Rice, the University President asked your group to give her a report (no more than five pages in additional to the cover page) answering her questions as well as providing recommendations about the expansion plan. Questions are not necessarily in the order as presented.

1.What activities does the advising department perform?

2.How does the department spend its resources on these activities?

3.Why is COBAA's performance poor relative to benchmarks?

4.How can COBAA improve Bay State's performance regarding credit hours at graduation, FTF time to graduation, and student satisfaction with advising?

5.Should the request for an increase in the base budget be funded? Explain.

6.Make a budget for the 2008 academic year, with specific suggestions about how to cut recurring operating costs by (at least) 15% while achieving the unit's mission.

Group project: Academic Advising at Bay State An introduction to the case This case is based loosely on over 40 years of experience with a state university system. The name and size of the state system, metrics, and financial data have been changed, but the scenario describes some of the actual conditions that existed in one advising operation. BAY STATE UNIVERSITY is part of a five-campus public state university system established by the state legislature in 1926. The mission of the state university system is to provide educational opportunity to students who graduate in the top 20% of their public high schools. Tuition is low, with the state paying approximately 80% of the cost of education while students pay the remaining 20%. The state legislature budgets for the university system and evaluates the performance of each campus by monitoring the percent of the state's graduating seniors who apply, the average GPA and SAT scores of the incoming class, the student retention rate, the average time to graduation, the average units (credit hours) accumulated at graduation, and various capacity ratios (students to full-time faculty, percent utilization of buildings, etc.). Table 1 contains a summary of key statistics for the five campuses in the system for 2007. Concerned with state legislative cutbacks to the state university system and facing increasing accountability for graduation rates and capacity utilization, university administrators charged each university president in the system to improve results on vital performance measures while reducing recurring operating costs by 15%. BAY STATE UNIVERSITY Located in a major metropolitan area, Bay State has an enrollment of approximately 39,000 fulland part-time students, correlating to 28,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) students. Bay State's average time to graduation for first-time freshmen has risen from 4.7 years to six years. The student retention rate, measured by the percentage of incoming students who ultimately graduate from Bay State, has fallen from a high of 72% in the late 1970s to 38% in 2007. Additionally, students only have to amass 124 semester credit hours to graduate, yet the average number of credit hours for a graduating senior at Bay State is 147. Table 2 contains information about the school's performance over the past 10 years. While many factors contribute to Bay State's results, academic advising shares some responsibility. The mission statement for the academic advisement function at Bay State is: \"Academic Advisement (AA) exists to help students understand and comply with their degree requirements so they reach their educational goals in the most efficient and timely manner possible.\" Results in Table 2 show that students certainly don't reach their goals in an efficient and timely manner. Additionally, Bay State students have complained to the president about the performance of AA in many departments. OUTSIDE CONSULTANTS 1 Concerned with Bay State's performance, Brenda Rice, the university president, hired outside consultants in early 2007 to review the university's advising operations. The consultants collected information from university institutional research, students, outside benchmark institutions, and local feeder high schools and community colleges. Table 3 displays a summary of the information the consultants compiled. Students gave AA an average score of 4.0 on a seven-point scale. The survey results demonstrate wide variation in the level of satisfaction with AA within Bay State's various colleges. Scores show that the College of Arts, Media, and Communication (AMC) and College of Education are performing advisement services significantly better than the College of Business (COB), College of Computer Science and Engineering, and College of Science and Mathematics. The last two columns in Table 3 show that these differences aren't related to the amount of money spent on advising or the quantity of the advising staff. The consultants also analyzed free-form survey comments and found that students in colleges with low advisement satisfaction scores: Lack knowledge of their degree program requirements. Feel that advisors did not help them identify proper classes to reach their educational goals. Had their degree recording postponed because advisors lost their paperwork for substitutions and waivers. Are frustrated about their ability to see an advisor in a timely fashion. Are dissatisfied with group advisement. Further, in focus groups, students pinpoint poor advising as a major cause of their excess units and time to graduation. The consultants analyzed the AA activities performed by the colleges. They conducted interviews, observed employees of the various advising offices, and identified 13 major activities. Table 4 provides a brief description and performance measures for each activity. For benchmarking purposes, the consultants provided performance data for similar activities (where available) from other campuses in the state university system considered to be better at advising than Bay State (see Table 5). For internal comparisons, the consultants used activity-based costing (ABC) techniques to determine the cost of the activities performed by the Colleges of AMC and Education (see Table 6). COLLEGE OF BUSINESS During a discussion with the University Budget Committee (UBC) about the budget requests from various parts of the school, Rice commented on the initiatives of the College of Business Academic Advising (COBAA) department, saying, \"I support the ideas behind the COBAA initiatives. It's important for us to address student complaints, offer internship opportunities, and help our students understand what courses count toward their degree. But COBAA's performance is less than satisfactory. If we are to fund any of these additional activities, they must find ways to improve performance while reducing operating costs. I would like to table this discussion and establish a task force to look at their advising operations.