Introduction

Higher education is in crisis and its leaders are handicapped by a lack of reliable data. Other industries, healthcare in particular, have leveraged industry standard data to support management decisions. Each year approximately $500 billion is spent by institutions of higher education in the U.S. alone. For decades, these institutions have focused on growth and quality improvements and have passed on incremental costs via government subsidies and tuition increases. Today, macro forces such as revenue pressure, cost pressure and new technologies are at an all-time high. We believe these factors are the impetus for disruption in the industry. We are entering an era that will require more informed decision making in higher education and unfortunately the underlying data, especially benchmarking performance information, do not exist to support such strategic thinking and change.

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• Keyword(s):
• strategy and entrepreneurship 167

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