Do More with Less: 7 Strategic Advantages of Shared Services in Higher Education

College administrators wear many hats to ensure their institutions thrive. Stakeholders expect them to be visionaries, budget stewards, tech experts, and student champions. However, wearing too many hats can hinder the ability to meet more strategic and forward-thinking institutional demands, effectively diluting leadership capacity and outcomes. 

How can administrators remove some of those hats without losing control or spending more? 

How can they guide their institutions to achieve better outcomes with fewer resources?  

At the 2024 Collegis Education Summit, keynote speaker Dr. John Smith-Coppes, president of Joyce University, shared his advice for achieving higher ed excellence amid market paradigms, shifting learner expectations, and capacity constraints.

“Embrace your institutional superpower and then partner for expertise. You have to know what you are really good at, but also where you might need help. Having the bravery to objectively look at the brutal facts can take you from good to great. Keep this in mind: Your institution is perfectly designed to get the outcomes it’s getting.”

-Dr. John Smith-Coppes, President of Joyce University

Dr. Smith-Coppes is right. If you’re not getting the results you want, you have to shine a light on the operation and consider what adjustments or changes will better position your institution for desired outcomes.

To echo Dr. Smith-Coppes and answer the earlier questions, working with a strategic partner who has deep expertise in higher education shared services and can manage certain responsibilities more efficiently can get your institution closer to turning aspiration into reality. A true partnership is not about simply outsourcing tasks. Rather, it’s a strategic way to gain access to specialized knowledge, proven methodologies, and scalable resources, all while enabling administrators to focus on their core areas of expertise.

Mounting challenges facing higher ed leaders

When I talk to administrators, the conversation inevitably turns to the challenge of doing more with less. They consistently grapple with four key issues:

• Budget Cuts: Funding is uncertain or shrinking, forcing them to rethink the allocation of resources.

• Advancing Technology: Technology is rapidly evolving, leaving administrators to scramble after the next advancement or emerging capability.

• Socioeconomic Pressures: With some questioning the value of postsecondary education, relevant programs with affordable tuition have never been more critical.

• Employee Turnover: Retaining top talent is difficult, leaving critical gaps.

But none of these issues surprise us. On the contrary, Collegis Education has partnered with numerous public and private institutions of varying sizes and levels of brand recognition to address these challenges, uncovering advantageous pathways toward more sustainable and fruitful operations.

The results speak for themselves. Administrators gain more time to leverage their core strengths to elevate their institution’s mission and educational outcomes while actualizing a variety of clear benefits. Here is what Collegis Education continues to deliver for our shared-service partners.

Seven ways shared services in higher education deliver results

Institutions that leverage shared services experience benefits in a variety of key areas. Explore some of the most significant advantages:

1. Improved financial stability

Predictability and optimization are the key words here. With our solutions for technology management, enrollment management, and student services, institutions know exactly what to budget every year. At the same time, we find cost savings by getting a better return on technology investments, strategically decommissioning redundancies, and renegotiating contracts.

2. Enhanced operational efficiency

Is there a better way to reach an institution’s goals more efficiently? More often than not, the answer is yes. We help bring these opportunities to the surface by fully assessing the school’s infrastructure, technology, processes, and other operating procedures. This assessment denotes areas of excellence and points of failure as well as identifies where lag or waste exists. With these insights, we can identify and prioritize emerging opportunities to drive improvement. All this informs a multiyear roadmap that guides higher ed leaders on how to thoughtfully implement changes that engage key stakeholders to accelerate the change management cycle.

3. Objective perspective & best practices

We bring a unique perspective to our recommendations based on our work with other schools while protecting each school’s anonymity and uniqueness. This helps give you a baseline of how your school performs when compared to similar ones. Are you leading or lagging? As an unbiased third party, we offer fresh ideas backed by the knowledge of the results they have produced. It’s a great way to eliminate the “but this is how we’ve always done it” objection and gain buy-in from internal staff.

4. Risk mitigation & accountability

There’s rarely a higher ed situation we haven’t already dealt with at another institution. Our partners benefit from this experience, allowing them to proactively avoid operational and technical risks. They also benefit tremendously from having a partner who holds themselves accountable to quantifiable outcomes measured by agreed-upon service level agreements (SLAs). Together, these provide a lot of peace of mind when it comes to issues like cybersecurity, compliance, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

5. Specialized expertise without the overhead

Hiring and retaining experienced staff is challenging enough. Finding people with skill sets to leverage evolving technology capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI) is a whole other story. That’s why our partners rely on Collegis to provide the expertise that’s hard to find. We’re software-agnostic and implement solutions that are in the school’s best interest from a financial, operational, and strategic perspective without the need for full-time employees to manage them.

6. Data-enabled decision making with full transparency

Data at most institutions is stored in siloes, with limited stewardship and governance over its quality and consistency. However, many of the “data” solutions in the market today are complicated and difficult to implement and support.

This is why we built Connected Core, a scalable higher education industry cloud solution that integrates siloed data sets, systems, and applications to enable institutional intelligence. This proven approach and methodology for collecting, connecting, and activating institutional data eliminates data doubt and gives leaders the confidence to make quickly make strategic decisions with confidence.

7. Focus on core mission & educational outcomes

By outsourcing some functions, administrators can redirect resources and energy to what truly matters: student success. By reducing the number of hats they wear, leaders can instead focus on using the tools they have on hand to manage strategic initiatives that drive institutional growth.

Strategic delegation to yield better outcomes

Some leaders fear losing control through outsourcing, and rightfully so. Too many vendors tout “partnership” when, in fact, they are trying to build an unhealthy dependency that is not mutually beneficial.

That’s just not us. It fundamentally goes against our values and who we are as a company.

Our partnerships are built on collaboration and shared governance. Institutions set priorities, and all actions follow clear assessments, implementation plans, and progress reviews. Our partners gain greater control over technology, enrollment, and budgets. Control isn’t lost, but visibility and accountability are gained.

Shared-services models allow administrators to confidently offload specific responsibilities. Leveraging external expertise amplifies your internal strengths and empowers your leaders to focus on building and maintaining a thriving campus community.

But the first step is starting the conversation with the right partner.