\" 2 Rice's goal for the task force is to help the COB's associate dean and AA manager manage operations and costs strategically. You are a member of that task force. Rice wants some questions answered by the task force: 1. What activities does the advising department perform? 2. How does the department spend its resources on these activities? 3. Why is COBAA's performance poor relative to benchmarks? 4. How can COBAA improve Bay State's performance regarding credit hours at graduation, FTF time to graduation, and student satisfaction with advising? Rice would also like the task force to make a budget recommendation for the 2008 academic year, with specific suggestions about how to cut recurring operating costs by 15% while achieving the unit's mission. COBAA's base budget request for 2008 is provided in Table 7. Table 8 contains details of the COB's advising activities that the advising staff put together for further analysis, and Table 9 contains the performance evaluations of the individual activities, where available. In addition to the base budget request in Table 7, COB's advising manager is requesting that your task force also recommend an increase in the base budget to cover the following items: 1. The hiring of an ombudsman to take students' complaints and assist students in resolving their issues. The primary focus would be on lost paperwork, failure to meet deadlines for adding and dropping classes, ability to maintain financial aid with unit reductions, help in arranging makeup work for missed classes, and finding space in open classes. The recurring cost of this activity would be approximately $67,000, which includes salary, benefits, and office expenses for another employee. 2. The development of glossy brochures for each option and major to be distributed to high school and community college students to assist outreach activities. These brochures should cost approximately $75,000 in the upcoming year to develop and print; afterwards, the annual cost should be between $25,000 and $30,000 to replenish stock. 3. Expansion of A1 activities by 25% to include group sessions on the substitution and waiver process. This should benefit all students who are cross-enrolled in another university, attending a study abroad program, or have transferred. This cost could be partially offset by eliminating the review of special substitution and waiver activities, work that seems to be duplicated by department chairs. 4. Coordinate with the Internship office to have firms offering internships attend the career fair with information about internship positions. This would create additional event costs of approximately $15,000. Students would benefit from the additional service. Required: Rice, the University President asked your group to give her a report (no more than five pages in additional to the cover page) answering her questions as well as providing recommendations about the expansion plan. Questions are not necessarily in the order as presented. 1. What activities does the advising department perform? 2. How does the department spend its resources on these activities? 3. Why is COBAA's performance poor relative to benchmarks? 4. How can COBAA improve Bay State's performance regarding credit hours at graduation, FTF time to graduation, and student satisfaction with advising? 3 5. Should the request for an increase in the base budget be funded? Explain. 6. Make a budget for the 2008 academic year, with specific suggestions about how to cut recurring operating costs by (at least) 15% while achieving the unit's mission. Instructor's suggestions: 1. This case is vague about the nature of the analysis required. Your group may approach the case with tools/analysis learned in the course or you may use other analysis. Regardless of the tools that you use for analysis purposes, it is important you move beyond technical analysis. You should approach the case from a strategic cost management perspective and make recommendations that focus on the mission of advising. Appropriate recommendations should address improving performance on metrics monitored by the state legislature. Recommendations should be based on data and analysis, not just \"gut\" feelings. 2. In answering questions and writing the report, your group should use information provided in the case as well as industry analysis, market analysis, cost analysis, and activity analysis, etc. It is important that your group move beyond technical analysis. Your group should approach the case from a strategic cost management perspective and make recommendations that focus on the suggested strategy. Appropriate recommendations should be based on data and analysis, not just \"gut\" feelings. 3. All your data and analysis must be supported by reliable source or your calculations. If you use software such as a spreadsheet program to perform analysis, the original file must be submitted as a separate file from the report file. You should utilize formula or analysis functions of the software in your file so that your results will be updated automatically if the information is changed. 4. When answering question 3, you may use Table 9 as a starting point for discussions. Think about if each activity aligns with mission statement and how well the performance was compared to University goals. 5. When answering question 5, you may analyze whether the initiatives proposed by COBAA align with mission statement and add values. 6. The report should consistently follow a professional style such as the APA style. You may use the following online resource for the APA style. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/1/) 7. The report should include an appendix stating each group member's contributions to the project. You may include additional appendices, if necessary. 4 5 6 7 8 9 10