Which costs are too high? Without a benchmark, it is difficult to know. The University of Delaware’s Cost Study (the Cost Study) provided benchmarks but is being discontinued.
Gray DI offers a replacement and an upgrade. We provide more accurate, detailed, easier-to-implement, and timely benchmarks.
Cost Benchmarking is Essential
Budgets are tight and getting tighter, and boards and legislators demand that institutions become more efficient. When your costs are appropriate, Gray DI’s benchmarks give you evidence to share. They also offer a clear view of your instructional expenses, revealing where you’re overspending or underresourced, enabling institutions to make precise cuts and investments.
The depth of Gray DI’s data sheds light on how to reduce costs. Whether it’s enforcing class sizes, reducing course offerings, or finding the right balance of full-time and adjunct faculty, Gray DI provides the details you need to make an impact in the right place.
The Gray DI Advantage
Gray DI provides a more granular, flexible, and accurate picture of your institution’s economics than the Cost Study.
- Finer Detail: While the Cost Study focused on academic disciplines, Gray DI benchmarks focus on cost at the institution, college, department, discipline, program, and course level. These high-resolution benchmarks pinpoint cost problems.
- More Accurate Costing: Interdisciplinary teaching is common; however, the Cost Study methodology could not track these costs correctly. Gray DI assigns instructor cost to specific courses regardless of the instructor’s department. If an English instructor teaches a Psychology course, we track it. Consistency: The Cost Study relied on each institution to implement its methodology, leaving room for differences in interpretation and mistakes. Gray DI ensures consistent, clean data by processing raw section and instructor-level information using a templated data processing methodology. Our analysts then review the results, inspect outliers, and fix errors.
- Broader Benchmarks: Gray DI offers more than just cost data. We also track revenue, margin, and other metrics, including average section sizes, DFW rates, instructor salaries, benefit rates, and non-instructional time, giving you holistic benchmarks for your academic operations.
- Easier Implementation: Gathering and aligning data for the Cost Study was a heavy lift for IR. Gray DI has APIs to pull data directly from your systems with minimal support from your team; once the API connection is established, no support is required from your team to provide updated data. If API access is not used, you can provide relatively simple tables of raw data, which is demanding, but still easier than Delaware.
Navigation for the New World
Given higher education’s challenges, better information and faster navigation systems are essential. Gray DI’s benchmarking is one of those systems: it allows you to inform your constituencies and act with precision to improve your financials.
