How to Better Manage Your Enrollment and Tuition Forecasts
Ever-changing economic pressures and a shifting student landscape continue to cause significant changes and challenges for higher education institutions. Institutions have been affected by price sensitivity, increasingly limited state funding, greater competition for students, increased constraints due to shifting student demographics, decreasing international enrollment, and surging demand for alternative education options. Developing an effective, reliable, accurate, and actionable enrollment and tuition pricing model has never been more important.
Higher education institutions must proactively manage and plan enrollment, tuition pricing, and retention. Traditionally, groups managing these functions have operated more like a loosely assembled group, rather than a connected, tightly-integrated organization. This has caused latency in data and a lack of transparency on what changes mean to the budget and financials for the institution. To better manage the institution, they should strive to fully understand the downstream impact of changes to net tuition revenue and the financials across the institution to enable actionable insights and transparency. This is done by integrating these functions more tightly and allowing for scenarios to be modeled and analyzed to better understand the impacts of:
- Cohort differences and pricing structures.
- By detailed student attributes by cohort.
- Differences in transfer cohorts.
- Graduate cohorts by school.
- Effectively managing retention and student matriculation.
- Effectively allocating financial aid.
- Adequately allocating dollars to student services.
- Understanding student retention value.
- Changes to pricing plans and various scenarios.
- Tightly linking and incorporating student and general-ledger system information to the model.
- Understanding what differing assumptions and scenarios mean to the organization.
Enabling the capabilities above allows for a more robust enrollment and tuition model to be developed. This helps institutions better manage and navigate the choppy waters ahead. Whether trying to better understand high-level, net-tuition revenue for long-range planning, the incorporation of differential tuition and student fees or targeting specifically at-risk students or student categories to allocate aid more effectively—Connected Planning is the answer!
Allitix and Anaplan can help your institution understand and proactively anticipate how changes to enrollment and pricing impact your institutions’ revenue.
By leveraging the Anaplan Connected Planning platform, Allitix can help your institution anticipate what changes to enrollment assumptions mean to your institution. For example, Connected Planning models help auxiliary units understand the enrollment scenario's impact on occupancy and capacity for the residential halls. Your institution can see the impacts to dining and leverage these insights to have informed discussions with your 3rd-party, dining-services provider while managing maintenance costs for changes in usage. These enrollment plans can be leveraged by multiple groups within the institution—from the finance and budget office to enrollment management and various colleges/schools within the institution.
While there are challenges on the horizon, they can be overcome. Institutions can capitalize on opportunities born out of these challenges by anticipating the future, analyzing the past, and proactively planning. Our experience in higher education has shown us that nimble institutions making the right investments—based on transparent, data-driven decisions—can thrive. To do this, institutions must invest and set new processes that enable all stakeholders to make strategic decisions and support ongoing analysis throughout the year and over multi-year horizons. Leveraging Anaplan and Allitix to align enrollment management and finance functions is one way to get ahead of the challenges in higher education.
More from Community:
- The 3 Pillars of Connected Planning: Part 1—People
- The Honeycomb Effect: Taking Connected Planning Beyond the Boundaries of Finance
- Lead with Enablement: The Key to Anaplan Implementation Success
About Allitix
We are a people-driven consulting firm that prioritizes the goals and vision of our clients while also investing to empower its individuals. Our guided approach enables our clients to work with our consultants to deliver immediate results while providing our clients the knowledge and skills to maximize and drive future success. Our professionals have decades of experience servicing the needs of higher education clients and have enabled institutions to leverage Anaplan to its fullest extent. We are all-in for our clients and their success!
Director, Curtis GratzCurtis Gratz is a director for Allitix—based in Chicago, Illinois—with 15 years of experience. Mr. Gratz leads the Central and East regions for Allitix and also overseas its higher education vertical. His experience within the higher education space has been focused on tuition and revenue, budget development, capital planning, position budgeting, endowment, grant, philanthropy, debt servicing, long-range planning, and program costing, as well as helping institutions change budget methodologies. Through past experiences, Mr. Gratz is adept at assessing existing processes, identifying opportunities for improvement, developing road maps for implementing recommendations, and helping clients realize those future state visions via value-added software and process solutions.