Cost of Academic Programs

Presentation Summary

Jahnavi Jilledumudi, SUNY Albany

In 2012, the then UAlbany Provost set the highest priority for the first BI project: tie expenditures to course credits and tell me how much we're spending on academics. When we initially contacted the HEDW forum for ideas on a Cost of Instruction Model, we were advised that it will present a lot of challenges and would be very complex to venture into it. We also researched other institutions and received similar responses. But, since this was THE priority for the Provost, we had no choice but dive in. With a fabricated spreadsheet as a prototype, and using the Delaware model as a basis, IT, Budget, and IR worked hand in hand to develop, test, retest, recode, and test again the Cost for Instruction Model. This model is in use today and provides very interesting metrics: Cost per credit, By Instructors, Programs, Department, Schools, Titles, Student Credits, Seat Counts and Student FTE by Instructors, Programs, Department, Schools, Faculty Titles and Title Types. The model also feeds our Course Planning Dashboard (Average Class sizes, Number of Courses) and our Workforce Dashboard (Number of Instructors, Position FTE, and Instructor FTE). Our Model gained a lot of publicity within the SUNY system. We provided presentations to our sister colleges and to SUNY Administration that included the dashboards, and most importantly, the Data Warehouse structure, sources, and logic required to create these metrics. They were very excited to understand HOW these precious metrics were derived and used. And equally excited that we are about to quantify Research Activities of faculty. Any institution who has asked this question can benefit from our model, methods & lessons learned. This presentation will convince them not to shy away from trying to tie these metrics together for their own use.