And those 40,000 students are a mix of
our population. We've got undergraduate,
graduate, as well as our professional law
school,
and we needed to be able to look at
specific populations
to really make sure we were looking at
data and assessing it reasonably.
Welcome to Focus! A podcast dedicated to
the business of higher education.
I'm your host Heather Hichmond and we
will be exploring the challenges
and opportunities facing today's higher
learning institutions.
On this episode i'm joined by Christine
Blakney,
managing director of student business
services at Texas Tech University.
She walks us through how Texas Tech has
used key performance indicators
or KPIs to help the university business
and students -
a task especially important once the
pandemic hit.
Well thanks so much for taking the time
to talk with me today, Christine.
Thank you very much for having me.
Well I
know I had the pleasure
of moderating a panel discussion for
NACUBO earlier this year and you were
one of the speakers
and had some very interesting insight on
using KPIs
or key performance indicators. And since
this term is not
often used in higher ed, can you share
how this helps you in running the
student business office for Texas Tech
University?
Absolutely, and you're right that KPIs
may be more of a business-related aspect
of monitoring and keeping up with
trends and analytics and those kind of
things.
But it has a very significant use in the
higher education community.
Because we all are monitoring
anything from enrollment management, to
student workflow, to
where are financial management
stays in place. So it's
definitely a helpful tool -
is what I would propose it to be. It's
not something that
any one particular KPI,
or metric, or set of metrics, would, you
know, solve everybody's problems, or would
necessarily apply to
any particular institution. So
that's where we
really want to look at the how KPIs work
in higher ed.
Oh, that's wonderful. And so you
already
had some of these KPIs and metrics
established, really before this whole
world change with the pandemic, right?
That's correct. And, you know,
COVID has impacted all of us. It's caused
significant interruptions to
our daily lives, as well as our business
management.
But, you know, one of the things that was
apparent from the very outset of things
was
the financial impacts - both on people
personally,
but also with businesses, and our
operations, and our ability to conduct
business
the way we intend to and provide the
good customer support and especially
student support that we need to as an
institution of higher education. And so
it's been something that we needed to
have
solid analytics and to be able to make
sound business decisions.
And so I see those as being more
necessary now than ever before. And
that's where these KPIs have really come
into play.
We were lucky to have some of these in
place, and we were able to use the data
that
they represented very creatively to
answer
emergency needs as administration kind
of moved through the pandemic.
And the changing - the ever-changing - world
that has
seemed to come about with the pandemic
as well.
And even today everything remains very
fluid,
but it's helpful to be able to provide
data to administrators to help them make
informed decisions,
even as continuing planning evolves
and as we adapt and adjust to the
pandemic, as well.
Right, well it's great that you already
had some of that in place. You know,
there's
the old saying about when's the best
time to plant a tree, and it's like well
10 years ago. But the second last time is
to do that now.
So you were actually ahead of the
game. What were some of the KPIs or
metrics, and what was the process to get that going?
The KPIs and metrics we had in place
before the
pandemic were things that you would
normally track,
such as outstanding receivables,
days in collection, how many students
had ACH or direct deposit established.
And some of these things gave us the
ability
to look and support very
good business decisions.
Like, could we withstand adjusting our
holds threshold, those kind of things. So
some of the KPIs we
had that help support those decisions
were, like, an assessment of our
outstanding receivables.
We were looking at both term balances
overall versus current balance.
We looked specifically at our TouchNet
Payment Plans
and we could immediately see 
which plans were remaining current,
which went delinquent, which went
delinquent as of late-March -
when some of this really started
impacting students and families
financially -
and when they started to move off campus.
Analyzing KPIs takes a bit of an
assumption.
Sometimes you do have to document what
assumptions you're making anytime you're
analyzing these KPIs.
So, like, when the CARES Act came in,
we wanted to know how many students were
current and paying on time
in the payment plans. We knew that COVID
impacted virtually everybody financially,
and we use this data reporting to see
where
any of our CARES Act funds could be
best utilized across the campus.
Not only was it just an assessment of
the outstanding receivables,
you know, we were able to look at
specific points in time. And that's the
benefit of having
historical data to look back through
Because you want to
look back and say, "Where would we have
been at this point in time?
