TimTalks: Notre Dame Student Affairs Unit Economics

So in a prior video we talked about the professor as the unit in the academy side of Notre Dame. What's the unit on the student affairs side of Notre Dame? Well, that customer is the student. So the student is the unit in student affairs. Now, as we mentioned, we have a 9 to 1 student to faculty ratio and a 4 to 1 student to staff ratio. So in student affairs, we're going to focus a lot more on this. On this four to one. So what are we trying to do? What is success for a student? Success for a student is admitting the right people into ND who have a passion to solve one of the big unmet needs in the world for family, planet or parish. And you have the top 1% smart skinness and grit to be able to go and successfully do that as part of the Indy family. So we admit a student, we have them on campus for four years further developing mind, body, spirit, and then we unleash them into the endy family. And then the endy family together rose together for family planet Parish, the unit of our society on which we are a force for good. So here you again. You can look at how you're doing. Right. So does it work? Winning metric zero. Right. Does it work? Winning metric one. Are the students happy? Do they tell you they're happy? Well, are we asking them net promoter scores for all of our staffers and all of what we show the student. Do they. Do they tell you they're happy based on your retention asymptotes? So what services are they using that are provided them on campus in developing mind, body, spirit? 3. Then it's unit economics. So what do we invest in a student and how does that yield way more value than the cost of serving them? And then how do we scale that up? Now what's interesting is we're choosing not to scale up past 8,500 undergrads. That's a fixed number. So we don't have to go be organized to grow fast. We just have to be organized to do the best we can for the 8,500 undergrads that we have. So if you, if you look at these things right, you got to understand what you're trying to do. So we know what we try to do. Recruit great students, developing mind, body, spirit, unleash in the Indy family and help them grow with everybody else on family, planet and parish. So it gets really interesting to know how to iterate. If you think about this model. So you say, okay, what is, what are all these staffers doing? So what are all the Faculty doing first. So are students happy with their courses? Courses are probably 75% of their waking time as a student. Are those courses and those professors inspiring these students who come in really bright eyed to be a force for good in the world? How are we doing in our coursework at helping them develop mind, body, spirit? So we have what's called SIF scores, the course evaluation form scores, that's kind of the equivalent of nps. So we should look at those questions and make sure those questions are cutting to the heart of how well prepared these courses and professors are helping helping our students get more prepared in mind, body, spirit. So if a professor is given way too much homework and, and helping the academic side of the mind but is causing that student to suffer in mental health, then we've hurt versus help that student. So let's make sure we ask the right questions about homework load, et cetera. Are the courses relevant to the real world? Right. So if you care about family and you care about housing and affordable housing, right. Are you, are those courses providing real world projects, connecting with the ND family who's working in housing so that you can be inspired about how to develop your skills to help with housing for families? So this is a big one because you can't fix what you don't measure. So we already measure. So let's make sure we're measuring the right stuff and let's understand if the courses are delivering what we want them to do. Then let's look at all the other staffers at Indy. So for every student there's effectively 0.25 staffers. So let's look at all of those staffers in the organization and do the students use those services from those staffers and how impactful per dollar of spend are those staffers on helping students develop mind, body, spirit? If something's high importance to students but not performing on an MPS basis or is not getting adoption, then it's time to measure, iterate, measure, iterate, measure, iterate and improve it. So for example, one area that students tell me is out of line is every student gets an academic advisor to help them with course selection. But one third of students are already reactively using mental health services at Indy, which means everybody should get proactive mental health coaching. But we have tons of staffers spent on academic counseling. But we have very few staffers spent on mental health counseling and coaching. So those are the kind of things that will come out of this analysis. What matters most to the students in helping them develop mind, body, spirit and where does that map to our spend level resourcing and how does that map to how satisfied the students are? So if we offer a service and only 5% of the students know about it, our retention, and very few stick around and use it over and over again, then we're going to show very bad retention. So we're surveying them. On the academic side, let's survey them with nps. On the services side, let's look at usage and retention of each service that staffers are providing. That will tell us where our bottlenecks are on unit economics. Let's look at where we're spending the money versus what the students really care about. That'll highlight some places where we can probably reallocate resources. And then the great news is we have a fixed number of students, so we have a fixed number of staffers. So it's really about getting those staffers best organized to help the students thrive while they're on campus. Now what's interesting too for Notre Dame is most universities, since they're focused inward on developing knowledge or, you know, their mission is very different. Notre Dame's to be a force for good. With Notre Dame's mission to be a force for good, it's not just the student that matters, but it's actually every member of the Indy family that matters today. The Indy family. There's a little bit of stuff, a little bit of resources spent on helping the Indy family grow together. There's a lot of resources spent on helping the Andy family give financially back to the university. But I think it'd be really interesting to do a similar NPS score for the Indy family. So hey, we have somebody for four years on campus helping them develop mindbodyspirit. What are we doing to help those Notre Dame alums be a force for good in their life? How are we helping them move up in their careers and additional opportunities to to get ever more responsibility? How are we helping them connect with other alums to work on unmet needs and family plan and parish? I think if we do that analysis, we'll see we got lots of resources spent on alums, but right now it's more about having those alums give back financially versus going to those alums and saying how can we help you be a force for good? And looking for matches within the Indy family for people also working on common interests in unmet needs for family planet and parish.