Higher education is facing economic and competitive pressure like never before.  In these tough times, it can be difficult to both manage operations and invest in the future.  This session addresses a comprehensive approach to strategic budgeting. Using Notre Dame as a case study, presenters share the processes, structure, and tools that the university used to achieve its mission. Participants will learn how to focus on strategic priorities, build flexibility into their organization, explore alternative funding sources, and better connect the budget with the plan.  

How does an institution move from a historic resource allocation model to one that significantly alters the institutional landscape? Examples of institutions that are developing and implementing new approaches and a more detailed University of Virginia (UVA) case study will be reviewed. UVA used a change process that engaged key stakeholders to better align resources, authority, and accountability with teaching and research activities.  

Higher education institutions continue to face tremendous pressure to keep tuition low and find new ways to reallocate resources to their core academic mission. Poor fiscal planning can force colleges and universities to balance budgets through reactive steps (hiring freezes, purchasing freezes, deferred capital spending and across the board cuts) that seldom produce sustainable budget reductions. This session presents financial planning strategies used by the University of Michigan to promote long‐term fiscal stability that preserves and enhances its academic excellence.

Streamlining academic program assessment into a process that meets the needs of the provost and CFO can be challenging. Learn how one institution addressed resource allocation gaps in its assessment activities and built a seamless process. This session focuses on how academic and business units can work together to “close the loop” and marry program planning and assessment with organizational planning and budgeting.

Defining instructional costs can better align the budget and curriculum while providing transparency for faculty and administrators.  The Dean and administrators at Columbia College engaged faculty to implement a budget process that allocates resources based on curricular needs. Under this model, budget requests must be submitted with a rationale that links expenses to the curriculum. Hear how administrators and faculty collaborated to focus on student learning, identify true instructional costs, and eliminate the worst practices of “rollover” budgeting.

National data trends indicate that campus buildings are aging and backlogs are growing. These trends will accelerate as buildings constructed in the 1960’s turn 50, and capital funding from all sources continues to be limited. Faced with fewer capital resources to invest and increasing costs for capital renewal, the University of Massachusetts‐Amherst is taking on these challenges by assessing the condition of all buildings on campus, creating portfolios of projects to help campus leaders set capital funding priorities, and analyzing the trade‐offs between renovating, repurposing or demolishing buildings.

In December of 2011, the University of Chicago decided to implement Hyperion Planning as its enterprise‐wide budget and planning system. This was a dramatic change across an institution that has long relied on an Excel‐based budgeting process. This session will provide a brief overview of the implementation (which is still underway) and its anticipated benefits. Presenters will also highlight how the implementation provided an opportunity to redesign select budgeting policies, processes, and timelines.

Creating a strong link between the strategic plan and budget requires unwavering commitment from an institution’s leadership. Processes must be defined, and faculty and staff must be engaged to ensure the most effective use of resources. Presenters discuss how to involve all campus units in this process and key strategies to ensure successful coordination and communication of both the process and the results.

If the latter is true, we are seriously underprepared; our traditional revenue streams may be permanently diminished while costs continue to escalate. We must think seriously about new business models that enable productive use of resources while not gutting our most valued beliefs about what constitutes quality in learning, discovery, and community and economic engagement.  

This session seeks to establish the “big picture” that drives our need to frame new business model solutions and provide some guidelines and ideas for creating future models. The presentation will include a discussion of those functions for which new business models may work best, the pros and cons of some new models being tried, and examples of emerging ideas for reinventing our higher education future. Finally, the speaker will query the audience for new ideas being tried at participant institutions.

This session focuses on the strategies, skills, and tools to communicate budget principles and directions across numerous and fluid stakeholder groups. In an age of increased calls for accountability and financial efficiency, it is more important than ever for budget and business personnel to work effectively with constituents to explain institutional strategic direction, budget principles, and provide insight and transparency about budget development and management.

Without adequate data analysis models, academic resource allocation decisions can be contentious and fraught with issues. Ouachita Baptist University has created an Academic Cost and Demand Model that is reviewed annually as part of resource allocation decision‐making. The model identifies academic programs that are overfunded or underfunding by a ranking system that is based upon demand and net revenue generation. The presentation will review the model and address its design and implementation.