Modernizing Education for Scalable Growth at Unity Environmental University

Institutional Profile

Unity Environmental University is a fast-growing, mission-driven private institution, built for modern learners and serving approximately 10,000 students, having pivoted in 2016 to enrolling primarily online students.^Footnote1 Unity's unique Board-endorsed governance model empowers Sustainable Education Business Units with clear role/scope/authority and centralized shared services. Unity can launch audience‑driven programs and partnerships in new domestic or international markets in record time. Affordability, accessibility, and flexibility are engineered into the model: tuition is locked through 2030 with transparent, no-surprise pricing. Unity's pivot lets students learn where they live and work while accessing career-aligned environmental programs nationwide. Unity also invests in the people who serve students, instituting a $50,000 minimum salary for full-time employees without raising tuition. As a result, Unity is the top-ranked private university in the United States on the 2024 Social Mobility Index and holds the top spot among all institutions in Maine, proof that technology plus a values-driven business model can expand opportunity at scale.

Unity's Enterprise Model and Stratus platform unify data, services, and engagement tools in a world-class tech stack. Unity became the first U.S. institution to launch Agentforce (layered on Salesforce Education Cloud), debuting Una, an AI service agent that delivers real-time guidance, answers routine questions, and frees staff for high-touch support.^Footnote2

The Challenge/Opportunity

As showcased by the 2025 EDUCAUSE Top 10, higher education institutions are facing mounting pressure to modernize their technology and undergo digital transformation as they work to meet rising expectations from students, faculty, and staff for seamless digital experiences, real-time data access, and personalized services. However, the path forward is complex and often hindered by entrenched structures and limited resources. Many campuses still rely on legacy systems that are difficult to integrate, maintain, or scale, creating barriers to agility and innovation. Furthermore, the transition to a model that emphasizes centralized systems, shared services, and data-driven decision-making is difficult. For many institutions, this shift is a sharp contrast to long-standing decentralized governance and operational silos—it requires not just new tools but a fundamental shift in mindset and culture. To drive successful digital transformation, IT leaders will need to lead the charge in aligning stakeholders and fostering a culture that supports collaboration, standardization, and continuous innovation while managing risk, ensuring compliance, and delivering measurable value for staff and students.

Once a small, tuition-dependent college in rural Maine, Unity Environmental University is now a Carnegie-classified, profession-focused institution offering undergraduate and master's degrees at a large/medium scale, proving that transformation at this level is possible. Nearly a decade ago, Unity President and CEO Melik Khoury saw the challenges of rising tuition costs and shrinking enrollments in higher education, and he began the work of transforming the mission and structure of the institution to improve access to education in a manner that he describes as "more civically minded, flexible, affordable, and environmentally conscious." Then in 2020, seeing that sector-wide enrollment declines would eventually force austerity, institutional leaders made the difficult decision to restructure the university, a change that included a one-time reduction in faculty and staff. The move freed resources to build a scalable, mission-aligned model.

Khoury's plan for the future of the institution reduced gatekeeping of student applicants by providing more flexible modalities for courses and opening up opportunities for semi-independent subsidiaries to develop specific audience-focused programs, products, and services. These changes would help open the institution to a wider range of potential students while also allowing significantly larger numbers of students to enroll. Unity has since created more positions than it eliminated, with the new roles offering higher pay, clearer advancement pathways, and greater flexibility than the previous structure allowed.

Khoury opened the doors wide, but Unity's outdated systems couldn't handle the volume or the vision. The institution's traditional curriculum and fragmented tech infrastructure made it nearly impossible to scale or innovate. So he started over, not with incremental change but with a top-to-bottom redesign. Rather than patch the old system, he partnered with Salesforce to rebuild Unity's digital infrastructure from scratch. The goal? A centralized, scalable, data-driven ecosystem that could support a modern, mission-aligned institution.

With such a disruptive vision, Khoury knew he couldn't just impose change from the top down. He started by building trust. Internally, he worked alongside staff and faculty to identify Unity's core strengths and uncover gaps in systems, workflows, and communication. He made transparency a priority, inviting people into the process early, sharing draft ideas openly, and acknowledging the discomfort that would come with a major transformation.

