Category: Data-Driven Decision Support

Pilbara Higher Ed Conference 2019

The Pilbara Higher Ed conference was held September 3-4 in Brisbane at the Rydges Hotel in Southbank. It was a great crowd and generated a lot of interesting discussions over the two day event. The focus of the conference was Data Driven Decision Making and in particular how cost and predictive models can be used […]

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New Academic Programs – Five Year Financial Forecasts in Minutes

A significant amount of time and effort goes into the development of a new program for a college. Unfortunately, the financial aspects of the new program tend not to get as much attention. In today’s environment it is becoming more and more important to ensure any new programs not only break-even but contribute positively to […]

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Upcoming Pilbara Conference: Keynotes Announced

This September 3-4, we will be hosting our Pilbara Users’ Conference entitled “Preparing for Change: Data Driven Decision Making.” The two-day event was created in response to the changes taking place in Higher Education with multiple external factors putting pressure on existing business models, not just in Australia but internationally as well. We are now […]

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The Alternative to Closing/Merging – Networking!

In my last post I identified that 14% of presidents think their college will close or merge in the next five years. With over 4,000 degree-granting institutions in the US, this could potentially mean that more than 400 colleges are at risk of closure or merging. In this post, Andrew Faulkner and I dig into […]

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Seven Weeks to Data Analysis Nirvana

Skip the Rapid Prototype and go straight to the Rapid Fully Functioning Model It’s a common situation around the globe for financial analysts working for Higher Education institutions. Some type of looming crisis, major project or big decision requires detailed financial analysis… or as has happened here in Australia, the Government now requires universities to […]

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The Great Higher Ed Financial Disconnect

The Critical Course Metric you probably don’t know about  Affordability and Financial Sustainability are primary concerns cited by Boards of Trustees of higher education institutions as stated in the latest AGB 2018 Trustee Index.    Unfortunately at most institutions there can often be a huge disconnect between affordability (price/revenue) and sustainability (cost/margins).    To determine if this is an issue at your institution, just ask this very simple […]

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Is a tuition freeze a good thing?

It can be if you know how to calculate the financial impact and develop mitigating strategies… here’s how: “Tuition Freeze” seems to be a headline that’s popping up more and more in higher education news sites in the US.  A growing number of institutions are proposing a tuition freeze for 2019-2020, some have had a tuition freeze […]

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Are you prepared for Higher Ed Disruption?

How can Higher Ed manage fundamental changes to their traditional business model? I was reading this article by Ray Fleming at Microsoft and it got me thinking about the Third Place concept for Higher Ed and in particular, how would an institution investigate the feasibility of establishing or transitioning to a Third Place model. For […]

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Conference Debrief: LH Martin Service Improvement and Innovation

We were proud to sponsor and support the LH Martin Service Improvement and Innovation Conference down in Melbourne Oct 25 – 26.  We were also pleased to assist Ray Fleming from Microsoft with his workshop, where we dug into ways data can support decision making, which we will go through later in this post. The […]

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The Cost of Teaching: A New Requirement for 2019

One of the major benefits of having a systemized approach to costing is that you can save an extraordinary amount of time developing reports for a wide range of stakeholders. As an example, our model wasn’t specifically designed to address the Government’s Cost of Teaching requirement but we have been able to create the required […]

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