By Robert Gray Atkins
The pandemic will require deep cost cuts at many colleges, or they simply won’t survive. It is unpleasant, even disturbing work. But like all work, it can be done well or badly, quickly or slowly. Bad cuts unnecessarily damage the mission and people. Bad cuts drag on and undermine morale and confidence in leadership. They are usually the result of short-sighted thinking, incomplete or erroneous information and data, bad information, and lack of courage. Good cuts use sound data and robust, fast processes to create a leaner, financially sustainable, mission-centered institution. Here’s how.
Cutting costs may be essential, but there is no joy in it. Do it well and get it over with. The reward will be an institution that is more tightly focused on its mission and once again has the resources to pursue it.
To see Curricular Efficiency in action please join Gray’s Closing the Gap Webinar on May 13th at 2 PM (register here). We will share our Program Economics Platform which calculates revenue, cost and margin at the course level. We will also provide an overview of a Curricular Efficiency Workshop.
"What Gray aggregates is both wider and deeper (than other options). Gray's Program Evaluation System (PES) taps into additional resources that relate to job profiling and down to not just the state or regional level, but down to the zip code level, down to the actual job markets in the cities and towns we are servicing. This level of detail is extremely helpful when we assess whether to phase out a program or choices we made to add programs.... Balancing the budget does not mean cutting programs, it also means adding programs that could be financially significant."