Externally, he brought in management consultants to help define what a mission-aligned enterprise model would look like for a university of Unity's size and scope. Khoury sought a platform that could grow with the institution, and Unity became one of the first U.S. institutions to partner with Salesforce to build a tech stack specific to higher education from the ground up. Salesforce offered a blank slate, with tools that Unity could configure function-by-function to match its evolving needs. With a shared, cloud-based system, staff could finally break out of their silos and work from a single, real-time source of data. The partnership helped connect, coordinate, and improve visibility across campus, including admissions, advising, financial aid, registrar, and marketing.

The partnership didn't just transform operations—it unlocked scale. With this new backbone in place, Unity could accommodate thousands of new students. Faculty could track student progress instantly. Advisors had a full view of each learner's journey. Leadership had the data they needed to adapt quickly, make strategic decisions, and measure impact in real time.

Process

Realizing the enterprise model that Khoury envisioned has required a great deal of effort, starting with discovery and development. First, Khoury conducted a donor-funded branding initiative to identify who the current and potential student audience was and where they were located. This helped institutional leaders identify their brand as well as the internal and external factors they would need to address to grow an infrastructure capable of supporting thousands of additional learners. Next, Khoury had to lay the groundwork for governance and strategic planning. He brought his plans to the Board of Trustees to gain their support and then formally established new leadership roles and responsibilities for members of the team implementing the new model. The roles were further supported by a new nomenclature for the enterprise structure. Khoury hoped that these changes would help shift staff and faculty expectations away from the traditional model the institution was leaving behind while also providing clear definitions and communication about the upcoming changes. Additionally, in the discovery and development phase, Khoury wrote an article titled "How to Work...In Abundance" to articulate his approach to leading the institution through the upcoming changes. The article included some of the following highlights:

THINK OUTSIDE AND INSIDE THE BOX | Be bold, but follow the rules. If we have a policy, follow it. If we need a policy, propose it. If we need to change a policy, propose that. Understand that our policies, while informed by our past, help guide our present and future.

CHECK IN EARLY AND OFTEN | Let constituencies and decision-makers know what is under consideration so that you get feedback and avoid dead ends and non-starters.

COMMUNICATE MORE RATHER THAN LESS | Calibrate workstyle, establish trust, and understand each other's need for information. Overshare rather than protect your supervisor from work, burden, responsibility, or information. If people don't know, they can't help

INCLUSIVITY IS THE RULE | Identify and involve all constituencies and stakeholders in deliberative processes. That does not mean every task group has to have 47 members. It does not mean every community member is a stakeholder. Identify all legitimate stakeholders, then get feedback: go on a listening tour, have a focus group, do a survey. Involve new people, senior leaders, community members, students, and faculty of all ranks in your process, then incorporate that information into your decision or recommendations.

HAVE A SHORT MEMORY AND A LONG MEMORY | In a busy institution like ours, during times of change, folks will make mistakes. In a first among equals model, slights, mis-steps, and miscues must be processed, but we must have a short memory where they are concerned. Honest mistakes are a part of doing business. So is forgiveness.^Footnote3

Once the roles, strategy, and governance were aligned and defined, Khoury and his team identified Salesforce as the company that could provide Unity with the technology and support to build and implement their new enterprise model. Salesforce offered the opportunity to become an early adopter of Education Cloud, which would give Unity the ability to build its new system from the ground up. With the support of Salesforce, Khoury and his team could work unit-by-unit and function-by-function to achieve the outcomes they had set for the institution and that the Board had approved. This collaboration would also position the university to secure accreditation for its new program from both the Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Khoury and his team worked closely with the Department of Education throughout the redesign to ensure the new standards met the needs for accreditation.

