What’s the secret to Northeastern’s success? Harvard Business School is on the case
Harvard Business School pioneered the case method using real-world business and management scenarios that put students in the role of decision makers. The school recently focused on Northeastern.
Over the past 20 years, Northeastern has moved from being a largely regional university, admitting half of all students who applied, to becoming one of the most selective universities in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically raising its profile and impact.
This success gained the notice of a case-writing team at Harvard Business School, which recently published an exhaustive case study on Northeastern’s transformation.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, a membership organization that mobilizes the higher education community to shape effective public policy, called the case “an honor” for Northeastern.
“[The case] is highlighting the positive changes that have happened and the great leadership that it’s taken to move Northeastern into the very top ranks of higher education,” he said. “It’s certainly a story that other institutions can learn from.”
Michael B. Horn, an author, speaker and co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, said that HBS case studies generally can be characterized in three ways: cautionary tales; tales of success; and a case where a major decision has been made but the outcome is “to-be-determined.”
Horn, also an HBS graduate and adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said the Northeastern case study “is in the second category.”
“It’s about the transformation of an institution that was thought of as a commuter school into a world-class research institution… a highly differentiated world-class research institution because of co-op, experiential learning, geographic expansion and the professional and graduate studies for lifelong learning,” Horn said. “It’s the definitive story of how this happened.”
For more than 100 years, Harvard Business School (HBS) has taught its students through the case method, using real-world business and management scenarios, and dilemmas that put its students in the role of decision makers. The method, which Harvard pioneered, has since been adopted by multiple other universities and business schools, and each case includes detailed background information on the situation, often interviews of senior leaders involved, and concludes with recommendations and decisions to be made.
In May, Harvard focused on whether Northeastern represented a new model for higher education.
“HBS is best known for dissecting the strategies of businesses,” Jeff Selingo, a well-known journalist and author who focuses on higher education, wrote in a newsletter highlighting the case. “It’s rare that a university gets that treatment.”
So, what did the case say about Northeastern? Here are some takeaways:
1. Northeastern’s leadership has had a sustained focus on enhancing the university’s reputation and prestige through innovation
President Joseph E. Aoun, who joined Northeastern in 2006, has introduced the university to the global stage, opening a network of campuses across the world and significantly recruiting international students. He also embraced making Northeastern the world leader in experiential learning, emphasizing co-ops where students are placed in immersive, full time work experiences.
Mitchell praised Aoun’s leadership.
“Northeastern’s rise under Joseph Aoun’s leadership has been nothing short of spectacular,” Mitchell said. “The lessons from that rise need to be distributed and need to be understood and appreciated broadly,” Mitchell said.
2. Lean into your strengths
Twenty years ago, some thought Northeastern’s emphasis on experiential learning through co-ops “was a drag on its rankings,” according to the case study, and too affiliated with vocational programming. Aoun disagreed.
He expanded the program both domestically and internationally and, in an academic plan released in 2008, called for the university’s “experiential learning model to be global and lifelong,” the case noted.
By Fall 2023, the university had:
13,246 co-op placements, more than double the number of 2006.
- 13,346 co-op placements, more than double the number of 2006.
- More than 4,000 co-op employers were partnered in 149 countries.
- More than 95% of students in the Class of 2023 participated in the program.
- Roughly 58% of its 2023 bachelor’s graduates received a job offer from a former co-op employer.
In the case, Aoun is quoted as saying that co-op distinguished Northeastern and became “our calling card.”
The university also enhanced its research capabilities.
Over the first decade of Aoun’s administration, the university excelled on several fronts:
- External research funding increased from $48.7 million to $127.5 million.
- More than 500 tenured and tenure-track faculty were recruited.
- In 2016, Northeastern secured Northeastern R1 status, the highest rating for universities as awarded by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
By 2023-2024, Northeastern had generated almost $300 million in external research funding, a 500% increase from 2006, the case noted.
“The case brings out a strategy of clearly understanding what you are and what you aren’t,” Horn said. “It also emphasizes how you can leverage that strategy to become much more impactful, grow more prestigious, and the like.”
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3. When faced with challenges to the higher ed sector, Northeastern zigged while others zagged
While other universities were hammered by the 2008 financial crisis, Aoun saw opportunity.
The case quoted Aoun as saying:
“Every [university] president was sending out a letter saying that they were freezing hiring and laying off people,” Aoun recalled. But he saw it as a time “to double down on co-op, to make the place global, to recruit faculty and to serve the students.”
