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Program Economic Analysis for Higher Education

Unlock the full potential of your academic portfolio.
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Are financial constraints hindering your institution’s sustainability and ability to achieve its mission?

Higher education institutions continue to face many challenges, from declining enrollment and increasing competition to regulations and the uncertainty arising from an ever-evolving industry landscape. Has your institution tried to analyze the economics of its program offerings? This can be challenging, but it doesn’t need to be. Whether your institution is charting a new financial journey or continuing its path of intentional growth, you need evidence-based data to help you evaluate financial performance and develop a more strategic academic plan that’s tailored to the unique goals, needs, and mission of your school.

Program Economic Analysis (PEA) is our analytical model 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 impacted by changes to academic variables.

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

Uncover Valuable Insights

Use interactive and customizable dashboards to view key performance metrics across colleges, programs, departments, and courses to help:

  • Identify costs, revenues, and growth opportunities within your academic portfolio
  • Build financial health through program efficiency and intentional investments and disinvestments

Chart showing course margin breakdown between cost and tuition for multiple fields of study.

Understand How You Measure Up to Competitors

Benchmark your performance against peer institutions to gain a better understanding of your institution’s competitive advantages and gaps.

Table showing various metrics across multiple fiscal years.

Unveil the Potential of Hidden Opportunities With Financial Forecasting

Dashboard showing a forecasted enrollment increase in a biology bachelors program.

What If Scenario Modeling enables you to test and model how financial performance outcomes could be impacted by changes to your academic variables, such as:

  • Headcount
  • Faculty Lines
Forvis Mazars’ Program Economic Analysis has been a game changer in getting our university’s leadership involved, improving efficiencies, and solving financial issues, and the process has been a morale booster to the rest of the campus. Going through this analysis has made us more of a team, and we are each doing what we can to make the institution a place where we can thrive. We knew there were issues, but we did not know where they were or how to fix them. Forvis Mazars is a professional third party providing a tool to empower our leadership to make key decisions. The information is better received by our leadership because it was provided by a nonbiased third party, which is an advantage.”
– Jim Smith, Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology

Your Compass for Academic Investment Insights

Use PEA’s visual dashboards and customizable filters, benchmarking, and scenario modeling features to drill down into your academic data and gain insight that can help you build sustainable, financial health through program efficiency and intentional investment. Provide stakeholders with a more complete view of the institution’s financial position with:

Revenue & Expense Management

  • Enhance tuition, tuition discounts, fees, and athletic scholarship allocations
  • Refine faculty assignments (including faculty load/release time and non-teaching expenses), adjunct compensation, and course logistics
  • Manage class sizes, course scheduling and planning, and staff resources more efficiently
  • Forecast financial performance through embedded scenario modeling

Reporting & Transparency

  • Deliver accurate external reports for accreditation on class size and faculty-to-student ratio, full-time faculty representation by program, and number of sections
  • Provide detailed reporting on enrollment trends to deans, chairs, boards, and faculty committees
  • Improve financial literacy (gross versus net tuition, overhead expenses)
  • Compare your performance against peer institutions and develop benchmarks to measure success

Strategic Academic Planning

  • Use benchmarks and enrollment analytics for strategic academic investments
  • Manage enrollment through data visualizations of trends by program, subject area, course, and section
  • Leverage data for curriculum development and academic advising insights

The PEA Process

Past

We collaborate with you to collect your institutional data, so you and your stakeholders can be confident in gained insights.

Present

We listen to understand your institution’s mission and financial state to build a solid foundation for your PEA dashboards.

Future

We provide insight on your institution’s financial health to help you develop a strategic academic plan aligned with your mission and unlock your full potential.

While many institutions focus on expense management, there are various use cases where PEA can provide additional value to the institution’s cabinet members, including:

Your Mission, Our Experience

Our team has extensive experience serving more than 300 colleges and universities across the United States. For more than seven years, PEA has worked with a wide range of higher education clients—including small private colleges, public institutions, community colleges, and nationally ranked universities—to provide insights that help drive financial health and create an environment that:

  • Encourages proactive action by helping validate your challenges, opportunities, and areas of strength
  • Facilitates communication across stakeholders by shifting the conversation in leadership meetings
  • Assists with resource allocation and strategic planning
Franklin College logo

Hear from President Kerry Prather of Franklin College to learn how our innovative Program Economic Analysis tool helped his institution create faculty buy-in to identify program efficiencies across campus.

Value-Added Services to Support Your Institution

Supplement PEA with other Higher Education Consulting Services including:

  • Assistance in developing and implementing a strategic academic plan that can help guide you from recommendations to action
  • Personalized workshops that guide you through your data discovery phase to gain valuable insights and clear, actionable next steps
  • Identification of inefficiencies and how to turn them into opportunities
  • Extensive internal and external analysis of your programs that draws on industry and institutional data. Gain new understanding and develop an enhanced strategy.
Ready to empower your mission?
Find out how we can support the development of your strategic academic plan.
 

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