SCUP is, BTW, collecting links to economic impact or community impact reports. You can see the 14 we have found so far here. Please use this simple online form to share any other such links you know of. Thanks.

We discovered this economic impact report while we were looking for news on the Iowa website about the $152M FEMA grant it just received to rebuild from its flooding. We didn't find much yet, just this, but when we do we will share it. The following language begins the executive summary of the report:

Statewide expenditures by the University of Iowa and related constituencies totaled $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2008-09. The University affected business volume in Iowa in two ways:

1. Direct expenditures for goods and services by the University, its employees, students, and visitors. This supported local businesses, which in turn employed local individuals to sell the goods and provide the services that University constituencies needed.

2. Induced or indirect spending within the state of Iowa. The businesses and individuals that received direct expenditures re-spent this money within the state, thus creating the need for even more jobs.

As a result of expenditures on goods and services by the University, the overall economic impact of all the University’s operations on the state of Iowa in FY 2008-09 was $6.0 billion ($2.6 billion direct impact and $3.4 billion indirect).

The Chronicle of Higher Education has obtained and published an internal Texas A&M University System report "Academic Financial Data Compilation FY 2009."  The system's chancellor concludes that "the faculty in each university generate revenue in excess of their payroll costs. The TAMU report is here (PDF). The Chronicle's coverage of it is here.

[The report] lists how much each faculty member in the 11-campus system generated by teaching during the 2008-9 academic year. The faculty member's salary and estimated cost of benefits are subtracted from that amount.

The teaching revenue is calculated by adding tuition paid by students—larger classes generate more tuition dollars—and factors in the weighted value for semester credit hours of different types and levels of courses. Those weighted values are used to determine state financial support (for instance, hours spent teaching graduate courses are generally weighted more heavily than those spent teaching undergraduates).

Another column in the report shows how much faculty members generated in research grants, but that figure is not factored into the bottom-line total for each person.

More and more, Sedlacek said, top business officers from the 11 colleges--who function as CEOs of each college, essentially--were asking for better access to critical data they needed to make decisions. "They wanted metrics at their fingertips," Sedlacek said, such as faculty and student retention numbers, enrollment rates, and expenditures. "A lot of this is very hard information to get. It takes a lot of time." Often, by the time the data can be collected and verified, she said, the numbers are out of date.

In the spring of 2007, the KPI committee decided to address the need by purchasing an enterprise BI tool. But after spending eight months implementing the software, training the KPI technical team, and holding various meetings, "we didn't have much to show," Sedlacek said.