Scenario Groupings

1. Scenario Groupings • A. Find new money • 1. Pay Better • 6. Reduce Tuition • 10. Balance the Budget • B. Change gender/ethnic profiles • 8. Enroll More Minority Students • 9. Hire More Minority Faculty Members • C. Rebalance departments • 2. Allocate New Money • 7. Respond to Enrollment Shifts • D. Change behavior • 3. Teach Better • 4. Improve Research Performance • 5. Win Games

2. Find new money to pay better, reduce tuition,orbalance the budget. • Ways to find new money • Increase student enrollment • Lowers selectivity. • Increases class sizes or teaching loads. • Puts more strain on facilities. • Increase the tuition rate • Reduces applications & yield. • Increases financial aid requirement. • Reduce staff salaries • Hurts staff morale. • Increases crime and likelihood of administrative problems (chance cards). • Increase endowment spending or gifts • Spending more now borrows from the future • More aggressive investments are risky. • Development takes time and money. • Cut the budget or transfer to plant • Hurts morale and performance. • Limits facilities construction or boosts debt. • Strategy: find your areas of strength and weakness: exploit the one and avoid the other.

3. Change gender/ethnic profilesfor students or faculty. • Ways to improve the profiles: • Boost the priorities for admitting or hiring minorities and women. • Boost the financial aid priority for minorities and the gender-ethnic equity priority for faculty salary setting. • Spend more on financial aid and faculty salary increases. • Relax the other priorities for admissions, financial aid, hiring, and salary-setting. • Admit more students or hire more faculty. • Focus admission on student levels with minority potential and hiring on departments with minority and gender potential. • Strategy: decide whether you can expand or whether you have to reallocate, then determine your areas of strength and weakness; use your strengths to leverage the profiles and leave the areas of weakness alone.

4. Rebalance departments by allocating new money or responding to enrollment shifts. • Consider building departments where: • Student-faculty ratios are high; class sizes and teaching loads are large. • Research/scholarship performance is good or you think there may be good potential. • There is a good nucleus of faculty talent.. • Consider cutting departments where: • Student-faculty ratios, class sizes, and teaching loads are low;. • Research/scholarship performance is poor and there’s little expectation of improvement. • Faculty talent is low. • Tenure ratios are low, there are many adjuncts, or faculty are near retirement. • Strategy: decide whether you want education quality or research, then and adjust departmental allocations accordingly.

5. Change behaviorin teaching, research, or athletics. • Ways to change faculty behavior: • Adjust time allocation targets. • This may hurt morale. (Boost salaries?) • Adjust course mix targets. • This will affect educational quality and teaching loads. (Add new hires?) • Change salary-setting incentives. • Larger salary increments add leverage. • Change hiring priorities. • Go after the needed talent, hire at a more senior level or in departments with special potential. • Reduce the research indirect cost rate. • Ways to improve athletics: • Spend more. • Change admission and financial aid priorities. • This may hurt academic and extracurricular results. • Higher admissions targets and more financial aid add leverage. • Strategy:determine your degrees of freedom and act accordingly, compensate with other actions where necessary.

6. Group A: Find new money(1. Pay Better: Public Comprehensive) • Faculty morale

7. Group B: Change gender/ethnic profiles (9. More Minority Faculty: Private LAC) • Faculty diversity index

8. Group C: Rebalance Departments (2. Allocate New Money: Public RU) • Departmental Prestige

9. Group D: Change Behavior (3. Teach Better: Private RU) • Education quality

10. Advanced Play • Custom Games • Departmental choice and option screens • Initializing procedure: averages the ten institutions in VU’s 1200-institution database that come closest to the player’s specifications. • Limits on department numbers and the number of students. • Random events and random goals. • Faculty (“Boosting research in a small department.”) • Actions • Time use priorities • Promotion, hiring, and salary-setting • Indirect cost rate • Outcomes • Effects on individuals • Effects on departmental research performance • Effects on institutional research performance • Unintended consequences • Budgets • Achieving a balanced budget • Achieving “long-run financial equilibrium”

11. Faculty:Boosting research in a small department

12. Budgets • Budget Balance • Surplus (deficit) = 0 • These variables can be influenced but not controlled: • Sponsored research revenue and expense • Endowment investment return • Athletics revenue and expense • Other revenue and expense • Interest received and paid • Policy targets, limits, and priorities and Budget Office behavior • Long-run Financial Equilibrium • Budget balance AND equal growth rates for revenue and expense AND sustainable prices AND no deferred liabilities • The endowment spending rate is critical to growth-rate equality and it should be about 5%. • Prices. Tuition, financial aid should be about 1%. The indirect cost rate should be less than its maximum. • Deferred liabilities. Salary growth should be about 1%. O&M and the transfer to plant should meet needs—watch for any deferred maintenance or building space gap in the Facilities Office.

13. Using Virtual U in Teaching and Training • Modes of use • Achieve a specific goal • Push the system in one direction, or play a Scenario, or make up your own Scenario. • Try out different sets of actions. • Observe the degree goal achievement and look for unintended consequences. • General play • Go for maximum game score, with or without random events and goals. • Team activities • Each team has at least three people. • One to run the computer • One or more to keep track of the data • One or more to analyze the data for patterns and hypotheses • Allow time for the team to reflect on what it has learned about the university as a system.

14. Possible Approach for a Conference or Retreat • Distribute Virtual U to all participants • Before or at the start of the conference • Ask each participant to scan the manual and spend one hour trying out the game (perhaps suggest an easy Scenario). • Opening plenary • Introduce Virtual U and its rationale. • Introduce one or more specific goals: discuss the goals and possible strategies. • Demo the actions and performance indicators needed for the exercise. • Briefly discuss the lessons to be sought. • Assign each team to a goal (if more than one goal) • Group Sessions • Groups play Virtual U, saving games at interesting points and at the end of play. • Groups discuss results and lessons learned, then prepare brief PowerPoint or flip-chart presentations that can be illustrated by the saved game(s). • Wrap-up Plenary • One or more groups from each goal set gives its presentation and the other groups chime in as appropriate. (All the presentations will be printed and distributed so no one feels left out.) • General discussion of what might have been done differently and the lessons learned.