Strategic Decision Support for Financial Planning and Sustainability

The cost of college for students increased by more than 25% in the last 10 years.¹

Colleges and universities turned to this lever to counter cuts to higher education funding, declining enrollments, and a rise in other expenses at institutions. In response, students as consumers have underscored the need to improve the affordability of higher education. Meanwhile, institutions continued to demonstrate an over-reliance on increasing revenue and countering costs with tuition increases.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the ineffectiveness of tuition increases to manage costs and grow revenue. However, this problem existed long before the pandemic as colleges and universities - public and private - were largely operating with structural deficits. That is, operating expenses were regularly exceeding operating revenues - often by a substantial margin - and are heavily reliant on non-operating revenues to balance the budget each year. In short, the old normal had already become challenging, even pre-pandemic.

Learn how to:

• Bring data-informed strategies into the financial planning process
• Drive decisions that will resonate with each institution's mission and capacity for more sustainable, targeted, effective planning

¹https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by-more-than-25percent-in-the-last-10-years.html