By cross-referencing SOC and CIP codes, we determine the degree programs your competitors are offering, the occupations they are targeting, their delivery options, and the costs and ROI of their degrees.  We examine competitors’ web sites to inventory their offerings and capture alternative credentialing not available from IPEDS and other public sources.  We calculate total market demand and each school’s market share.

Drawing from our extensive data base of labor statistics, we help identify what professions and jobs will be in demand nationally, regionally, locally, and by industry, including annual openings, wages, and educational requisites.

We consult an array of professional, labor, industry, and accreditation resources so you can look into the future on how your programs might be affected by geodemographic, social, economic, technological, competitive, and other forces and what changes might occur to the roles your graduates will play and the skills and knowledge they will need.

We help you complete a systematic assessment of your current capabilities to design, deliver, and promote potential program areas, including studying how certain opportunities can optimize current resources, determining what capabilities you’ll need to develop, and evaluating whether or not the programs you’re considering will extend your brand and elevate your reputation.

Using our Program Development Prioritization Scorecard, we collaborate with you on rating and ranking your program opportunities, so you can settle on which have the strongest potential for success before moving into program and curriculum design.

We complete a deep dive into the design, performance trends, resources, positioning, reputation, and differentiated value of competitors for each academic program candidate that has advanced to this stage.

We seek out similar offerings at other universities and colleges that can serve as models for your program development, examining their curriculum structures, delivery options, targeted markets, partnerships, resources, positioning, and other features you can learn from and consider in planning.

We work closely with your planning team to define the student and organizational market segments your program will target, delineate key characteristics of each segment, and determine how your competitors are recruiting them.

We help delineate each market segment’s functional, affective, and motivational requirements, any constraints or barriers to access or participation, and preferences for the overall learning experience—and then create vivid personas that can drive design, marketing, and recruitment.

We create an inventory of the professional competencies and skills requisite for the occupations and careers related to each academic program, by mining the O*NET and other occupational databases, searching recommendations of professional, industry, and licensure associations, and collecting employment requirements from current job postings in your geographic region.

Your academic program planning team meets in a design charrette to synthesize the market, competitor and planning intelligence from the preceding activities and arrive at requirements for differentiating each program through its curriculum, delivery, educational experience, access, reputation, and other design considerations.

Guided by the Design Requirements, faculty and other planning team members build the curriculum, courses, instructional delivery, student experience, and other components necessary for institutional and accreditation approvals and for program implementation.

We collaborate with your planning team on how to situate the academic offering within the institution’s and academic enterprise’s current brand, where to craft brand extensions specific to the program, and the strategies to establish and build the program’s reputation among targeted markets, audiences, and stakeholders.

Development of a formal marketing and recruitment strategy, plan, and budget is integrated into the academic program planning model.  We work alongside you to create this marketing plan that targets each market segment according to its unique persona, builds the segmented recruitment funnel at each level of yield, and sets and attains the numbers of students you need for a successful program.

We apply a range of decision analytics to set the expected investment requirements, profitability, and ROI for each program candidate, conduct risk analyses, and run optimization models for resource deployment.  We assign a Program Profitability Index (PPI) score to each program, derived from its NPV calculation, so you can consider the relative value of each candidate against all the others.

We help you fully document the program’s expected performance using an interactive set of electronic templates customized for your internal review and approval requirements.  These templates generate multi-year operating pro formas across all major areas of implementation and performance (recruitment funnel, headcount enrollments, credit hour generation, gross and net income, and the like) as well as key performance indicators for monitoring success.

We assist you in translating project deliverables into presentations and materials that are used for internal reviews, institutional and accreditation approvals, and program implementation.