E-Learning-Inclusivo (Mashup)

"

Facing skeptical customers, declining enrollment, an antiquated financial model that is hemorrhaging money, and new kinds of low-cost competition, some U.S. universities and colleges may be going the way of the music and journalism industries.

Their predicament has become so bad that financial analysts, regulators and bond-rating agencies are beginning to warn that many colleges and universities could close.

'A growing percentage of our colleges and universities are in real financial trouble,' the financial consulting firm Bain & Company concluded in a report—one-third of them, to be exact, according to Bain, which found that these institutions’ operating costs are rising faster than revenues and investment returns can cover them."

Via Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)

"Certainly there are limitations to the model described, some of which I have identified and others which I'm sure readers will point out. It is currently being modified to eliminate some of its shortcomings.

But as flawed as it may be, it serves to point out several key points. First, different approaches to attaining goals have different cost consequences.

Second, in almost all scenarios, resources required by community colleges outstrip those that will be required by four-year institutions. This is a direct contradiction to priorities typically assigned in the appropriation process. Institutional costs can be reduced under an assumption of marginal costs being less than average costs, but this doesn't change the need to assign priority to funding for those institutions that will have to do the heavy lifting if attainment goals are to be met.

Third, the largest component of costs in both scenarios is student financial aid. The real-world examples reinforce the point made earlier in this paper that concentrated attention to the design of financial-aid programs is perhaps the key element in the development of cost-effective means of reaching aggressive attainment goals.

Finally, it drives home the point that reaching such goals will take substantial additional resources. Ways can be found to mitigate these costs, but success will be impossible without additional state investments."

Via Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)