Where would we have been at this point
in time? Is it different? Are we seeing
major fluctuations
in our outstanding receivables that
people are unable to pay
at this point?" And also
effectively manage holds. If we put a
hold on students for being late or
unpaid, should we adjust that whole
threshold, knowing that there's,
you know, a globally financial impact
happening
that we need to adjust for. One of the
things
that makes it really important for Texas
Tech to have these in place
is we have over 40,000 students on
campus.
And administration needs to be able to
make decisions. And those 40,000
students are a mix of our population.
We've got undergraduate,
graduate, as well as our professional law
school,
and we needed to be able to look at
specific populations
to really make sure we were looking at
data and assessing it reasonably,
and making sure the numbers were
understandable and the percentages.
To be able to look at outstanding
receivables by, you know,
30, 60, 90, days late.
How many of those students already had
holds? How many had delinquencies in the
past?
What their current balance owed was?
Because one of the things that I know
many business officers get the
question
of is - "Okay, you've got 10,000 holds on
students. How many of those students only
owe a couple hundred dollars?" And so
you always want to be able to break down
these analytics to where
you can look successfully at specific
populations of students.
So one of the things we did - and again it
really, really helped to be able to look
at the TouchNet
Payment Plans, find anybody that was
delinquent in those, because
normally we don't assess late fees, or
we don't assess
holds for
people on payment plans until they've
missed two consecutive payments.
And so looking at those and being able
to look back at historically, is this
the same percentage of students that
missed
two payments in a row? So that was
very, very helpful to be able to do that.
We actually went in
and looked at our holds and
looked at all the balances that students
had
outstanding. And while we normally
would have a hold on a student for any
past due balance,
we raised that threshold to be a
thousand dollars, and allowed them to
carry over a thousand dollars
of previous balance without a hold.
And that gave us some flexibility. So, you
know,
we were making very active decisions
on this data as it was occurring.
So we were able to very quickly adapt,
and conform,
and adjust, based on the metrics we were
seeing.
Oh that's great. And especially with the
CARES Act, and you had to make some quick
decisions, and really look at the
students with greatest need, and being
able to have all that data at your
fingertips. It's not like you're going
through
person-by-person with 40,000 students.
You have to have those data sets, right?
Absolutely! 
That's great. So then do you
find that these metrics are pretty
universal?
So for our listeners, you know, how do
they best determine what KPIs
would really support their
administration and their students?
And that's something I would greatly
suggest you
really just have to adapt these to the
culture of your institution.
Every institution has a unique culture,
has unique expectations,
has unique risk tolerance levels.
Focus on what your mission is as an
institution. And I know none of our
mission is to collect, you know, tuition
and fees from students. That's not our
mission,
obviously as higher educators we have
to
educate students. And so when we look at
these
metrics, we want them to support the
decisions administration
is making in regard to sustaining those
missions.
And so you break them down into various
categories such as, you know, what are
your strategic
KPIs? What is your CFO, what is your
president
going to want to know about? They're
going to want to really know overall
totals. How much did you bill this
semester?
How much have you collected this
semester? What's your collections rate?
How many, you know, how many total refunds
have you issued?
When the CARES Act funds came in, how
many total CARES Act
students and funds were awarded? And some
of that rolls into some of that upper-
level,
national-level reporting that you would
turn into
the Department of Education, or to your
local legislature,
to monitor the money that they funneled
to us.
We want to be able to report those
metrics back,
in addition to what I would call the
strategic - the CFO
and president level - we've got the
managerial level, which is more
our departmental management. And it's
more the administrative measures
that we want to assess by term. Are we on
track? Are we moving forward? Are we
falling behind?
Is it pointing me to some area of
concern that I might need to address?
Maybe we've got a policy or
procedure that's not working,
and that was very, very important
throughout the last months.
To be able to assess if what was normal
for us
needed to adapt because of all the other
adaptations that were
happening. I know we've all been tasked
with
moving classes online, and building
tuition and fees for that, and
all those kind of things. So it was very
helpful to have metrics of saying we
would normally have
this many online enrollments, we would
normally bill this much in
online fees, or this much in our campus
base fees.
And if we were to adapt or adjust those,
this is the revenue loss, or those kind
of things.
