What Lucky Charms Can Teach You About Higher Ed Policy

Gen X-ers, Millennials: I have some news you might find upsetting.

Last week I was merrily scrolling through Instagram when I happened upon an ad for Lucky Charms that made my blood run cold (which is to say I was mildly surprised and annoyed). Friends, Romans, Countrymen, they got rid of the Pots of Gold! Full disclosure: I was raised in a purely Raisin Bran/Grape Nuts house. But that marshmallowy pipe dream of a cereal was so ubiquitous in Saturday morning commercials that even I could recite every single marshmallow that Lucky the Leprechaun extolled.

‍Lucky Charms is synergistic, meaning that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. A bowl full of heart marshmallows is just Valentine’s Day-themed. A bowl full of horseshoes is bizarrely equestrian. But a bowl full of hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, and blue moons, pots of gold and rainbows, and the red balloons? That's magically delicious. Each individual piece still has a critical job of contributing to the overall identity of the product. This is why it's so jarring when you go to sing a jingle you've been hearing for thirty years, only to find they've changed the lyrics.

A higher ed institution's policies work the same way. Each one is its own whole thing, its own marshmallow, if you will; but together they form something larger: the identity of your institution. They define how you operate, how you treat your students, and how you interact with your personnel and the public.

The Slow Negotiation of Institutional Identity

The trouble rarely starts with a big, dramatic overhaul. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to fundamentally undermine their institution's values before breakfast. Maybe your complaint resolution policy used to require a response within five business days, but you're short-staffed and the inbox is overwhelming, so you update it to seven. Just a little. Just this once. Maybe your admissions policy had a minimum GPA requirement that was keeping enrollment numbers lower than you'd like, so you decrease it, just to see what happens. Maybe your financial aid advising process used to include a one-on-one conversation before enrollment, but that takes time and staff hours, so you replace it with an email and a link to an FAQ.

Each of these decisions, in isolation, is defensible. Policies should evolve. Institutions should respond to their operational realities. The problem isn't the change. The problem is when change happens for ease or revenue rather than mission, and when nobody is keeping track of how many marshmallows have been quietly swapped out. If your mission emphasizes academic rigor and one-on-one support, then these changes are a serious deviation.

‍I'm not going to pretend that I don't know why they added Unicorns to the Lucky Charms lineup. In 2018, unicorns were everywhere. If it was a product you could buy for children, they slapped a unicorn onto it. It made good marketing sense. In all fairness, General Mills/Lucky Charms isn't an accredited institution being held to higher ed best practices; they're in the business of selling cereal to children. But, at the risk of overstating the obvious: unicorns aren't lucky charms. Unicorns aren't even canonically lucky. The unicorn marshmallow wasn't added because it made the product more coherent or more true to itself. It was added because it was trending. And trends are not a mission.

‍At some point, you look down at your bowl and realize you're not eating Lucky Charms anymore.

Shamrock Summit University: When the Easy Fix Isn't a Fix

Welcome to Shamrock Summit University, a school offering a highly respected Bachelor of Science in Treasure Relocation, a rigorous, field-based program preparing students for careers in end-of-rainbow asset recovery. Their mission is built around academic excellence and industry preparedness. Their graduates are known for being the best in the business. Employers in the asset recovery space specifically recruit from Shamrock Summit because they know the program is rigorous and the graduates are career-ready.

The Problem: Students are failing Foundational Rainbow Physics at an alarming rate. It's the gateway course for the entire program, and thirty percent of first-year students aren't making it through. Enrollment is suffering because word is getting out that the program is brutal.

‍The Easy Solution: Make the course easier. Change the grading policy, lowering the passing threshold. Reduce the lab hours, give students more attempts to pass the assessments. Problem solved, right? Enrollment stabilizes, everyone moves forward, crisis averted.

‍The Mission-Aligned Solution: Don't touch the course yet. Instead, figure out why students are failing. Is it a preparation gap? Offer a bridge course for incoming students who need it. Is it the pace? Build in structured study groups and faculty office hours specifically around the most challenging units. Is it one particularly rigorous exam? Look at the assessment design, not the standard it's measuring. The rigor remains the same. The support system grows around it.

