Creative approaches for demonstrating a college’s return on investment

For a column I published in University Business magazine, I pulled together some information about creative approaches to demonstrating an institution’s return on investment (ROI).  Many schools, like Wesleyan University (CT), are promoting efforts to reduce the cost of a degree.  These and other programs that are designed to address concerns about affordability can make a compelling case for a college’s ROI.

Colleges and universities are also mining student outcomes data as they become increasingly aware of the need to articulate their value proposition.  Prospective students and their families are looking for detailed answers to questions like:

• What do business graduates, education graduates, science graduates, and so on from your college do after graduation?
• What companies hire them?
• What are graduates’ starting salaries?
• What aspects of the educational experience prepared them best for their careers?

Make outcomes data a part of your ROI process

The days are long gone when schools could send out an alumni survey every five years, get a 15 percent response rate, and satisfy themselves that they knew what their alumni were doing.  The need to provide detailed graduate outcomes data within every major requires comprehensive survey efforts and high “knowledge rates” – i.e., survey responses supplemented by follow-up phone calls, mining of social media, etc.  The University of Northern Iowa has been involved in preliminary testing of a cooperative venture with state workforce development staff to collect outcomes data for nearly 100 percent of graduates.

As career services offices, alumni affairs, institutional research, and academic departments become increasingly effective at collecting outcomes data, the burden shifts to summarizing the information and making it available to the public.  Congress and the White House are both promoting programs to require colleges and universities to publish more graduate outcomes data.  There are also a number of state-level and commercial responses to these calls for greater transparency in outcomes information.

The other change required by this movement is to make academic department websites more outward-directed. Historically, departments saw their sites as primarily serving faculty and student majors in the department and possibly currently-enrolled students who had not yet declared a major. But a recent E-Expectations survey (report coming in fall 2015) found that almost 60 percent of high school juniors searching for information on colleges skipped institutions’ home pages and instead searched on a combination of college name + major. This puts increased pressure on departmental pages to serve a marketing function for the institution. And it’s not a one-shot effort. Outcomes information–the kind of data described above and stories about recent graduates that bring the statistics to life–must be constantly updated to keep the information fresh.

For more details on innovative approaches to demonstrating your institution’s return on investment, see my column for University Business. And please feel free to send me your questions or comments about how you can express ROI for your degrees.