decisions, weight substantive expertise heavily. A dean of a law faculty should be a distinguished lawyer or legal scholar. A head of an engineering school should be an accomplished engineer. Generic “leadership” credentials are not a substitute.
2. The silencing of internal criticism.
Boeing’s engineers knew that the 737 MAX had problems. They raised concerns internally. Those concerns were ignored or suppressed. The most prominent concern is a climate of fear and retaliation, where employees, especially engineers and quality inspectors, are reportedly discouraged or even punished for raising safety concerns. Whistleblowers have described a system where speaking up leads to isolation, reassignment, or professional retaliation.
The same pattern is visible in educational institutions where faculty members who raise concerns about program quality are marginalized, denied promotion, or terminated. As discussed in the previous section, such retaliation creates a culture of silence in which problems fester until they become impossible to ignore.
Practical implication: Create formal, protected channels for faculty and staff to raise concerns about educational quality. Investigate such concerns seriously. Never retaliate against employees for raising substantive concerns, even if those concerns prove unfounded. The cost of occasional false alarms is far lower than the cost of suppressed warnings about genuine problems.
3. The celebration of inputs rather than outcomes.
When an institution’s communications emphasize inputs (hours of content uploaded, students enrolled, programs launched, awards received) rather than outcomes (graduates employed, licensing examinations passed, careers advanced), drift is often underway.
This is because inputs are controllable and impressive-sounding. Outcomes are difficult to measure, slow to materialize, and often disappointing. An institution that is focused on its genuine mission will tolerate this difficulty because outcomes are what matter. An institution that is drifting will gravitate toward inputs because inputs are easier to celebrate.
Practical implication: In all institutional communications—to accreditors, to prospective students, to funders, to the public—lead with outcomes. How many of your graduates pass the licensing examination? How many secure employment in their field? How many remain in the profession after five years? If you do not know the answers to these questions, find out. If the answers are unfavorable, do not hide them—fix them.
4. The pursuit of “innovation” for its own sake.
Innovation is not inherently valuable. It is valuable only insofar as it improves outcomes. An institution that launches “first-of-its-kind” programs in order to claim the title—without adequate evidence that those programs will serve students well—is not innovating. It is seeking publicity at students’ expense.
Boeing’s decision to retrofit the 737 rather than design a new aircraft was, in a sense, an “innovation”—a creative solution to a competitive problem. But it was an innovation that prioritized speed to market over safety. The result was catastrophic.
Practical implication: Before launching any new program, define clear success metrics tied to student outcomes. Establish a timeline for evaluation. Be willing to modify or discontinue the program if it fails to meet its goals. Do not allow the sunk cost of the innovation—or the reputational investment in it—to prevent you from acknowledging failure.
5. The distance between leadership and operations.
In 2001, Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle—where its factories and engineers were located—to Chicago, lured by $60 million in tax credits. The move separated Boeing’s corporate executives from its engineering and product decisions and alienated its Seattle-based engineers. Executives who once walked the factory floor now saw their products only in PowerPoint presentations.
The same pattern is visible in educational institutions where administrators become increasingly removed from the classroom. When leaders do not teach, do not interact with students, and do not observe instruction, they lose touch with the realities of educational delivery. They become susceptible to optimistic reports from subordinates and to metrics that look impressive on paper but do not reflect actual learning.
Practical implication: Leaders should maintain direct contact with the institution’s core work. Deans should teach. Provosts should visit classrooms. Administrators should talk with students—not just in formal settings, but informally, to understand their actual experiences. The Japanese manufacturing concept of gemba—the practice of going to the actual place where work is done—has direct application to educational leadership.
6. The prioritization of external stakeholders over primary beneficiaries.
Boeing’s leadership came to prioritize shareholders and stock analysts over passengers and airlines. Educational institutions can drift in the same direction, prioritizing donors, rankings agencies, accreditors, or government funders over students.
This is not to say that external stakeholders are unimportant. Accreditation is essential. Funding is necessary. Rankings, for better or worse, influence applicant decisions. But when external stakeholders become the primary audience for institutional decision-making—when programs are designed to impress accreditors rather than to educate students, when communications are crafted for rankings agencies rather than for prospective students—the institution has lost its way.
