To navigate today's fiscal challenges successfully, school districts must constantly examine the long-term fiscal implications of policy, programmatic, and human resource decisions on their organization. They must look at the effect of such items as bargaining agreements, contracted services, placement costs, transportation costs, benefits,…

Financial stewardship by college governing boards too often stops at balancing the budget. That was the message two finance experts presented last week during the annual meeting of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Furthermore, the yearly budget exercise can give trustees a misperception of their institutions'…

This paper prescribes a significant change in the budgeting practices of most public colleges and universities by urging an approach to budgeting that focuses on the creation and maintenance of institutional assets and the use of mechanisms that reward accomplishment through effective utilization of these assets. This approach contrasts with…

This report lists 11 budgetary principles for higher education institutions, and presents the results of a survey which examined whether the practices of four-year public higher education institutions in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Wisconsin followed these precepts during the fiscal problems of the early 1990s. The 11…

This publication presents case studies of 10 colleges and universities that developed creative approaches to resource allocation in order to confront the fiscal realities facing higher education. The case studies describe strategic review and planning efforts in times of fiscal austerity. They look at streamlining, but also explore permanent…

Despite the complexity and elusiveness of strategic planning by research universities, factors correlated with satisfaction in planning include presence of president or chief executive, presence of centralization and decentralization elements in the planning process, presence of a permanent planning committee, linkage of planning to budgeting, use…

This paper addresses the problem of shaping new strategies in the face of current enrollment declines at many colleges and universities. It describes an approach that applies a long term planning model that can incorporate the short-term realities of lower enrollments and budget constraints with projections for new strategic initiatives. The paper…

Each college foreign language department needs to use its limited resources with long-term goals in mind. Strategic planning requires the department to make sense of innovations in technology, present and future costs, enrollment trends, product life cycles, student characteristics, methodology, programmed or non-programmed needs, and vendors. In…

This report responds to a 1987 task force study which urged Oklahoma to develop a superior system of higher education through implementing 97 recommendations in 5 major areas. This report notes that, without reform funding or major legislation, higher education in Oklahoma has completed or made major progress on three-fourths of the 77…

A survey of 452 public and private two- and four-year colleges and follow-up interviews at 32 institutions investigated the integration of academic program review into other institutional decision-making processes, particularly those of planning, budgeting, and student outcomes assessment. The extent to which this effort has been successful is…

This book provides a new look at educational management in the face of mounting financial pressures. The demands for accountability that today's university administrators must face require them to apply the sophistication of modern business and institutional management while preserving the expensive and often difficult-to-measure contributions of…

This monograph presents recommendations for college and university trustees regarding endowment spending policies. The recommendations include how to set investment goals, assess the reasonableness of investments, and judge when to use endowment funds for high priority needs. A systematic method for determining how much to spend annually from…

Strategic planning in higher education is seen in this book as an essential element in the life of a successful college or university. This book begins by defining strategic planning and explains how to identify the core problems a college or university wants to address and solve through the planning process. It continues with advice on how to…

This paper addresses challenges faced by the Montana University System in meeting the educational demands of a new knowledge age. The paper is organized into two sections; the first considers six factors that lay a foundation for four policy issues addressed in the second part. The six issues discussed in Part 1 include: (1) financial…