And in a lot of ways that happens in a
lot of accounting departments, in a lot
of your finance areas,
but I think it's pivotal to have your
business office be
part of those conversations, because
we're the ones that generally get the
questions, you know? The
student's not going to call the
accounting office and ask why they were
towards the rec center fee.
They're going to call student business
services.
You're the one that has to take the
questions right from the students
directly.
Absolutely. That's exactly correct.
Very interesting. I like you have on
those levels, and the different types of
KPIs. Whether you're looking at a
strategic
and what do you need to know at that
level, versus the managerial to be able
to make, you know, maybe changes in your
process,
and see really how does that affect
your business differently than,
you know, should really roll up to
that next-level goal, right?
Right. And what's important to
remember about that
is, you know, each institution - like I said -
has a different culture. And even just
the simplest of examples is a private
institution.
They may have a completely different
hold threshold due to
you know their tuition rates being
different from
what a public institution would be, or
even a community college would be.
Because each of us have our own break
points
of where our tuition and fees reside. And
we want to make sure that
anything we analyze is reflecting back
on what we expect an overall
total to be.
And like I said, you really have to
understand the risk aversion for your
school.
And we work well with, you know, various
offices,
and working well with the enrollment
management office
is critical to this because they can be
highly concerned that these metrics are
being utilized in a way that would
impact their metrics for enrollment, and
retention, and graduation rates.
And we know that all circles back around
to all of us because then that
can impact your federal
funding.
So we want to make sure that we're
cognizant of how
we can't live in a silo, we can't live in
a bubble, that we all have to work
together to make these metrics make
sense for the university.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you
know, we talk a lot about the success
outside the classroom for the student,
and really how that success
outside the classroom - such as the
financial piece - impacts
the success inside the classroom. So
there's always this ever going question
of, is it, you know, payments and finances
that affect enrollment, or does
enrollment affect payment?
What is your insight on that?
It absolutely matters,
because we find that finances can be the
number one stressor
for most people. And that's regardless of
whether you're a college student or not.
I think we all have experienced that. And
when your finances are at risk it's very
hard to concentrate and focus,
especially on your academic performance.
One example I like to share is from
another school that
removed all of their holds and late
fees. They didn't have any
negative consequences tied to
non-payment. And this was well prior to
COVID, so it had absolutely nothing to do
with the financial impacts of
the pandemic. But they didn't follow
their normal processes, they didn't
notify students of balances, they didn't
add holds, and provide notices of holds.
What happened was they were two years
down the path
in this new world of not providing these
communications,
and students were starting to graduate.
And they were sending communications
like, "Oh now 
you owe us a balance." And the students
were like, "What?
I didn't even realize." So, yeah
they,
you know, unless you send them a direct
communication, students aren't known to
pay attention necessarily to their
student accounts as
much as we would prefer them to.
But we've really it caused the
students to be
in a bad situation because, as anybody
that works in with financial aid knows,
you can only apply financial aid
throughout the aid year.
And so once you've moved past that aid
year, that aid year is closed,
those students now don't have an
opportunity to
have their aid adjusted for maybe a
larger expense that they incurred that
they didn't pay. And so
it really put those students in a bad
situation by getting outside
of the standardization
process of communicating, and placing
holds, and placing late fees.
And we realized, you know, you need to
have some flexibility,
and sometimes you need to massage the
rules, and especially like when the
pandemic hit.
We definitely started getting more and
more creative and more flexible with our
processes,
because that allowed us to react to the
situation.
But when you completely remove the
standardization that you have
and you haven't provided this reliable
set
process, you
tend to fail the student in a way.
Because they're expecting to get
communications,
you know, when they didn't pay. And when
you don't send them a communication, it's
out of sight, out of mind,
and they may not follow up appropriately
like you need them to.
Right, I mean that's the whole point of a
bill, right? Is the billing
process, and cycle, and knowing I have
something to pay
on this date, or else! That's life!
Absolutely. And, you know, that's one of
the benefits that
with our TouchNet Payment Plans, the
messages are automated.
And while there were times that we
turned off an automated message about a
late fee because we were going to waive
those late fees,
that then became our choice to make that
decision.
But, you know, the normal message that
goes out
is that reminder to students saying, "Oh
wait, I wasn't thinking
about this payment coming up. I better
make sure I have the money in the bank
that I need to pay it."