Khoury and his team focused on designing the new processes and data requirements for each new function and unit. The Salesforce implementation process enabled them to centralize and standardize technology infrastructure as a single source of truth. But each function brought unique challenges that Khoury and his team had to face. For example, different functions and units maintained independent approaches to data governance, each adding, removing, and managing data in its own way, which made it nearly impossible to ensure consistency, integration, and automation at the institutional level. For example, the registrar function was located within student success, the bursar within the business office, and financial aid within enrollment, all operating in separate silos. To address this fragmentation, Khoury's team launched a data integration initiative that spanned nearly three years and led to the creation of a new Stratus strategy team tasked with ensuring full data integration across platforms. They also established a new function, Organizational Effectiveness, consisting of five units, to consolidate and manage data institutionally. This function now serves as the single lens through which all data are viewed, enabling other units to operate from a shared, comprehensive understanding.

After modernizing the functions and units across the institution, Khoury's team had to come up with a way to educate staff and facilitate change management. They went with a broad approach and began by creating a new university-wide employee handbook as well as dedicated faculty and student handbooks within the Sustainable Education Business Units. They also began university-wide professional development days that provided training on the new technologies and processes from their transition, in addition to modifying employee orientation to match the new model. They also created an FAQ to help current and future employees understand how their roles and responsibilities align with new processes, and they updated the organizational chart to accurately reflect the changes introduced by the new model.

With the majority of the changes implemented, the current enterprise model at Unity is intended "to enable rapid and mission-aligned responses to the changing needs of target audiences and reach new markets."^Footnote4 Khoury and his team are now refining how they use market research to drive program development, providing the means "to identify, incubate, launch, evaluate, and even decommission business entities" over time and creating flexibility in responding to changes in student needs and wants.^Footnote5 Unity has promised a tuition freeze until at least 2030 for new students, aligned with its mission to provide affordable access to environmental education. Khoury hopes the adaptability and success of the organizational shift will help other institutions follow their path to their own transformations.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Research and collaborate with peers and industry. Khoury knew that the enterprise model he was proposing wasn't a new concept, but it was novel for a small private institution. So he researched how this transformation had been accomplished at institutions such as Harvard University, as well as organizations in the private sector. He drew on insights from his research and then worked with management consultants to help create his initial plan for Unity, laying a foundation that allowed him to refine his ideas and vision and partner with the consultants and Salesforce to actualize the enterprise model. Once the changes had been implemented, Unity formed partnerships with local businesses to build out their sustainable venture units with the goal of providing increased access to hands-on experiences for students across geographic locations.

Align governance, strategy, and processes with the planned outcomes of the new structure. One of the core aspects of Khoury's plans was to define desired outcomes from a high-level, "big picture" perspective and ensure that all the changes—from documentation to implementation—would meet those outcomes. For example, when working on plans for attracting and enrolling prospective students, he was tasked with integrating processes for multiple data sources, including the registrar and other units across campus. This was a difficult process that required implementation teams to create and design common data fields that would be accepted and used in the same way across the institution. Although it was more difficult to build this way, the integration between functional areas has significantly reduced silos and related challenges that the institution previously struggled with.

Large, disruptive changes require plans for institutional culture. Khoury knew there would be a cultural upheaval in response to such a drastic change to the organization of the institution, but he planned for it early on and made sure that he kept abreast of the issues as they arose throughout the project. To accommodate challenges such as attrition and struggles with change management, he hired 30% more people than were included in the original budget. He and his team had to spend two and a half years in a "hypercare" mode, identifying and addressing cultural issues as they came up in each functional area they worked with, but they remained loyal to their process and made it to the other side. The institution can now focus on enhancements and integrations of new technologies.

Notes

1. Jessica Blake, "An Online Pivot That Continues to Pay Off," Inside Higher Ed, July 8, 2024. Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.↩
2. Government Technology, "Salesforce Launches AI Agent at Unity Environmental University," March 3, 2025. Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.↩
3. Melik Peter Khoury, "How to Work…In Abundance," Unity Environmental University, January 26, 2021. Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.↩
4. See "Realizing an Enterprise Model." Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.↩
5. Ibid. Jump back to footnote 5 in the text.↩

Sean Burns is Researcher at EDUCAUSE.

Melik Peter Khoury is President and CEO of Unity Environmental University.