Higher Education Finance News

Enrollment Up, Revenue Down: The Community College Conundrum

Recent news and commentary highlights the particular challenge community colleges face: increasing enrollment amidst pressures to cut expenses through early retirement and other measures that reduce staff. “It’s a strange time to try to purge staff, since we have more students than we can handle already,” observes a community college dean. “Reducing our staffing will only make it that much worse. But when costs are meaningfully separate from revenues, which they still are for us, it’s not surprising that we’d be pulled in contradictory directions.”

Accord can help! Our line of services help leaders strategically connect costs and revenues so they can see their organization in a more strategic light. Our program costing service combined with our dashboard service empowers institutions to project future costs and revenues based upon changing enrollment patterns. And our staffing and capacity modeling tool can help leaders determine optimal enrollment levels to capitalize on existing capacity levels in courses. By consulting with program faculty and administration on course enrollment limits and staffing patterns, Accord is able to assist institutions in determining the best possible relationships between enrollment, course requirements, and faculty load.