So it's very, very helpful to keep those
messages and that
standardized process running, so that
students aren't caught unaware.
Yeah, that's really key. And so I think
you do some other things, too, at Texas
Tech to help reduce that
financial stress or that burden of
knowing what do I have to pay
for students, is that right?
Absolutely. It seems a little backwards
in a lot of ways of thinking that
we are a school that believes in
cancellation. So
lots of people call that by many names:
purging, deregistration,
purging enrollment, but basically it's
cancelling a student's registration
for not being paid. And
for us we would cancel their current
term registration
if the previous term is not paid by a
certain date, or if they're not
enrolled in a payment plan. And so we
want to make sure that we
process that, because it ultimately
becomes successful.
We understand there's natural
procrastinators in the world.
It's one of those things that,
unfortunately,
you don't necessarily get a reaction, you
don't
get the student to take the appropriate
action that they need to take
to complete their financial aid package,
or other situations,
until you assess a negative consequence.
And, you know, while cancellation we don't
necessarily want it to be a negative
consequence,
it serves a purpose. And we've been
able to teach that over time.
We understand the enrollment office gets
a little concerned because
it is impacting their enrollment
headcounts that they have worked so hard
to achieve.
But when you standardize it in regards
to the communications, the timing, we
apply the same parameters, we apply the
same considerations,
students can really learn about it and
they can learn to rely
on that process. We even find that some
students know the exact time that
that's going to happen,
and if they have been waiting for a
class to open up,
they will get online and register for
that class immediately after we've
canceled some students,
because now there's an opening! And
it's not meant to
really be that much of a penalty. It's
really for the people that, you know, they
may have registered for classes and then
something happened in their personal
lives and 
they're not coming to Texas Tech anymore.
They've changed their mind. They may have
registered way back in May
and something happened in July, and now
they're not going to return in the fall.
You know, cancellation provides them
a way that
prevents them from having to be
financially responsible for
that charge. 
Right and it's really, like
you said, it's a teaching opportunity
You're really teaching that financial
literacy. And so when they get
out of school, and they have other bills
to pay with due dates, and they're going
to get communicated with the bill,
they understand how that process works.
That's exactly right. Because we all know
that
if you fail to pay your landlord, or if
you fail to pay your credit card bill, or
your
utility bill, those companies take
action
against you. And that's part of the
learning process
of educating students that are
maybe walking out into the world
for the first time on their own,
and never had to deal with a bill
before. So
they learned that there's a
standardization to it that, you know,
every month I have to pay this bill,
every month I need to at least
look at it. And that helps
educate those students to be more
successful later on in life, as well.
That's really true, and obviously
it's really key to have that consistency
and standardization, especially during
emergency situations like a pandemic,
right? 
Absolutely, I saw
many schools decided they weren't going
to send bills.
They didn't send past due notices -
anything.
You know, they just didn't want to
send a negative message in any way. And
to me it wasn't necessarily a negative
message, it was more of a reminder.
For Texas Tech we didn't charge late
fees, we didn't place holds for two
months,
and we didn't necessarily proactively
communicate that we weren't going to do
those.
When students got their bill, they saw
that there was no late fee on it, or that
the late fee was removed.
They knew that they didn't get the hold
on their account, and they were able to
assess where they stood at that
particular point in time,
and what they needed to take care of, and
they had the time to be able to
work on other funding sources. Whether
they need to get back to financial aid.
Some students are just simply caught off
guard that they think once they've
completed the financial aid process that
it's just going to work seamlessly.
We know that often that is not the case,
and sometimes the students need to take
additional action.
And so when we send them a bill in about
March or April,
you know, January and February they think, "Oh
it's just coming, it's just going to take
a while."
But when you send them a bill in March
or April they're like, "Oh wait,
I might need to call and ask about this."
So,
again, you lose that standardization, you
put yourself
at a high risk, and you generally cause
confusion
for the student. So standardization is
definitely a key to this.
Absolutely.
And again it gives you, you
know, being able to have those KPIs in
place, and being able to see
those receivables, and know what
are the communications, what the plans,
really all goes together. So that's great.
What other KPIs really outside of the
receivables are you tracking?
