Balanced Scorecards redux

Having skimmed through the standard book on Balanced Scorecards, only some of it would apply directly to higher education. One section I did find intriguing, however, was the summation of 12 items that typically go into a balanced scorecard in most businesses. That got me thinking about which of these would fit for a place like JBU.

1) ROI: Defined in business terms, that's net income divided by average stockholders equity. Given that TUG seldom has net income and that there isn't any stockholder's equity, this one doesn't make much sense for TUG. But for G&PS, this is a possibility. Since these programs make a profit and don't usually have much in the way of endowments, you could run them according to the standard formula.

The rest I'll deal with later, but here's the list.

2-4) Profitability, Revenue growth/mix, Cost reduction/productivity: Again, these are problematic for TUG because there is no net income to work from. But you could determine cost per credit hour generated and track that for the "productivity" number in all programs (potentially using Delaware Study data for TUG comparisons). For G&PS, profitability and revenue growth are easier to track and probably should be.

5) Market share: We know high school graduation numbers by state, so you could determine market share percentage for some aspect of TUG. For G&PS, you could also do some basic demographic data-mining to determine market share here as well. This would seem to me to be a key figure that most IHEs don't really track at this point.

6) Customer acquisition: TUG admissions keeps detailed "cost to recruit" data as do our competitors. This one's fairly easy to track.

7) Customer retention: We track retention and graduation rate data as well, and new models include comparison adjustments depending on the type of students we have (regression analyses based on ACT and Pell data as well as "frontier" analyses based on similar data). In short, we should be able to track this one for TUG. G&PS might be harder but it also doable.

8) Customer profitability: We currently track average net income from each student. But we could probably do a lot more here. Do we follow the typical business practice of determining which customers are likely to do what sorts of things (enroll at certain financial aid levels, persist to what stages of college, enter what fields, participate in which programs, spend money on which ancillary offerings such as on-campus housing and off-campus programs, etc.)? Not that I know of.

9) Customer satisfaction: Our alumni survey could be better, but we track a lot of this data via CIRP, SSI, NSSE, etc.

10) Employee satisfaction: We have faculty climate surveys and have occasionally participated in the Christianity Today employee satisfaction survey, but I'm not sure how helpful these processes are.

11) Employee retention: We have such low turnover, I'm not sure how helpful this would be, but perhaps it would be worth tracking.

12) Employee productivity: I'm not sure we do anything on this one, except perhaps if we calculated cost per credit hour generated.

To summarize, the list might have some relevance to an institution like JBU, but it might involve some significant effort to include all of these elements.