Bain has decades of experience helping higher educational institutions of all types on strategic issues such as performance improvement, operating efficiency, cost management and reduction, growth strategy, organizational effectiveness and funding strategy.
Universities are reacting with determination and creativity to the new challenges they face. Budget deficits have mushroomed following sudden declines in endowment values, deep cuts in state education funding and limits on tuition increases that can be passed along to already financially burdened students and families. All these trends are making the operating environment for universities particularly difficult. These pressures are placing core academic missions of teaching, research and outreach at increasing risk. That has created a
need to create deficit-planning scenarios. As a result:
- Schools are closely examining their operations and organizations to determine which administrative support functions, and redundancies, are diverting scarce resources away from higher education's core purpose.
- They're also finding ways to rationalize traditionally decentralized and highly complex organization structures; ones whose governance processes often produce isolated organizational entities, with widely disparate service levels and unworkable spans of control.
Bain has
decades of experience working with both for-profit and nonprofit universities, public and private, in the US and internationally and with numerous academic medical centers. Among recent university clients we have served:
- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where we helped UNC identify more than $85 million in cost savings options (5 percent of operating budget) across a range of administrative functions. Read our final report on the University's site.
- An Ivy League university, where we have launched a program targeting more than $90 million in annual administrative cost savings, plus identified significant alternative revenue growth opportunities.
