Rising costs and declining enrollment put pressure on your institution’s bottom line. Benchmarking program economics is no longer an option; it’s a fiscal lifeline. Understanding your program and course economics is critical to efficiently managing your resources. Compare your performance to other institutions to identify efficiency opportunities, allocate resources strategically, and fund growth. This data-informed approach is essential for long-term sustainability.
The Benefits of Benchmarking
Benchmarking program economics is a powerful tool to:
- Identify cost-saving opportunities: Discover what you could be saving if your cost per student credit hour matched your peers.
- Optimize resource allocation: Allocate resources effectively by understanding which programs are cost-efficient and where investments might yield the highest return.
- Discover hidden cost drivers: Pinpoint whether class size, salaries, or workload may be driving your costs higher than your peers.
Using Program Economics to Drive Fiscal Sustainability
With a platform accessible to as many users as you need, key stakeholders have one source of information to make data-informed decisions. Whether you are a program chair, head of a department, or a dean, you have enrollment, course passage rates, and cost data at your fingertips. With this data, you can better plan what courses to offer and how to maximize your current resources, as well as identify areas that may be under-resourced.
The first step is to collect, clean, and validate your internal data on the direct instructional costs of your academic programs, including revenue, discounts, instructional salaries and benefits, and workloads. Gray DI’s system allows you to analyze economics at the institutional level all the way down to individual sections – and everywhere in between. Once you know your internal metrics, you’ll want to analyze similar data for other institutions to see how you compare.
The next step is to understand how your performance compares to peers. Is it just your Data Analytics program that is so expensive, or are other institutions facing the same challenge? Are there others who have margin-positive programs when mine is not? Are my cost drivers of English courses similar to peers? With this knowledge in hand, you can then identify opportunities for improved efficiency within your academic area.
Ongoing Data-Informed Management
In the current higher education environment, analyzing your internal economics and comparing your performance needs to be part of an ongoing management process. Resources are scarce, so allocation optimization is vital to ensure a sustainable future.
But remember, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Ensuring your institution’s financial stability means that you can continue to deliver on your mission, and managing your portfolio well allows for investment in growth and the opportunity to invite more students to learn and thrive.
Join us at our Benchmarking Webinar to discover a new tool for data-informed decisions.
