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ANAHEIM, Calif. — In an era where many colleges face steep challenges and heightened scrutiny, financial teams can play a crucial role beyond crunching numbers and enforcing budgets.
“We’re all translators of financial information to very diverse audiences,” Bill Nunez, vice chancellor for finance at Texas Christian University, said Sunday at a panel at the National Association of College and University Business Officers’ annual conference in Anaheim, California.
“Not everybody you talk to are financial experts,” he added. “It’s very complicated, but you have to boil it down into terms and data points that everybody can understand.”
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Nunez and other panelists framed translation of financial information as a matter of transparency so that the various constituencies across a college can be literate on budgets and the complicated ways money flows through a higher education institution.
Getting into the financial weeds
When panelists held a straw poll of their audience Sunday, composed largely of college business and finance office administrators, the vast majority listed faculty members as their biggest challenge when communicating financial issues.
That communication is arguably more important now than ever, in an era of retrenchment and budget pressures across wide swaths of the higher ed sector — not uncommonly with bruising public fights breaking out between faculty and college leaders over budget cuts. Additionally, panelists said board members and even students and families are becoming more engaged with the financial lives of colleges.
Unobvious or unadvertised financial details can lead to knowledge and trust gaps.
“As a former faculty member, there are a shocking number of people on your campus who believe that you are collecting the sticker price for most of your students,” said Rachel Pauletti, higher ed consulting director at the consulting firm Forvis Mazars. Yet colleges often provide heavy tuition discounts to large shares of their students.
Those tuition discounting practices have a major impact on finances. They can determine both the financial margins for individual courses and programs as well as the overall health of the university.
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Pauletti described situations where faculty might see overall enrollment rising and assume the institution is bringing more revenue, when in fact discounting may lead to less net tuition revenue despite student body increases. Moreover, rising costs may surpass any additional revenue.
Translating and visualizing financial data
Brian Burnett, CFO at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, pointed to restrictions on cash sources and spending as an area where campus financial education is often needed.
When teaching a graduate-level higher ed finance class early in his career, Burnett found “these graduate students thought we could take the money that came into the university and do anything with it.”
In his role as a university finance executive, Burnett developed a “colors of money” visualization. The idea is to use clear, intuitive labels showing how university accounts can be used. Those colored green are unrestricted and can be spent freely. Red accounts have legal parameters on how they can be spent, such as donor-restricted endowment gifts and research grants.
Auxiliary accounts, such as parking and housing, fall somewhere in between and are shown as yellow in Burnett’s color scheme. These revenues are typically unrestricted but often stem from capital- or labor-intensive activities.
“You have to really be careful about how you use them,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of auxiliaries being raided by presidents or provosts to bail out this part of the campus or that part of the campus.”
Similarly, Nunez showed how color could be used to highlight areas of potential concern and strength in university income statements and other financial reports to help guide discussions between administrators and boards. He also showed how graphic heat maps can visualize where financial risks intersect with strategic priorities.
And then there’s Burnett’s “Finance Academy.” The daylong budget and finance educational sessions bring together university finance staff with administrators and faculty leaders, and sometimes faculty members who just want to increase their knowledge.
“I figured out that if you say ‘training,’ the deans and the faculty won’t come,” he said. “But if you call it an academy, everyone is coming.”
Burnett described the sessions as popular with attendees — as evidenced by high survey marks afterward — and said they were bolstered by the participation and support of the university president.
In general, the president can set the tone on financial transparency within an institution, he said. And transparency levels can play a large role in the emotional climate during tough financial decisions, as panelists and other experts pointed out.
“At the end of the day, it benefits everybody if we’re very transparent about how we spend our money, where it goes,” Nunez said. “Justify it, so people say, ‘Oh, I hate it, but I get it.’”