This research aims to describe visionary leadership, lecturer performance, and academic culture in improving the competitiveness of Islamic tertiary institutions in Indonesia. Quality and highly competitive education is a problem faced by the majority of educational institutions in Indonesia. Leadership is thought to be able to create performance and academic culture in achieving the vision and mission of the institution and be able to meet the expectations of the community and education stakeholders. In order to achieve these objectives properly, a quantitative research approach with survey design was used. The questionnaire that has been tested for validity and reliability is used as a tool in exploring the data needed in research. This research was conducted in several Islamic Higher Educations in Indonesia, with a population of 35,705 students. The questionnaire was filled by 1135 students who were sampled in this study with random sampling techniques. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and path analysis. The results showed that visionary leadership, lecturer performance, academic culture, had a significant contribution to the competitiveness of Islamic Higher Education in East Java. This finding has the implication that the better visionary leadership in higher education, the better the performance of lecturers and academic culture and institutional competitiveness. The better the performance of lecturers, the better the academic culture and competitiveness of the institution. This finding shows that visionary leadership is the key to success in improving the quality and competitiveness of educational institutions in the global era.