Anyone who has read anything on the internet in the last year knows that it’s been rough. Globally, nearly every sector felt the weight of having to innovate due to a global pandemic. Higher education was no exception.
According to research just released from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the financial crisis hit nearly every single college and university in the United States, to the tune of nearly $184 billion dollars in losses, just from the 2020-2021 school year. Those losses cover COVID preparedness, state assistance being drastically reduced, and a significant decline in student matriculation which resulted in lost revenue from tuition. If you’re part of the faculty and staff at any school across the globe, this isn’t new news.
What the data does suggest is that those schools that proactively come up with solutions on how to better serve their students in the coming school year will be the schools with the quickest rebound and lowest impact on their operations. According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, their research suggests an average drop in revenue of approximately 5.5 percent in the fiscal year 2020 and 8.6 percent in the fiscal year 2021. The private institutions in our study are experiencing much more severe drops in revenue, with an average of 10 percent expected in the fiscal year 2021 versus 7 percent in public institutions.
While the focus on the upcoming year is cost containment, now is the perfect time to invest in the infrastructure that will allow your institution to know exactly what is happening on campus, where funds need to be allocated, and how to best serve your student body. With the help of DXtera’s data management solutions, your organization can securely bring together data from across multiple enterprise systems, allowing anyone with access to answer critical business questions and track key institutional performance indicators. The ability to make timely, data-driven decisions will help distinguish those institutions that thrive from those that merely survive.
The heart of the DXtera data management solutions is a comprehensive enterprise data model for educational institutions based on three decades of design and development and road-tested at multiple institutions. Users can leverage standard business intelligence tools with confidence that the information they are working with is current, accurate, and consistent.
The reality is, no one knows when life is going to go back to normal. We can only hope that the upcoming school year will resume as it once did. But now is not the time to take that chance and assume that funding and enrollment will bounce back to their pre-pandemic days.
If you’re interested in learning more about how DXtera can help your institution gain control of its data, become a member today. You’ll get instant access to the DXtera community where you can join other like-minded leaders in higher education.