Shamrock Summit's reputation is built on producing graduates who actually know how to locate treasure at the end of a rainbow under pressure. The moment they start handing out degrees to students who can't pass Foundational Rainbow Physics, they've added a unicorn to the cereal. It looks fine in the bowl. But it isn't what they said it was. It’s not Lucky Charms.

‍Cloverfield College: Making Flexibility Work

Now over at Cloverfield College, which offers a much lauded Master of Arts in Celtic Folklore, things are different. Cloverfield is all about accessibility. Their mission is built on the belief that graduate education should be available to scholars with unconventional paths (career changers, returning students, people who took a few detours along the way). If you didn’t effortlessly glide through your undergrad education to graduate with a pristine transcript, you can still find an academic home at Cloverfield.

‍The Problem: Program completion times are creeping up. What used to be a two-year master's degree program is stretching into three, four, sometimes five years. Students are staying enrolled semester after semester without making meaningful progress toward finishing their theses. A review of the data suggests the issue might be their Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) policy. It's generous, but maybe a little too generous. Students can remain enrolled with minimal forward movement for quite a long time before encountering any meaningful consequences. There's hesitation about changing the policy. After all, students who remain enrolled are still paying tuition, and Cloverfield doesn’t have a ton of personnel to throw at intervention efforts. From a short-term financial perspective, the system works.

‍The Easy Solution: Leave the SAP policy exactly as it is. Students who need extra time can keep taking a course here or there, remaining technically enrolled even if their thesis progress has stalled. The tuition revenue continues to trickle in, and no one has to deliver the uncomfortable message that it’s time to either move forward or make a different plan. On paper, the program remains accessible.

‍But accessibility without forward movement isn’t really access to a degree; it’s just access to indefinite enrollment. Students drift instead of progressing. Life gets busier, motivation fades, and the degree that once felt attainable slowly turns into something perpetually “in progress.”

The Mission-Aligned Solution: Preserve accessibility but replace indefinite enrollment with clear expectations and student-centered flexibility. Cloverfield could revise its SAP policy to establish a reasonable maximum time-to-degree for the master’s program (say five years), while also introducing a formal Leave of Absence option. Students facing life disruptions could pause their studies for a defined period without paying tuition or losing their place in the program, and the clock on their completion timeline would pause during that leave.

Just as importantly, Cloverfield would make these expectations visible from the beginning. The time-to-degree timeline would be prominently featured and prioritized during admissions conversations, orientation, and academic advising. Students would know from day one what expected progress looks like, what flexibility exists if life intervenes, and what milestones must be completed along the way.

None of this makes the program less accessible. In fact, it does the opposite. By pairing clear timelines with structured opportunities to pause when necessary, Cloverfield ensures that accessibility actually leads somewhere: to the completion of a Master of Arts in Celtic Folklore.

After all, Cloverfield’s mission isn’t just to welcome scholars with unconventional journeys. It’s to help them finish.

So, What's in Your Bowl?

Neither Shamrock Summit nor Cloverfield is a perfect institution (they're fictional, for one thing), but real institutions must make choices like this every day. The easy solution is almost always available. It's faster, cheaper, and requires fewer uncomfortable conversations. And sometimes, honestly, it's fine. Nobody cared when Lucky Charms added the blue moon; it was cute and on-brand.  Sometimes, seven business days really is more realistic than five, and updating the policy to reflect that is just good institutional hygiene.

‍But sometimes it isn't fine. Sometimes it’s a shamelessly marketing-driven unicorn. If the easy solution is a quiet departure from the thing that made your institution worth attending in the first place, you need to understand reality. And the tricky part is that the easy choice might be easy to rationalize. It’s just a unicorn! They’re magical, and magic is kind of like luck, right? Who will even notice? It's just removing the thesis requirement because it scares off potential students. It's not even that important.

Policies aren't just esoteric exercises in regulatory rhetoric used to fill pages in an academic catalog. Your admissions policy determines who gets through the door. Your SAP policy determines who gets to stay. Your complaint resolution policy determines whether students feel like they matter when something goes wrong. Your academic progress standards determine what your degree actually means. Each one has a real job to do for a real person in a real moment that might define their entire educational experience. And together, they are your institution. Your policies are where your values either show up or they don't. Change enough of them for the wrong reasons, and you'll still have a bowl full of cereal. It just won't be yours anymore. So, before you make a swap, ask yourself whether you're adding a lucky charm or a random mythological creature. Your students will know the difference.