Skip to content
Client Portal Request a Demo
Higher Ed Academic Performance Management

Unlocking Financial Sustainability through Data

Suffolk University's path from buy-in to pay-off

Suffolk University logo

About Suffolk University

Founded in 1906 as a law school with a mission to expand equity in education, Suffolk University has grown to become a world-class private research institution, continuing to prioritize underrepresented demographics. Suffolk serves approximately 4,500 undergraduate students, 1,100 graduate students, and 1,300 law students from its downtown Boston campus.

 

Suffolk University initially partnered with HelioCampus in 2019 to better understand their student lifecycle. Since then, they've sought out new challenges that could leverage data more effectively and answer important campus questions. They quickly identified the challenge of data accuracy, consistency, and completeness centering around how the university utilized data across schools when making difficult financial decisions. With this in mind, the university turned to HelioCampus to help address academic performance management.

"With the Academic Performance Management model, we were able to count credits, count students, look at how revenue was generated, costs associated with instruction, and do so by utilizing source data that was consistent across all schools."
Gary Fireman
Associate Provost for Assessment and Chief Data Officer

How Suffolk University tackled financial sustainability with HelioCampus

HelioCampus-icons-bargraph

Getting Started

In order to approach this project in the most effective way possible, Fireman and his team crafted a very specific process including starting with generating senior leadership buy-in, collecting feedback from their Deans, involving stakeholders in the model creation, and strategically rolling out the dashboards.

HC_Icons_DA_01-Enterprise-Tech

Increasing Efficiencies

With APM in place, every department could find ways to increase efficiencies by looking at faculty utilization and consolidation of low-enrollment classes, allowing deans to explore what faculty workloads were versus what they should be. This wasn’t just limited to course-level, entire programs were also being evaluated through this lens for financial viability.

HC-Color-Icon-150x150-07

One Source of Truth

This was critical because each school could no longer make their case based on how they sliced their own data. This really helped the university think through its strategic initiatives when driving enrollment, generating revenue, and managing costs.

HC_Product_Under_Construction_opt2

The Next Steps

Academic Performance Management has brought clarity to the institution's discussions, as a well as a shared understanding of the metrics which inform decision making. The utilization of APM has shifted tough conversations away from the source of the data or quality of the data and, instead, allowed those conversations to be rooted in agreed-upon, understood information. Because of the ongoing partnership with HelioCampus, Suffolk University continues to explore new ways to synthesize data for informed solutions based in a singular understanding for the institution.

Learn More About the Results

Read the case study to learn more about why Suffolk University chose HelioCampus as the right partner to support their institutional goals.

Download Now
suffolk-university-apm-case-study-cover
footer heliocampus logo
© HelioCampus. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Terms & Conditions Security