We track a lot of things. Just
transactional tracking, whether we're
looking for anomalies,
we're looking for, of course, My Direct
Deposit was a big one. Especially with
the C.A.R.E.S funds we wanted to make sure
that
we did not create an administrative
burden on the part of our staff.
That when we're trying to distribute, for
Texas Tech, we had over 12 million
dollars that we need to get in the hands
of students
as quickly as possible that,
while we were all working remotely, if we
didn't encourage these students to sign
up for My Direct Deposit and
didn't have a standardized message and
way to communicate that to the students,
it was going to cause staff members
to need to come to the university to
print those paper checks and get those
checks out the door.
So those were some good things that we
were like, okay our normal
My Direct Deposits metric is about
90 percent. Looking at all the
students that are eligible for C.A.R.E.S
funds, it was coming in much, much lower
than that. It was coming in at
only about 65 to 72 percent
actually had direct deposit set up.
Because many of them just simply never
got refunds from the university before.
And so we were able
to proactively reach out to those
students
and say, "Here's how you would sign up for
My Direct Deposit 
to receive your C.A.R.E.S Act funds in the
most expedient measure
possible. Here's the steps you would take
to do this."
Great, so do you see a lot of students
really taking advantage of that, then?
We did. We've got the metric back up into
the high 80s.
Especially with the C.A.R.E.S Act funds.
Because those were things that students
had proactively gone out and filled out
applications for.
So it simply just took a couple of
communications and then we were back up
into the metrics that we would
expect normally. 
That's great, that's
great.
Now I think you also looked
at some staffing metrics. Do you want to
talk a little bit about that?
When we were running into a staffing
issue with our third party area,
and our enrollment at Texas Tech has
just
exploded over the last couple of years.
And so obviously students that are
either sponsored,
or have a third party billing
arrangement, those kind of things were
things that
were student populations that we were
starting to struggle to provide the
quality level of service that we had in
the past.
So where we use these KPIs was to look
at
the number of students that each staff
member was
supporting, and we were able to compare
that against national trends,
any benchmarking surveys, and other data
that was available nationwide,
and to show that you know one staff
member for
the number of third party students that
we
support was running extremely low
compared to our peers and colleagues. And
so
I was able to negotiate adding another
full-time staff member to that
particular position.
And I think staffing metrics are
something that you always want to
play into it, just to make sure that
you have adequate staff to support the
university's missions and goals.
We know that there's going to be peak
periods, and one of the struggles we have
is keeping those staffing metrics to a
reasonable
place, but still dealing with the peak
periods.
So we definitely looked at
where staff was functional
and where we could cross-train them so
that they could support
different areas. And that allowed us to
spread those staff
a little bit more across the board than
what we had done in the past.
Yeah, that's great. Something to always
look at. And I think sometimes there's
this misconception when you bring
more technology to the table that it
can offset staff, but
you still have to have staff to manage
and maintain the technology,
right? And so cross-training is really
valuable for things like that.
Absolutely.
Great, so well, it's really
clear that having
your KPIs in place has really helped you
in your response to COVID,
but now that you're looking forward and
planning the best as you can - because we
know everything's changing
by the day - what do you think you're
going to continue to use, and maybe
alter for the future, when it comes to
KPIs?
Well we definitely are going to continue
the receivables tracking
and any of our financial metrics used by
our upper administration.
Because those are things that it's just
very important to hold on to.
You don't want those to slip very
far before you take appropriate action -
maybe send an additional reminder, or
address it some other way that
with a new policy or something, or
changing a
existing policy, to help address
a metric that's starting to slide.
Obviously, you know, with their staffing
metrics those are things we're going to
want to keep in place.
It's going to be very interesting to
watch the staffing metrics
in response to what we're seeing with
COVID.
Because we we're about
two weeks earlier than normal and we are
seeing significant
increases in both our call center and
our email communications from students.
So it's been very helpful to have
those metrics to know
we're we're hitting a peak period about
two weeks earlier than we normally would.
One of the things that we you know
has benefited us
most - and it's probably going to stay -
is watching the number of students that
we do service on a day-to-day basis
in conjunction with housing assignments.
If housing is having a particular day to
move in,
do we see the increase that day? Do we
see the increase the day before? The day
after?
And that's allowing us to adjust and be
prepared.
