Demand Trend Archives - Page 4 of 26 - Gray Associates

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Out of Crisis, Strategy!

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:September 13, 2021
Post category:Academic Strategy Demand Trend

Campuses are coming back to life, but that doesn’t mean a return to business as usual. Virus containment remains critical, but so is the need to address the pandemic’s huge legacy of disruption. The financial health of many schools is severely challenged, and neither teaching and learning nor the character of student demand will ever be the same. Campus leaders feel an urgent need to close current budget gaps and develop strategies for the future.

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Curricular Efficiency: Improving the Recurring Decisions that Drive Average Class Size

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:September 6, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

Average class size is one of the primary factors driving cost per Student Credit Hour (SCH).

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What Drives Curricular Efficiency?

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:August 4, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

Academic leaders routinely make decisions about course offerings, course scheduling, staffing, releases, and other topics that drive curricular efficiency. However, Deans and Chairs often lack convenient access to accurate data about instructional costs. As a result, many have limited, and sometimes incorrect, intuition about instructional economics. Asking them to make good decisions without access to sufficient relevant information is bound to lead to less-than-ideal results.

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The Great Resignation and the Opportunity for Data-Based Programs

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:July 6, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

If you have been following the news lately, you may have seen several articles about the American workforce and a trend that has been coined, “The Great Resignation.” Employees are leaving their old jobs for better ones (more than 4 million US workers quit in April), often with a pit stop for skills training. As a country, we are taking stock and retooling, and that includes the state of our skills and careers. Financial giant Prudential has been reporting regularly on survey results regarding worker expectations and the coming talent migration. But in a sense, this is an old prediction now coming to fruition. Back in October, the World Economic Forum published The Future of Jobs Report showing some interesting transitions – such as movement from hospitality to healthcare analytics and higher ed to software development. From these reports and others, and from our GrayData, we can see more interest and demand for training in skills that fall under the category of data science.

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Is Journalism Dead? Gray Data Reveals Some Interesting Facts

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:June 15, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

“The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain

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Predictive Models for Academic Resourcing

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:June 1, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

University leaders are seriously planning for the post-COVID world. This world will differ significantly from the old, familiar one. The possibilities for restructuring academic activities are increasing dramatically as graduate employment patterns shift and faculty and students accept new modes of digitally mediated instruction. Bob Atkins’ recent blog, “Higher Education: Are You Ready for the Economic Boom?“ speaks to the opportunities available to institutions that are prepared to launch “different types of programs.”

But launching different types of programs brings its own disruptions and uncertainties. Bob focused on demand and competition, but the university’s internal operations also face significant challenges. My own recent blog, “Envisioning Alternative Course and Program Portfolios,” describes Gray’s new analytics for changing the mix of currently offered programs to boost mission relevance and margins. This blog applies the analytics to planning for “new and different” programs.

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Envisioning Alternative Course and Program Portfolios

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:April 6, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

The importance of envisioning future course and program portfolios will be familiar to readers of my recent blogs. Provosts, deans, and others responsible for academic resourcing invest time and money to get better data on their portfolios: e.g., by using Gray Associates’ Program Economics Platform (PEP). These data help them identify strategies for improvement, which is especially important given the current Covid-19 disruptions. We are pleased to introduce PEP+, our new predictive model for envisioning the consequences of changing a school’s lineup of courses and programs, just in time to help mitigate these disruptions.

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Higher Education: Are You Ready for the Economic Boom?

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:March 18, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

We have a great deal to be optimistic about in higher education. For one, most state budgets didn’t fall much and the federal government just gave them billion dollar booster shots. The U.S. economy is poised for a boom, led by federal spending and pent-up consumer demand.

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Student Demand: The Critical Metric for Program Investment Decisions

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:March 9, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

In the face of financial shortfalls, many schools make a fundamental error: they focus on employment data to find new programs or current programs to grow. Unfortunately, there is a…

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Will Community Colleges Rally After COVID-19?

Post author:Gray Associates
Post published:February 24, 2021
Post category:Demand Trend

We took a look at our data to find out which programs offer the most promise.

Following the 2008-9 recession, enrollment at public two-year colleges and for-profit institutions grew to 7.6 million, up from about 6.4 million in 2007. Over the following ten years or so, the growth ebbed a bit, but when Covid-19 brought another economic recession, it was expected that community college enrollment would pick up again, especially in Certificate programs–displaced workers would seek short-term training for new jobs. If you are reading this, you probably know that is not what happened.

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