Higher Education Consulting

Unlock the full potential of your academic portfolio with Program Economic Analysis (PEA). Our analytical model is designed to help you evaluate the historical financial performance of your academic programs, benchmark your performance against peer institutions, and model how financial outcomes could be affected by changes to academic variables.

Leverage the unique features and insights in PEA to chart a more holistic and evidence-driven academic strategy that helps enhance your competitive advantage, drive sustainable financial health, and equip you to live out your mission.

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Ready to make substantive changes to your academic portfolio? Our Strategic Academic Planning and Implementation (SAPI) service can help.

SAPI uses a phased approach—an intentional model created by people with experience in higher education who comprehend the complicated dynamics that frame any portfolio review.

Leveraging our Program Economic Analysis analytics solution, we explore each program’s economic and non-economic contributions to the school, including constituents from around campus. The result is a clear plan for monitoring at-risk programs and making strategic academic investments.

SAPI is designed to help you make informed decisions. Our consultants work with you from start to finish, providing insights, benchmarking, and evaluation tools to help you develop a successful plan with a sustainable approach.

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With more than 300 higher education clients, we’ve seen most situations. We help our clients navigate financial exigency or financial challenges by using robust modeling and thoughtful consulting. We work with you to strategize next steps and provide tailored support that can help you put your best foot forward.

Your strategic plan is a road map for the future. Based on our culture of forward thinking and experience across multiple industries, we begin with a discovery period to learn more about your institution and its goals.

Then, we help synergize those goals with your mission and available resources, helping you facilitate a plan that’s aspirational and attainable.

Finally, we collaborate with you to help develop a set of key performance indicators for tracking your progress over time, providing the tools you need to maintain forward momentum.

With the rapid changes in today’s higher ed landscape, strategic partnerships such as mergers, acquisitions, and shared services are becoming essential pathways to sustainability and growth.

Our higher education consulting team offers strategic, experience-based support to help throughout the process—from identifying a partner to prioritizing a seamless, post-merger integration. We’ll guide your institution through the key challenges of a merger or acquisition, including financial and scenario modeling, strategic planning, change management, and post-merger integration.

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Need a deeper understanding of your students and their success? We can leverage your student data to create a model that helps you predict which potential students are most likely to matriculate and which enrolled students are likely to be retained.

This valuable knowledge can assist you in making informed decisions about financial aid, student support, and strategic scheduling. Our consultants round out this cost-effective service by providing insights and recommendations for addressing key areas of concern.

We also can extensively review your students’ academic records to explore patterns that will help you develop programs and personnel that bring your mission to life.

If you’re making a strategic investment, launching a new initiative, or needing to know how well your academic programs serve your community, Forvis Mazars can help. Gain access to the credible and actionable insights your team needs to make smart, strategic decisions.

Is your institution struggling to support students? Does it seem like you don’t have the right people in the right positions? Are your day-to-day tasks cumbersome or inefficient to the point of compromising mission-critical programs and services?

We can help you identify where your communications, systems, structures, or technology are preventing your institution from progressing.

Colleges and universities find it increasingly difficult to retain high-quality faculty and staff due to competition and concerns about internal pay equity.

If you’re committed to recruiting qualified personnel and mitigating turnover, we can help:

• Benchmark your compensation practices against peer and competitor institutions
• Conduct internal analyses of your compensation data to identify systematic differences in how people are paid
• Provide a set of actionable recommendations driven by your institution’s financial realities and mindful of its long-term financial health
• Communicate the study’s methodology, data sources, and outcomes to constituents

Institutions often have nuanced challenges or strategic initiatives that won’t fit into conference-wide training.

Forvis Mazars delivers workshops year round at professional organizations across the country. We can facilitate a remote or in-person, customized workshop on any of these higher education topics:

• Strategic Thinking
• Accreditation & Assessment
• Curriculum Redesign
• Financial Literacy
• Student Services & Student Affairs Trends

We offer additional training as requested—just tell us about your needs.

Your board members can be your strongest advocates, and it’s essential they’re equipped with the necessary knowledge and insights to help your institution achieve its forward vision. We can work with your board to provide customized training on governance and higher education leadership. We also can meet with your leaders to share best practices in strategic planning, financial management, and personnel development.