Gray Masterclass

Gray Master Class presents best practices for evaluating your academic program portfolio

What are the best data sources, analyses, and decision-making processes for evaluating your academic program portfolio? You will learn all of this and more in Gray’s seven-part Masterclass series on Best Practices in Program Decision-Making. During the webinars, we share innovations and insights Gray has developed during our decade of work conducting program evaluations for colleges and universities across the country. This information will help your institution:

1. Improve the quality and increase the speed of program decisions
2. Identify healthy new programs that can increase enrollment
3. Determine which current programs have opportunities for further growth
4. Identify struggling programs in poor markets that may need to be sunsetted
5. Build consensus on program decisions among faculty and administrators

We will identify the best data sources for evaluating student demand, employment opportunities, and competition in your markets. As important, we will share the underlying issues with the available data, including weaknesses in public sources (e.g. Google, IPEDS and BLS) and challenges in paid subscription data.

Part 1: Understanding Student Demand

Student demand is an essential ingredient in program evaluation, but it is important to understand the pros and cons of different data sources and how they can work together to create accurate insights.

Presenter: Bob Atkins

Part 2: Understanding Employer Needs

Gray experts share an in-depth view of employment markets. Learn how to use data sources to determine the most-needed skills your graduates will require to successfully enter the workforce.

Presenter: Steve Probst

Part 3: Competitive Intensity and Degree Fit

How can you track competitors gaining traction in your market, identify which programs attract the most online students, define your value proposition and understand the nuances of degree fit? Gray experts explain competition data sources, and their uses and limitations.

Presenter: Zach Paz

Part 4: Calculating Program Economics

Learn how to organize data to support analyzing program and course economics, identify information needed for evaluating your academic program portfolio decisions and investments, and understand how to use instructional economics data to support both routine and episodic academic decisions.

Presenter: Pete Starrett

Part 5: Reaching Curricular Efficiency

Learn how to use instructional economics data to identify ways to reduce the total teaching workload, to reduce the need to hire more faculty, to make college more affordable, and to minimize the extent to which budget cuts translate into higher workloads or inferior education.

Presenter: Steve Probst

Part 6: Inform and Engage Constituencies

Learn how to inform and engage your team concerning academic program portfolios and program-specific investments. Discover how to merge data with institutional knowledge and experience to optimize academic program decision-making.

Presenter: Mary Pahissa Upchurch

Part 7: Integrate and Sustain

Learn how to define academic program evaluation and management, review current issues, share best practices, and hear how one institution transformed their process.

Presenter: Robert Atkins