Recently I revisited last summer’s joint statement by AIR, EDUCAUSE, and NACUBO entitled, “Analytics Can Save Higher Education. Really.” It’s something all of us analytically-minded higher education people can and should get behind. I’m thrilled that these three organizations have made analytics a priority, and that they are working to spread the information and knowhow that will spur adoption.
Reading the statement reminded me of the tools we had to rely on before the development of today’s academic resourcing models that I've been writing about in these blogs. The improvements are relevant for achieving the benefits described in the joint statement referenced above as well as my own Reengineering the University and forthcoming Resource Management for Colleges and Universities. I'd like to share some of my experience in the early days of higher education analytics to show just how big a change the current models portend, and why that change is so important.
It should come as no surprise that margin, the difference between cost and revenue, emerged in blogs 1 and 2 as a key variable in the economics of teaching. What may be less obvious is that faculty and academic administrators need to take margin seriously. Conventional wisdom says that academics should focus on mission and its associated teaching and scholarly priorities while leaving the management of margin—and by extension the use of models that measure margin—to the institution's accounting and financial people. This blog describes why the conventional wisdom is wrong: why effective academic resource management requires mission and margin to be considered together, and why this is best done by the academic side of the house.