Changes that higher education is experiencing and forecasting and approaches to improve higher education management are considered. In addition to declining enrollment, rising costs, and diminishing financial resources, colleges are faced with the task of managing these changes under the pressures of new constraints and new constituencies. Collective bargaining is affecting faculty participation on governance, and the influence of faculty is also being affected by its changing composition and distribution: the tenured professoriate is projected to continue to age. Additionally, students now serve on academic advisory bodies at most institutions, and most colleges have defined due process for students with regard to their rights. It is suggested that with trends toward centralization of authority and demands for increased accountability, governing boards have increased the scope of their activities and will become an increasingly important constraint on higher education's decision-making processes. Among the external constituencies are state government, accrediting agencies, local communities, benefactors, and business interests. Each has a vehicle for exerting influence on an institution. It is suggested that the inability to measure its effectiveness is important to higher education's adaptation to the changes it is experiencing, and that criteria for evaluation must be established. Decisions must be based on specificity of goals, comprehensiveness in developing plans to achieve those goals, and innovation in measuring outcomes. Executives need an aggressive and open-minded approach in searching for and testing new methods and need to recognize constraints that affect a decision. (SW)