Strategic Governance 97
amount of strategic information in very economical fashion and has the advantage
of including many proportionate measures and trend lines as well as strategic
goals and comparative data. In doing so, it is able to address issues of identity,
performance, and aspiration in one place. Without doubt, much of the informa-
tion simply opens a strategic conversation that will require many other statistical
analyses and fuller sources of information as it proceeds. It also should be noted
that I have added a section on academic indicators, which are often missing from
key indicators, simply to emphasize the issue of strategic academic assessment.
Based on this example, it is clear that an institution’s sense of identity shapes
the development of the indicators, and vice versa. We learn what matters to a
place when we see the indicators by which it chooses to measure itself. Some of
the choices are inescapable because they define universal strategic issues con-
cerning financial resources and the realities of admissions and enrollment. They
convey information about both the social and economic forces at work in the
wider world and the institution’s position in relationship to them.
Whatever set is chosen, the validity and usefulness of the measures are always a
function of the care with which they are defined in response to the strategic oppor-
tunities and challenges of the institution. If we are to learn anything significant
for effective strategic decision making, the data have to be collected and analyzed
carefully, consistently, and systematically. To define a retention rate, for example,
is no simple matter, for it depends upon a complex model of classifying compli-
cated patterns in student enrollment and eventual graduation or departure, all
of which vary significantly among various types of colleges and universities and
the units within them. Getting good numbers to address the specific strategic
questions that we should pose to ourselves is a foundational task of strategy itself.
There was a time, for instance, when all we needed to know was the percentage
of students on need-based aid. In today’s world that figure alone has little strategic
significance. It takes both imagination and rigor to get it right.
Proportionate Measures
One of the first things to be noted in table 5.1 is the use of relative and
proportional measures (i.e., ratios and percentages and per-student and per-capita
indicators.) By combining two variables in the calculation, the institution is able
to develop indicators that pick out the significance of its special characteristics
of size and mission, position and performance. Analyzing financial position in
absolute terms without reference to the size and characteristics of the institu-
tion is an incomplete and misleading process. Financial information that is useful
strategically is always based on ratios and percentages, now a standard aspect of
the financial self-analysis of revenue and expense and assets and liabilities, as we
shall discuss in chapter 10. As we shall see, proportionate measures are also easily
compared to the norms of the higher education industry at large, so the data
reveal an institution’s strategic position relative to the competition and wider
economic realities.