Practical implication: In every significant decision, ask: “How will this affect our students?” If the answer is “not much, but it will impress the accreditors” or “not much, but it will help our ranking,” reconsider the decision. External stakeholders are means to an end. The end is student learning.
VI. Structural Safeguards Against Drift
Beyond these diagnostic indicators, the academic literature suggests several structural mechanisms that can help institutions resist mission drift.
Governance mechanisms. Cornforth (2014) emphasizes the importance of governance structures—board composition, constitutional provisions, external accreditation—in safeguarding organizational mission. For educational institutions, this means ensuring that governing boards include members with deep expertise in education, not just in finance or administration. It means writing mission commitments into institutional charters in ways that are difficult to amend. It means selecting accreditors who evaluate substantive outcomes rather than merely procedural compliance.
Stakeholder engagement. Ramus and Vaccaro (2017) found that organizations with stronger stakeholder engagement in decision-making are more resistant to drift. For educational institutions, this means involving faculty, students, and alumni in strategic decisions—not merely as consultants to be heard and ignored, but as genuine participants in governance.
Social accounting. Several scholars have emphasized the importance of measuring and reporting social outcomes alongside financial ones. For educational institutions, this means tracking not just enrollment and revenue, but graduate outcomes: employment rates, licensing passage rates, career trajectories, and (where possible) the social contributions of alumni.
Separation of functions. Some scholars suggest that organizations can reduce drift by separating social and commercial activities into distinct units with distinct governance. For educational institutions, this might mean separating revenue-generating activities (executive education, continuing education, online programs) from core degree programs, with clear firewalls to prevent commercial pressures from influencing academic decisions.
VII. Application to Emerging Contexts: Damascus and Beyond
The lessons of Boeing are universal, but their application requires attention to local context. Educational leaders in Damascus, Beirut, Amman, or other emerging contexts face challenges that differ in important ways from those faced by established institutions in wealthy countries.
Resource constraints. Emerging institutions often operate with severe resource constraints. The temptation to prioritize enrollment growth—because enrollment generates tuition revenue—is correspondingly intense. But institutions that grow faster than their capacity to deliver quality education will produce graduates who cannot pass licensing examinations, cannot secure employment, and cannot contribute to their societies. Such institutions may survive in the short term, but they will fail in the long term—and they will harm their students in the process.
Institutional trust. In post-conflict or transitional societies, institutional trust is often low. Citizens have been betrayed by governments, by businesses, by international organizations. An educational institution that makes promises it cannot keep—that advertises programs it cannot deliver, that changes requirements after students have enrolled—will confirm and deepen this distrust. Conversely, an institution that honors its commitments scrupulously, even when doing so is costly, will build a reputation that becomes an enduring asset.
Brain drain. Emerging contexts often suffer from brain drain: the most talented professionals emigrate to wealthier countries where opportunities are greater. Educational institutions can either accelerate this drain (by training graduates who immediately leave) or counteract it (by training graduates who choose to stay and contribute). The latter requires not just technical training but the cultivation of professional identity and civic commitment—outcomes that cannot be achieved through video modules alone.
Regulatory weakness. In many emerging contexts, regulatory oversight of educational institutions is weak or corrupt. This creates opportunities for predatory institutions that extract tuition from students without providing genuine education. It also creates opportunities for serious institutions to distinguish themselves through voluntary adherence to high standards. The absence of external regulation makes internal governance all the more important.
VIII. Conclusion: The Test of Innovation
The test of any innovation is simple: Are the students learning what they need to learn? Are they passing the examinations they need to pass? Are they prepared to practice the profession?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then the innovation has failed, regardless of how many awards it has won.
Boeing won awards. It was celebrated for its efficiency, its financial performance, its stock price. None of that mattered when its airplanes started falling out of the sky. The awards did not bring back the 346 people who died.
Educational institutions do not build airplanes, and their failures are rarely so dramatic. But the stakes are still high. A graduate who cannot pass the bar examination, who cannot secure employment in her field, who has spent years of her life and thousands of dollars on a credential that proves worthless—that graduate has been harmed, even if the harm is invisible to everyone but her.
An institution that harms its students in pursuit of metrics, publicity, or revenue is not an educational institution. It is a predator wearing the mask of education.
Build carefully. Build honestly. Build for the long term.
The art of leadership is a serious matter.
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