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We’ll Help You Strengthen Your Financial Position
Bridging Healthcare and Higher Education with a broader perspective, Kaufman Hall offers leaders a range of expertise and solutions to optimize performance and organizational decision making and sustained financial performance. We’ve helped colleges, universities, academic medical centers, schools of nursing, and allied health across the nation with plans to adjust to higher education’s rapidly changing environment.
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Higher Education Expertise and Services We Provide
Strategic and Academic Program Planning
Grow and Diversify Revenues Through Online and Non-traditional Academic Programs
Besides facilitating multi-year institutional strategic plans, we help universities examine current models and explore opportunities to diversify curricula, modalities, and revenues, such as through online and open learning and corporate partnerships. Attracting new students through innovative programs and alternative revenue sources can help grow institutions’ financial positions over time.
Operations
Aligning People, Processes, and Information to Drive Transformative Change
Kaufman Hall partners with institutions and administrative units to assess and design an optimized future state administrative model, including organizational design, staffing numbers, operating models, and leading practice business processes. We support our clients in breaking down silos, maximizing collaboration, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and minimizing duplication of efforts.
Financials
Structure Financial Processes for Optimal Financial Decision Making
We have assessed current practices for resource deployment across the strategic planning, financial planning, capital planning and budgeting, operating budget, and year-end forecasting processes and recommended scope, participants, governance, data requirements, timing, and technical support for each. We take a holistic approach that clearly defines the points of integration between each financial process to establish a single decision-making framework that is both effective and efficient.
Partnerships
Leverage Creative Partnerships to Strengthen Business Models
We believe that every transaction or partnership is premised on a broader underlying strategy. We work with you to understand your objectives and ensure that your mission, vision, and values guide your journey toward finding the right partner. Our team delivers everything from board education, development of key terms and negotiation of agreements, to assisting in the due diligence process and supporting the transaction close.
Real Estate Advisory
There are approximately 4,700 degree granting higher education institutions in the U.S., of which approximately two-thirds are four-year institutions. These institutions provide education for over 21 million students, or approximately 5 percent of the U.S. population. Over the last decade, due to technological transformation as well as a changing overall job market, Higher Education institutions are facing unprecedented challenges to their traditional business models. This is playing out with a backdrop of aging facilities, evolving physical plant needs and growing pressures on historic funding sources.
We provide advisory services related to how real estate assets could be owned and/or developed. If appropriate, we will provide transaction services related for new real estate development projects and the monetization of existing core and non-core real estate holdings.
Higher Education Practice Leaders
Jason Sussman has provided planning and financial advisory services for healthcare providers and higher education institutions nationwide for more than 35 years. He is a leader in Kaufman Hall’s Strategic and Financial Planning practice.
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Larenda Mielke is a Senior Vice President in the Higher Education division of Kaufman Hall’s Strategic and Financial Planning practice. She has extensive leadership experience in higher education in the areas of strategy, curriculum and program development, and more.
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Gaby Hawat is a Senior Vice President at Kaufman Hall in the firm’s Higher Education Practice. He develops strategies that help institutions tackle their current challenges in higher education.
Erik Kahill is a Vice President with Kaufman Hall and a member of the firm’s Higher Education practice. Erik brings a detailed understanding of higher education and expertise in enrollment and retention, institutional expenditures, and the use of data and dashboards to drive sustainable growth and strategy.
Webinar
Beyond the Outlooks: Our Second Annual Conversation with the Rating Agencies Webinar
Watch higher education sector leaders from Fitch Ratings, Moody’s Investors Service, and S&P Global Ratings for an in-depth conversation on trends affecting rating actions in higher education today.
Higher Education Featured Insights
Blog
Advancement and Strategic Growth
To fully capture the benefits of changes in institutional advancement, leadership should focus on two questions. Do we have the datasets and analytics needed to measure donor potential and engagement in an effective way? And have we structured our advancement office to best support its productivity and effectiveness?
Blog
Laying the Groundwork for Strategic Growth
Blog
Financial Literacy and Strategic Financial Planning
Blog
How to Promote Financial Literacy Within Your Institution
Higher Education Insights
Kaufman Hall offers college and university leaders a range of resources and solutions to optimize performance and organizational decision making and sustained financial performance.