NACUBO's Matt Hamill completes a year's worth of Business Officer articles in the series, Catalyst for Change: The Economic Downturn Reshapes Higher Education. Read this latest article here; see links to all the articles in the series here.

To be sure, the recession has forced most colleges and universities to broadly reexamine themselves in an effort to reduce costs and adjust to rapidly changing enrollment patterns. Earlier articles in this series have examined institutional actions resulting from these internal initiatives. As Martin Van Der Werf, former director, Chronicle Research Services, Washington, D.C., observed in the March 2010 Business Officer article, “Regular, Express, or Online,” the changes are too broad and too fundamental to attribute to current economic conditions. “There is a rethinking of the way education is being delivered,” he says, “but I don't know if the financial crisis could be isolated as a single factor producing these changes. The financial crisis is encouraging students and families to question what they were already questioning, such as the delivery model, the cost of college, and the difficulty in obtaining a degree. The recession is merely accentuating what people were already thinking.”

Modified practices. The last several years have seen a wide variety of changes to institutional practices in the areas of resource allocation, budgeting, and budget management, but we have also witnessed more significant changes in educational delivery models. This array of initiatives shares one central goal: to drive down students' cost of getting a degree by taking significant costs out of the model. Examples of creative delivery models include online learning incorporated into the curriculum, adoption of three-year bachelor's degree programs, and programs created to blend an associate degree within a four-year program.

Other initiatives have expanded the use of consortia mechanisms to streamline certain campus functions, such as library services, information technology, and cooperative purchasing. Generally, these programs can be successful because of their cost-saving potential, without fundamentally changing what is unique about each participating institution. Another strategy employed by many institutions has been to adjust the price that students pay by revising their overall pricing and financial aid strategies, and their associated budgets.