This process enables the leadership team to look systematically and efficiently at every driver of expense and potential revenue, benchmark the school’s performance against relevant peers, and use the results of that benchmarking to thoughtfully identify opportunities to meaningfully affect the need to increase tuition.

Schools that have effectively utilized this approach, including Greenhill School in Dallas, and St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, MA. Both schools were motivated by concerns of maximizing both their accessibility to mission-appropriate students and also their sustainability. The approach is a highly collaborative one in which school leaders gain insights from evaluating benchmarking information in the areas of Net Tuition, Non-Tuition Revenue, Staffing and Compensation, and Purchased Goods and Services. They gain an understanding of how enhancing their relative benchmarking performance can yield hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in benefits, and of proven approaches to capture these benefits. They can then make conscious choices to tackle areas they believe to be most advantageous for their schools.

Once leaders gain familiarity with the approach, they eagerly embrace it. At St. John’s Prep, the original improvement goal was $6 million over five years. Ultimately, the plan exceeded it with $9 million in identified benefits over five years.