The Kresge Foundation Funds Collaborative Proposal to Control College Costs
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
The Kresge Foundation has awarded Independent
Colleges of Indiana a $240,000 grant.
The grant will support feasibility studies for collaborative cost-saving
initiatives among ICI’s 31 member private colleges and universities.
Dubbed MAAC (Massive Aggregated Administrative
Capacity), the project name is a play off the acronym MOOC (Massive Open Online
Courses), the fairly recent phenomenon of offering free online classes to
thousands of students at a time. In
contrast, MAAC focuses on the administrative side of higher education, targeting
areas like payroll and technology that every college must do but that don’t
contribute to the institution’s unique identity and mission nor directly touch
the student experience in the classroom or on campus. In all, 12 feasibility studies are included
in the MAAC grant and are slated to take place over the next 15 months. The immediate goal is improved service and
efficiency for institutions at
a reduced cost. The larger long-term
goal is that these savings will help control college costs for students.
"Just as athletics have demonstrated that
intercollegiate engagement through competition
can enhance institutional strength,” says Richard L. Ludwick, ICI president
& CEO, "MAAC proposes that intercollegiate engagement through collaboration
can yield greater enhancements of institutional strength. ICI and our member colleges and universities
thank the Kresge Foundation for this opportunity to leverage resources to
create a new way of doing business---a more efficient, more effective means of
educating Americans to the world’s highest and most productive standards.”
As the oldest association of its type in the
country, ICI has been working collaboratively with its member colleges and
sister state associations for many years on cost-savings efforts, including
penning the first two agreements ever by a private college consortium for
cloud-based IT backups and co-founding with the Tennessee association the
Coalition for College Cost Savings that now serves 31 consortia of private
higher education and two million students.
Initial efforts of this type were primarily
focused on group purchasing agreements---such as for office supplies or vehicle
rentals---that have saved campuses significant dollars over the years. However, the sharing of administrative
processes and back-office operations in the Kresge Foundation grant maps the
next frontier for these types of collaborations and is expected to produce a
much higher rate of return. Once
established and tested, ICI will share the MAAC model with other private
college associations across the nation, as well as other interested education
organizations.
The Kresge Foundation is a $3 billion private, national
foundation that works to expand opportunities in America’s cities through
grantmaking and investing in arts and culture, education, work in the
environment, health, human services and community development efforts in
Detroit. Fostering greater access to and success in postsecondary education for
low-income, minority and first-generation college students is the focus of
Kresge’s education grantmaking. For more
information, visit kresge.org
or follow @kresgedu.
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