Because our housing department
expanded their move-in to an
appointment-based move-in over two weeks,
whereas normally it's over a weekend,
and we normally work that weekend. We
have the office open because we know
parents need to
visit with us and then get back to their
jobs and their hometowns.
So what we were able to do, knowing the
number of students that we normally
service based on those move-in numbers,
we were able to acquire
use of the basketball arena. So we're
going to be using the concourse there,
and so that's going to allow
us to deal with the social distancing
and the large numbers of students that
would come over here.
And we've also - because of the metrics we
had
day to day based on number of people we
saw -
we were able to prepare and say we need
the arena space for
this amount of time. So we were able to
actually say, "No, we need it actually the
day before
students have their appointments to move
in because
that historically has been a very heavy
processing day for us."
Had we not kept those metrics, had we not
had our customer service KPIs, we would not
know
that this is as much of an anomaly
as we've ever seen. And so that's really
been beneficial to us.
I know our metrics right now are at a
much more detailed level. Administration
really needed to
find fine-tooth information
and needed more detailed breakdowns to
be able to
really assess where they could give up
some revenue
and really benefit the student the most.
I do not expect them to stay at this
detailed level
on an ongoing basis. I believe it's
going to
quickly revert back to "that's too
much information, just give me the
summary" level.
So what we've been able to do is,
with these detailed metrics, we've been
able to really fine-tune
where student populations are when we
kind of went back to a sense of normal.
So have you added any new KPIs, or are you
just adding more details what you're
already doing?
We haven't added anything lately just
mostly because of capacity and we've all
been focused on
all the many other issues that we've had
to be dealing with
lately. I believe some of the newer
metrics,
some of the things will remain long-term,
but
my intent is definitely not to become
the reporting group for the institution.
So whereas, you know, when the C.A.R.E.S Act
funds started coming in, that was
something that my office didn't even
manage, but we were definitely providing
metrics and
data and analytics back to
administration to help manage that.
So some of those we hope, you know, is not
something we would
manage long-term across the university,
but we definitely want to
utilize the ones that we did develop and
keep those
if they have a relevance.
One of the things that I've worked
on in the past with
a number of my colleagues that made
wonderful contributions, was just a list
of metrics that schools may want to
consider in the future.
Our goal was to kind of talk about what
is a shopping list
of various metrics, and how would you get
the data,
and what's relevant to each person.
Because one of the things we found
in talking across in a more national
conversation, and even a statewide
conversation,
was that, you know, we all have different
reporting lines, and we may
have different responsibilities within
our own offices.
So what might be a relevant metric for
me at my school may not be a
relevant metric for someone else. So
we were just trying to brainstorm all
the various KPIs that,
you know, someone might want to
consider.
Great, so do you have that list that
you'll be able to share with our
listeners?
Absolutely, and we'd be happy to.
That's wonderful, that's wonderful.
Well I know another one of the big
challenges that we hear often is
figuring out where to get all this data.
So obviously I know you have technology
and systems in place
in order to be able to collect all this
and analyze the data, but what sources
are you pulling that from?
Absolutely, that's one of the most
important things to
consider - is what source your data is
coming from. Because many schools have
data storage,
but it may not be real-time. And lots of
times when you're dealing with student
business
functions, you need real-time data.
Because if someone came in and paid
five minutes ago, you don't want to send
them a cancellation notice now.
So you can't really utilize data that's
a day old
in a data storage facility. So we use
this as our case to
be granted access to have a
real-time query access to that data.
And that used to be locked down pretty
heavily across the
university, but the timing of the data
when we're making decisions, and placing
holds, and late fees,
and running cancellation processes, and
sending bills even,
is one of the things that we just have
to make sure
we have current data. And you want to
make sure you're requesting the right
data at the right time.
If you know it's a day behind then you
know you can
report that back to whoever's using the
data to make sure that they understand
that.
You also have to have staff that want to
understand
student data. You know, I say all the time
that we've got some
staff that want to come in and do their
jobs
and they do them very effectively and we
need those staff members every single
day.
We've got some staff that get very
creative, and they want to do
new things and venture into new areas.
And so over the years we've had staff
that were like
really analytically driven. 
