Resource Management for Colleges and Universities

Resource Management for Colleges and Universities presents a new set of concepts and tools for what I have come to call Academic Resourcing (AR). “AR” covers not just a college’s or university’s academic planning and budgeting processes, but everything that involves the application of financial, human, and physical resources in support of academic goals.

AR decisions determine what a university does, how it does it, and at what scale. These decisions penetrate into the fine structure of teaching, research, and other elements of faculty, staff and student behavior. They involve complex tradeoffs among mission-driven academic priorities, market opportunities and threats, and financial outcomes—all of which require close collaboration between academic and financial leaders who focus on the big picture, and faculty who understand the situation’s academic complexities at ground level.

The book introduces a new generation of Academic Resourcing Models. These provide actionable descriptions of a university’s teaching and research activities, together with their revenues, costs, contribution margins, and overheads. The information from these models helps provosts, deans, and other university leaders develop strategic plans, manage academic program portfolios, set prices and discounting policies, and perform ongoing tasks like budgeting and balancing faculty workloads and facilities utilization. They blend structured academic judgments with outputs from the university’s transaction processing or data warehouse systems to support decision-making from the executive suite to academic program and departmental offices.

Resource Management for Colleges and Universities reports on my interviews with decision-makers who have adopted the activity, revenue, and cost models described in Reengineering the University (JHU Press, 2016). These models have been incorporated into at least two commercially available platforms, which are moving up the adoption curve with institutions ranging from research universities to community colleges.

Parts I and II of the book cover the following academic resourcing topics:

• Principles: AR and AR modeling as applied to making decisions in not-for-profit colleges and universities; approaches to organizational transformation and the adoption of models.
• Data: What’s needed to support AR modeling, and why most institutions can get what they need without expensive and time-consuming IT data preparation projects.
• Applications: Kinds of decisions supported by the models: for example, adjusting to changed enrollments, management of academic program portfolios, setting tuition and fee levels, balancing faculty workloads, managing course configurations and facilities utilization, and using the fine structure of costs, revenues, and margins to solve budget and financial sustainability problems.
• Historical Models: Report activity and economic data at the level of individual programs and courses enable powerful analytics for learning from past experience.
• Predictive Models: Allow users to test “what-ifs,” at the same level of detail as in the historical models, before committing to future activities.

Part III of the book covers organizational transformation, academic quality assurance and improvement, comprehensive program review, and other topics with relevance to AR.

My greatest satisfaction in writing the book was to see how academic resourcing concepts and models can change the conversations between academic and financial people. I had hoped for this, but to see it in action within multiple colleges and universities is thrilling. I firmly believe that provision of good AR data will revolutionize academic decision-making, and that at no time has this been more important than in the present COVID-19 era.

Resource Management for Colleges and Universities will spur the application of economic evidence to academic decision processes and, contrary to the concerns of some purists, this will improve the institution’s ability to improve learning quality, faculty research, and other aspects of its not-for-profit mission. To the extent it succeeds in doing so, the book will become an on-going reference for both model builders and model users. Future developments, including exciting work now being conducted by myself and others, will build on this reference material rather than supersede it.

Order Resource Management for Colleges and Universities -- published on June 9, 2020 -- at the following link: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/resource-management-colleges-and-universities

William F. Massy, a higher education consultant, is professor emeritus of education and business administration and a former vice president and vice provost at Stanford University. The author of Resource Management for Colleges and Universities and Reengineering the University: How to Be Mission Centered, Market Smart, and Margin Conscious, he is the former president of the Jackson Hole Higher Education Group.