College Strategic Compass Tutorial: Full-time staff, Full-time faculty, part-time faculty & staff

Hi, it's Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability. This tutorial on the College Strategic Compass from Perspective Data Science will cover these modules: full-time staff, full-time faculty, part-time faculty and staff. The data used in the Strategic Compass comes from a college's audited financial statements, its IRS Form 990s, and its IPEDS data submissions to the National Center for Education Statistics. The time period is from 2016 to 2023-24. Perspective Data Science uses an AI technology that captures images of the financial statements and 990s and converts those through an optical character recognition program. Those data points become the basis for all of the Perspective Data Science products available. Hey, let's take a look at full-time staff, full-time faculty, and part-time faculty and staff. So in general, when you see a blue color on the strategic compass, it means the value is lower than the peer group or than the other group. And when you see a red indicator, it is higher than its comparison group. And we can take a quick look at our demo college here. And again, the school filters included a statistically determined set of peer colleges. And we can look at full-time non-instructional staff, which is what we're looking at here. Full-time staff will also be looking at full-time faculty and part-time faculty and staff during this demo. We can see that our demo college is a little below the recommended or expected staff level based on the peer group, a little bit low also on the compensation with the benefits component added in. It's a standard benefits component as part of the, as part of the assumptions made, and we can see it's a little bit lower than the expected for for the peer group, and we can see the difference over here. So a noteworthy difference on the total non-instructional staff, about $1.2 million to the good for this demo college. We can go down then and look at librarians, curators, archivists, and others. And these are the occupational codes that are listed. And we can see our demo college is about 13 higher than what the expected peer group number would be. Compensation is a little bit higher than the peer group. and that's to the about $100,000 looks like to the demo college to their, to their negative in comparison with the peer group. As we look on down, we're looking for big differences. Nothing right through here. We can look at student and academic affairs and other educational services, and we can see that our demo college is quite a bit higher than the peer college group that we're looking at. We can look at management and see management is quite a bit lower. In terms of full-time staffing, non-academic staffing. We can also see the compensation is substantially lower than the peer group, and we can see that the college is ahead about $3 million and change in that category. On business and financial operations, we can see based on the peer group, our demo college is quite a bit higher, compensation is quite a bit higher, and you can again see that this college is higher than its peer group. If they're looking for opportunities to save, this might be an area to look. And as we look down the rest of the group, maybe we look at services and you can see the, the occupational codes here. You can look those up through a variety of services and we can see that the college pays a little bit less and they are a little bit above $170,000 above what their peer group is. And then it looks like office and administrative support is considerably higher, compensated a little bit lower, and to the good of the college of about $900,000. Let's take it then and take a look at the same kind of analysis, same group, full-time staff, and let's look at the data trends from 2014 through 2024, and 2023 sometimes is when the data is reported through so far. And we can see that our demo college, which is in the red line, is really consistent early on and then seems to jump all over the place in terms of, of non-academic full-time staffing. What does that mean? That means it provides you a chance with the opportunity to ask questions about why. You can go back to this table up here and and get a little bit of a handle on why that might be the case in some of these categories where there are big discrepancies. But this shows you the year-to-year variation. When we go down farther, we can look at non-instructional staff size trends. Delete that last part. We can look at this chart as a per-student value. We can also look at it as raw values or the total salary outlays. And again, we see that our demo college has, for the most part, trended down over the 10 or so years in the reporting period. We scroll down and we look at staff sizes, and again, we can look at per student, which is a more standard comparison, and our demo college has been consistently below the peer group. Again, the demo college is red, the peer group is blue. We can also look at the raw numbers, and again, we see that our college started off with much higher staff sizes and has shrunken considerably over the going years. Where has that come from? Again, probably that information lies in this table up here. And then finally, let's take a look at the salary trends. And we have non-inflation adjusted, so the inflation is not taken into account here. And we can see that the salary trends have trended upward significantly until about 2021, and they have plummeted since then. You can see that the peer group, as you would expect, is a smoother line across those 30 or so colleges that are in the peer group. But it gives you a chance to compare where an individual college is, your college is, with a peer group that is associated with your college. Let's move on then and take a look at full-time faculty. You're gonna see the same kind of data. So we're gonna go through the same analysis in a little bit briefer detail, and we're looking for big gaps. Not much here. Associate professor seems to be a little bit low on our demo college. Their compensation is a little bit high. You can see the difference to their good. So they have a higher salary for fewer folks, a little bit of a gap at the assistant professor level. And as we scroll down, more of a gap when you bring both the full and associate professors together. You can see the compensation, you can see the difference, again, to the good of our college for the most part. And the same thing, you know, not much else there. Let's take a look at the trends, similar to what we saw with non-faculty, non-academic full-time staff. We can look at their per-student values. We can look at the raw values, same trend we saw before. And we can also go down and look at that same per-student value for faculty size trends. There's per-student again bouncing over the, over the years reported, and again a dramatic drop over the time frame included. And we can see the same pattern for the part-time faculty and staff. You can look at this. I'll pause for a moment while you look at the data pieces as I go through it. No big differences between the part-time staff and expected staff really anywhere across this entire list. And then as we scroll down to the bottom, again, you can see the pattern is all over at the per-student level. Which is what we have here. We can also do the count, number of part-time, and again, our college just seems to be inconsistently staffed, I guess is the best way to look at it. Hi, I'm Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability. This tutorial on the College Strategic Compass comes from Perspective Data Science and will cover these 3 modules. Full-time staff, full-time faculty, and part-time faculty and staff. The data used in the Strategic Compass comes from a college's audited financial statements, its IRS 990 forms, and its IPEDS data submissions to the National Center for Education Statistics. The time period covered in the app is from 2016 to 2023, with some colleges covered for 2024. Perspective Data Science uses an AI technology that captures images of the financial statements and 990s and converts those to an optical character recognition program. Those data points become the basis for all of the prospective data science products available. Let's take a look at full-time staff, full-time faculty, and part-time faculty and staff in the Strategic Compass. So how can we use So how can you use the College Financial Compass? There are 3 basic ways. You can compare your financial, staffing, admissions data, and much, much more with either a statistically similar peer group or your own proximate peer group. Number 2, you can look at the 8-year, at least 8-year trends to learn how others have performed in that same period. And look at where you have done well and maybe where you have done less well than those peers. And you can do those comparisons across 16 different reports on your college's and the peer group's college's operations from 2016 through 2023 to 2024. Thanks for making time to watch the College Strategic Compass tutorial. Thanks for making time to watch the College Strategic Compass tutorial for full-time staff, full-time faculty, part-time faculty and staff. This is one in a series of 7 feature and benefit tutorials on the Strategic Compass. For College Viability, I'm Gary Stocker.