Lowering the cost of education is a constant reframe from political leaders and associated boards. There were numerous initiatives we undertook to reduce the cost of higher education in Georgia. Of course, we had to do that with little funding sometimes and no funding most of the time.
Transfer Articulation
One of the first projects we were involved with is transfer articulation. When I started at USG, transfer articulation was a manual, grossly inefficient process, without common standards performed by many of who had varying degrees of commitment to student success. What a recipe for success!
Governor Nathan Deal established the Alliance of Education Agency Heads in 2009 to accelerate high school and university graduation rates. Automated transfer articulation was an important component of the project. Lynne Weisenback was the USG lead on the project and my team was doing all of the programing as it related to the 36 public universities.
Over a couple of years, USG ITS built an automated transfer portal between more than 2,200 institutions and all of their courses. Executive Directors Karen Nunn and Beverly Norwood‘s teams did most of the work behind the scenes. This greatly accelerated transfer articulation and accelerated student success. It also lowered the cost of higher education as transfer articulation became much more much more efficient and predictable.
Multi Institution Course Registration
Once we had transfer articulation working, we started work on multi-institution course registration. One of the deterrents to students success was the lack of course availability. Required courses would fill at one university delaying student progress on their degree plan when the same course was available at a USG institution that was guaranteed to count. The solution was to build in all of the course registration systems an ability to register for the course in multiple institutions and to automatically and seamlessly transfer the grade back to the parent university. This was another project for Executive Directors Karen Nunn and Beverly Norwood‘s teams and over time, this functionality allowed more than 28,000 students to stay on schedule and graduate faster between 2011 and 2015.
In 2012, this project would win the Georgia Technology Innovation Award.
Consolidation
Chancellor Hank Huckaby was committed to lowering the cost of higher education rationally through consolidation. Consolidation creates economies of scale. I have known since my ACE Fellow days that colleges and universities with less than 4,000 – 8,000 students are financially suspect unless they have unusually large endowments. The 2008 Recession had exposed the weak and often unsustainably financial foundation of a number of USG institutions. The larger, more profitable institutions were covering for the smaller, less viable institutions. Chancellor Huckaby appointed Shelley Nickels to lead the initiative and I was assigned to the executive committee given that about two-thirds of 800 consolidation tasks were IT.
There are always winners and losers in a consolidation.
Regardless of how hard everyone tried, there are always winners and losers in a consolidation. Everyone tried very hard to be as fair and objective as possible. It was a documented and repeatable process. We tracked everything in a massive spreadsheet. A large and diverse executive committee met weekly to openly discuss the consolidations and associated decisions. But hard decisions have to be made and inevitably those decisions are misunderstood or perceived differently.
Our goal was to take the best of institution A and the best of institution B and form a new institution C. In shorthand, A + B = C. That did occur but rarely. Normally, a weak institution was being merged with a much larger university. In this case, A+B = A. We made an honest but time-limited attempt to consolidate business processes and technology stacks through shared governance. While time heals all wounds, some wounds take a long time to heal. Consolidation was such a wound.
I started work at USG with 36 universities or colleges. I left with 31 universities or colleges. At our peak, we were executing three consolidations involving six organizations at the same time. These consolidations were carried out without funding for the most part. It was just a prioritized new project. While there was a celebratory party in 2015, consolidations would continue after my departure as CIO.
Announce consolidation savings 18-24 months after the consolidation occurs and not before.
There were mistakes made.
- The system tried to predict future savings at 20%. Given how sensitive a consolidation is, this arbitrary goal just created unnecessary pressure. The savings will occur in 18-24 months organically.
- The system excluded some of the weakest organizations because it was not politically reasonable to consolidate those institutions. Those institutions are still not consolidated.
- Finally, the system consolidations stopped. I (and others) thought we would get to 16-20 institutions. USG stopped at 26.
Galileo and College Affordability
GALILEO, Georgia’s virtual library system reported to me from 2009 until 2014. The team was led by the strategic and thoughtful Merryll Penson who had been working for decades to advance library services in the state of Georgia. She, her team, and the institutional librarians had built a system serving over 2,000 institutions with more than 14 million holdings. The digital component of the system had more than 450,000,000 searches and 30,000,000 articles downloaded in 2013. While GALILEO was beloved by students, faculty, and administrators alike, Merryll thought they could do more.
We started an initiative to lower the cost of higher education by lowering the cost of textbooks. The initiative focused on the use of common domain electronic textbooks for core courses. The college affordability initiative was voluntary and involved faculty grants for course conversation. We found a significant number of willing allies and faculty members.
The marketing campaign around this campaign was particularly effective. It featured a monthly article with a faculty member on the cover in a power pose with a quote, “I just saved my students $100,000 this year.” The marketing campaign was so effective that it caught Governor Deal‘s attention and he provided additional funding.
The program is still running today.
GeorgiaFirst and GeorgiaBest
GeorgiaFirst was the shared service instance of the PeopleSoft financial instance. Running one instance instead of 32 instances of software was significantly more cost effective than 32 separate instances with differing business processes. Like many software packages, this software became customized over time. This increased the cost of maintaining the software as every time PeopleSoft issued a patch, ITS would have to test and patch all the customizations. Oftentimes, the patch would implement already existing functionality that had been deployed through custom code. In addition to costing an ever increasing amount of funding, it also delayed the deployment of new functionality. Over time, the code became a mess.
Executive Director David Nisbet and his team led a yearlong partnership with Oracle to reduce the PeopleSoft customization by 75%. Less customization means less cost and time to deploy new functionality. This was another initiative executed at no additional resource cost other than time.
GeorgiaBest was the shared services instance of the Ellucian Banner student information system and associated student success systems. Executive Director Karen Nunn led this team. This system was not as centralized as PeopleSoft Financials and thus our focus was on growing adoption of the shared services instance. The reasons were numerous:
- It was more expensive to run separate instances;
- Each individual institution could only hire 1-2 banner developers and thus they became single points of failure and especially so if they ever got sick, went on leave, or were hired away – you know – the normal things in life. And,
- Each instance was customized.
As discussed above, the transition from being solely state funded to being successful at selling services to customers who can say yea or nay was ultimately successful.
If you are progressing through this website sequentially, the next chapter is how not to do shared services. I hesitated on including this chapter but there are too many lessons to be learned from this ongoing disaster.