1. Cost Home
  2.  → 
  3. Resources
  4.  → Uses and Best Practices
 

Uses and Best Practices

The Cost Study offers a unique discipline-level analysis that allows you to examine the variation in cost at your institution in more detail.

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)

In addition to data-informed peer groups, we are now also offering personalize DEA analyses to all participants. DEA modelling allows you to evaluate your programs’ efficiency and make adjustments to your inputs (number of FTE instructional faculty and total direct expenditures for instruction) and outputs (total SCHs taught at different levels). Visit our Resources Page to view Webinar #4 about using DEA to facilitate operational excellence.

Academic Program Review

The Cost Study national norms and institutional reports can assist with academic program reviews by providing internal benchmarking at the department, college, and institution level. For example, you can benchmark department-level productivity and cost against college and institution averages.

Additionally, you can benchmark instructional activity per faculty (within a given academic unit/discipline) against the national norms. Here you can see that undergraduate SCHs are different than graduate SCHs and tenure/tenure-track faculty have different teaching loads that other faculty. These metrics can be computed at the department, college, and institution levels.

Data Envelopment Analysis