Date of Award
2017
Document Type
Project
Degree Name
Doctor of Education (EdD)
Committee Chair
John Balls
Abstract
Fiscal sustainability has plagued institutions of higher education for as long as universities have existed. Colleges and universities must gain a better understanding of the cost to teach our students and the fiscal performance of our academic programs to survive. Understanding how we construct and arrange resources around the essential academic delivery will allow university leadership to better align program decisions with financial sustainability. This project outlines a financial analytics dashboard showing the fiscal impact of academic programs for strategic operational planning and design at institutions of higher education. The dashboard developed was built on a common unit of measurement, the credit hour, and revenue and expense allocated to each academic unit through an adopted methodology framework. The resulting product is a net cost model for full-program analysis and per-unit analysis. The analysis required the mitigation of significant organizational culture risks as dashboard results reveal objective financial performance data. This model does not measure program performance as it relates to academic success or institutional effectiveness. The final product provides a working analytics dashboard outlining the fiscal production and outcomes for each undergraduate and graduate program at the university.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Citation Information
Biggerstaff, Patrick, "University Academic Program Cost Modeling: A Roadmap to Fiscal Sustainability" (2017). Education Dissertations and Projects. 197.
https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/education_etd/197