Gray Associates GrayReports Archive

In the fourth episode of our webcast series on The Best Practices in Program Portfolio Evaluation, we shared a process that leads to high-quality program decisions, and ensures that these choices have the support of faculty and institutional leaders. 

Our team has facilitated this process at institutions across the country.  It combines a workshop with the best data on markets for higher education.  

Why has this process been successful?

• Transparent - Enables a frank discussion of program metrics and scoring rubrics–and their limitations
• Cross-Functional - Engages key stakeholders from the administration and faculty
• Market Data - Provides all participants with relevant data on student demand, employer demand, and competition
• Judgment - Encourages participants to use the data to inform their judgment, not to replace it

In the third webcast of our series on The Best Practices in Program Portfolio Evaluation, we shared insights on how to evaluate competition for new and existing academic programs.  

We highlighted the major datasets on competition and their pitfalls so you can effectively use them to inform your program decisions.  These metrics included:

•   Completions Per Capita - Given its population, is this market more competitive than others? 
•   Average Program Size - Are competing programs growing or shrinking? 
•   Cost Per Inquiry - How intense is the keyword competition for this program?
•   Change in Number of Institutions - Are other institutions entering or leaving the market?

In the second webcast of our 4-part series on The Best Practices in Program Portfolio Evaluation, we highlighted all of the sources your institution can use to evaluate employer needs for your graduates.  We also shared the limitations of each data source, so you can use them more safely.

Here is a summary from our live webcast on employer demand: 

•    BLS data is readily available, but is dated and a weak indicator of trends.
•    Job posting data is vital for trends in employment growth, skills and certifications. 
•    Aligning labor market data (SOCs) with programs (CIPs) is hard and error-prone. 

The first webcast in our series on The Best Practices in Program Portfolio Evaluation focused on Student Demand.  Our goal was to help you understand how to get and use Google data, Inquiry volumes, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) completions, and geo-spatial analysis to assess demand for your programs.  Importantly, we also explained the weaknesses in each of these datasets, so you can use them safely.  As an example, IPEDS completions are a measure of student demand; however, Bachelor's degree completers started school 4-8 years ago, so trends in IPEDS appear years after they have occurred.  On the other hand, search data is more current (but has its own issues).