The COVID pandemic presented another opportunity. During one of the darkest moments of the crisis, the university, counterintuitively, assembled a mergers and acquisitions team to evaluate dozens of ailing colleges to see if they were a strategic fit with Northeastern’s experiential learning model and would enhance the global university system.
The result?
While other universities have shrunk, Northeastern has expanded through mergers and other growth opportunities in cities across North America and in London. In 2019, the university merged with the New College of the Humanities, London. In 2022, Mills College in Oakland became Northeastern University Oakland. Northeastern would subsequently finalize its merger with Marymount Manhattan College in New York in July 2026.
These mergers gave Northeastern a “foothold” in Western Europe, making it “the only university to have campuses that included undergraduate and graduate learning, residential life, recreation and research on both U.S. coasts,” the case notes.
By 2024, Northeastern had also opened eight new campuses offering graduate degrees:
- Charlotte, N.C. (2011)
- Seattle (2013)
- Silicon Valley, Calif. (2015)
- Toronto (2016)
- Vancouver, B.C. (2019)
- Portland, Maine (2020)
- Arlington, Va. (2023)
- Miami (2025)
Much of this expansion began as a way to better align regional workforces and employers by offering working professionals flexible, hybrid programs that combine online and classroom instruction, Aoun is cited as saying in the case study. A particular highlight was the launch of the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine, based on more than $200 million in philanthropic support from David Roux, a founder and co-CEO of Silver Lake, a technology-focused investing firm.
Today, Northeastern’s network of campuses goes way beyond lifelong learning for professionals; the campuses have allowed the university to distribute its research enterprise and offer undergraduate students mobility and new opportunities for experiential learning. “The campuses are platforms for the whole university,” Aoun said.
4. Increasing Northeastern’s brand and visibility
The university developed a communications strategy aligned with its 2008 academic plan and “built a ‘storytelling ecosystem,’ that included outside press coverage, in-house media, and social media tailored to specific audiences,” according to the case.
This resulted in:
- Expanding the university’s core audiences from high school students, parents and guidance counselors to also include federal funding agencies, C-suite executives, alumni, elite media and academia, among others.
- A multiyear campaign to secure earned media coverage focusing on the university’s priorities, with particular emphasis on experiential learning, translational research and the globalization of the university.
- An in-house news organization, Northeastern Global News (NGN), that publishes a steady flow of stories about the university and current events as analyzed by Northeastern faculty experts.
- In 2023, NGN averaged more than 4.6 million unique pageviews. That figure has jumped to around 7 million in 2025.
5. Is Northeastern a model for other institutions to follow?
Like all cases used at Harvard and other institutions, the Northeastern case ends with a decision to be made, specifically, whether the university’s model of expansion into a network of global campuses providing lifelong and experiential learning might be continued with the Marymount Manhattan merger.
“Could NU continue to scale without diluting its brand and risking its reputation for academic rigor and exclusivity?,” the case asks. “Would lifelong learners continue to pay tens of thousands of dollars to re-skill with a graduate degree? Was Northeastern more a company in pursuit of a global brand than a traditional educational institution? How many campuses are enough?”
Moreover, the case noted that higher education “faces some headwinds.”
- In 2023, the average annual tuition at a private university approached $47,000, up from approximately $21,500 in 2005—a 124% increase (or 41% when adjusted for inflation)
- Between 2016 and 2024, over 125 schools announced closures or consolidation and analysts projected as many as 80 more closures by 2029.
- A 2023 Gallup survey found that Americans who expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the value of a college education fell to 36% from 57% in 2015, and other surveys had similar findings.
Mitchell agreed about these headwinds.
“There’s been increasing public distrust of higher education, and a lot of that has been focused on the inability of higher education to prepare people for the dynamic workforce of the future,” Mitchell said.
But Mitchell said that Northeastern provides a solution to this concern by offering “really positive, generative real-life work experiences” for students through its co-op program.
“That stands alone, as a model of what other institutions should certainly aspire to,” he said.
Horn agreed.
“At a time when higher education is struggling and seen as out of step with so much of society, Northeastern is not seen that way,” Horn said.
Mitchell also recommended the HBS case be part of the curriculum for leading programs that prepare the next generation of higher education leaders.
Ravi Ramamurti, university distinguished professor of international business and strategy at Northeastern’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business and an HBS graduate, said in an interview with Northeastern Global News that he agreed.
He called the write-up on Northeastern a “classic case” because it picks up on issues facing the higher education sector such as online learning and the role of artificial intelligence in higher education, research versus teaching and practice versus theory as it relates to learning and the co-op program, and the role of higher education in society.
“If I, or anybody, was teaching courses in higher education, I would probably want to use a case like this,” Ramamurti said.