Once we kind of gave them free
reign to say,
"Okay, provide us more information about
this
data set that you're concerned about,"
that they were able to dig into the data,
learn it, reach a new level of Banner
(we're a banner school), a new level of
understanding of that data,
and how that information
fed across - not just from us, we have the
entire banner erp,
so that's student, registrar, financial
aid,
everything, and even tying that into
TouchNet
data sources as well. So we need to make
sure that
staff are engaged and understand the
data before we make any decisions
on those, or provide a representation of
what the data means
to other people. So especially with
what we have when registration drives
most of the billing, we need to know
who actually is generating
that particular set of data and how does
it end up
ultimately affecting us in the business
office?
And we can write reports back and say,
you know, based on these metrics,
we're seeing lower-than-normal financial
aid disbursed. We're seeing
higher-than-normal registration. We're
seeing lower-than-normal,
you know, other impacts, exemptions being
processed, or contracts being processed.
And, you know, the end-all, be-all to
most of this is that we're able to
take action earlier.
That's great, because you have the right
data that's informing you to know,
maybe, where you need a staff differently,
or
how you need to build differently, or, you
know, communicate across the board
a little bit different. That's great.
So let's say, so even if a school
isn't using KPIs or that terminology, but
they're like, "Wow I really love what
Christine had to say today."
You know, what do you think is really
that first step in formalizing data
analytics in the business office?
Obviously to me the first step is making
sure you know who
has the technical skills to access the
data you need.
I looked at - and I continue to look at -
what am I being asked on a regular basis?
If somebody has to ask me for the same
data twice,
I need to be looking at some sort of
report feature and building a report to
provide that, so that they don't have to
keep coming and asking me.
We've had significant growth in our
professional programs.
And that's like our Executive MBA and
our Executive Personal Financial
Planning
degrees. And so we've been able to
discuss with them what their needs are
they manage it on a
different, I guess,
schedule and structure than what a
normal
academic structure may look like. And so
we were able to provide them with
reports
that they can monitor what a student's
been build over time.
Especially with, we've had a significant
growth of what we call
program fees, that are term-based fees
that we would have to charge.
Some of these KPIs were very
vital to deciding: Are we
assessing too much? Because
we weren't able to necessarily cap them
over multiple terms.
And so we could use KPIs and say,
"What part, what percentage of a person's
tuition and fees was program fees?"
And when we looked at the cost of
getting a degree, you know, does that
program fee
impact some of our degree programs
more than other degree programs? Such as,
like, education. They cannot tolerate a
program fee
in the amount that maybe a business
program could.
So it's been very, very, very helpful to
look at
what questions I've been asked and how
could I
prevent myself from having to stop what
I'm doing right now
and answer that question. And again it's
getting past the terminology is the
first step. You're probably doing
most of this already, you just haven't
really attached a name to it.
Yeah, that's great. Well thanks so much
Christine for sharing all your insights
today. So any final words of advice to
our listeners?
Again, I circle back to: make sure you're
considering the institution's culture.
Because there's been times that I
thought,
"Oh this is going to be a great metric
and everybody's going to want to know
this information."
And I roll it out and somebody goes, "Yeah,
don't really care."
And so, you know, that can be a little
defeating sometimes. So you
kind of have to get past the hurt of
someone not caring as much about
your numbers. Especially if you've put
a lot of effort into it.
And that's where that, you know, a
shopping list, and just throwing out some
ideas
when you're discussing with your
administration, "Hey, would you like to
know
this particular metric? Would you like to
know how this trend
is occurring?" And like I said, one of the
most important
examples I can provide is we've had
in my 10 years of being in this
particular position, we've had
at three different presidents I believe.
And each time we've had a president come
into office,
we've had to basically prove that
cancellation
was not necessarily a bad thing. And by
having these historical measures in
place and showing
the starting point to ending point
of number of students canceled, basically
has allowed us to show them in numbers
what we needed them to take on faith
so that they didn't necessarily kill
a program that we had felt was working
successfully.
So definitely consider your institutions
culture,
consider your mission, but
anything you do with KPIs, it's always to
end with the goal of it's in the best
interest of the student
and the university. And a university
that's,
you know, financially sound is one that's
going to be able to support its students
long term.
That is great advice. It sounds
like data can really help keep you
informed
to help you make those smarter decisions.
Thanks again, Christine.
Thank you guys so
much for this opportunity.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of
Focus.
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