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Initiatives

Making Opportunity Affordable
The Delta Project is a partner in the national Making Opportunity Affordable (MOA) initiative, sponsored by the Lumina Foundation on Education and managed by Jobs for the Future. MOA aims to improve cost effectiveness and increase productivity in higher education, in order to meet national needs to increase higher education degree attainment without sacrificing access or quality. The initiative strives to identify and promote effective strategies for managing costs while improving degree attainment, with a particular focus on state policy makers and public institutions. One of the initiatives’ goals is to support in the development of data-driven ways to improve accountability for college and university spending. 

Investing in Student Success Initiative
This goal of this project is to help link college attainment, learning and equity with solid data that connects costs with concrete results, such as persistence, retention and graduation. In 2007-2008, we will be working with a pilot group of institutions that have a proven track record of increasing student success by focusing on increasing success for first-year students.  The pilot effort is designed to add analyses of costs, in particular spending in relation to results, to the research literature on ways to invest in student success.  It is hoped that the methodology for analyzing costs in relation to student success will allow these evaluations to become more routine, to promote increased investment in interventions that increase student learning results.  Results should be available in the Fall of 2008.  Assuming the pilot is successful, the program will be expanded to broader national audiences in the second year. 

National Association of System Heads (NASH), Program on Cost Management
The NASH Program on Cost Management is one element of the larger Access and Success Initiative (ASI). This voluntary initiative, conducted in partnership with the Education Trust, brings participating system heads and their leadership teams together to learn from each other and from outside experts on critical action steps, including setting goals, talking with the public, identifying and mounting powerful action strategies, and reporting progress. 

The Cost Management program seeks to improve system capacity to use scarce resources to enhance student access and success, including:

• Learning from one another about successful initiatives to contain spending;
• Improving use of comparative and trend data about changes in revenues and in spending;
• Identifying trade-offs between different investment options, to focus on which strategies are most cost-effective in containing costs and increasing student access and success;
• Developing metrics for measuring productivity that focus on spending in relation to access and degree attainment;
• Improving the integration of academic and fiscal planning, with a particular focus on strategies for managing faculty turnover;
• Framing the language of public debate about higher education finance, through attention to internal and external accountability for spending, and attention to public perceptions and policy maker concerns about higher education spending and productivity.
• Improving public governing board understanding of revenues and expenditures, and of system spending patterns, as those relate to their responsibilities for oversight and for system-level strategic planning.