Higher Education & Private Schools

Higher Education faces many unique challenges due to declines in endowment values, budget deficits, state education cuts, and restrictions on tuition increases to name a few.

Marcum’s education practice understands these challenges and works with colleges, universities and academic medical centers to improve operations and performance.

Administrative Services

Higher Education Administration focuses on the administrative service components. When strategically managed, these components work together to recruit and retain students for the institution and provide seamless support from matriculation to graduation and beyond.

Components of this administration can include recruitment and admissions, financial aid and scholarships, market and institutional research, records and registration, academic advising and support services, student accounts, housing, finance administration/budgeting, student/institutional employment, and alumni affairs.

While programs are tailored to meet the unique needs of each institution, the basic need to manage institutional enrollment from the point of initial contact through graduation has become increasingly apparent. Declining enrollments are second only to declining appropriations as the reason for institutions’ financial problems. Enrollment management is an important factor in assisting institutions to attain their objectives and remain financially viable.

Marcum’s professionals are unique to other consulting firms as we have been previously employed at institutions of higher learning and have experience and success in implementing changes across all divisions of institutions that affect administrative tasks. We can meet your needs with experts who deliver value to your administration – on site, on time and on budget.

Information Technology

As technological advances are introduced to the world of higher education, institutions, colleges and universities are more attracted by the promise of potential technology for enhancing procedures such as administrative reporting, data access and efficient day to day administrative operations.

As institutions move into an increasingly connected, globalized and digital environment there is a need to ensure the success of higher education information technology ventures, from implementation through execution. Many IT projects fail not only costing the institution considerable monetary investment but also compromising key strategic initiatives for which the new technology was critical.

Marcum’s consultants have extensive knowledge in various administrative systems that averages over 20 years of experience, stemming from all areas of an institution. For example, if your need is to plan, design and deploy an ERP implementation and/or integrate to other systems, our experienced team can enable your project to be successful.

Marcum offers a full suite of services in the area of information technology:

• Assessment and selection of technologies.
• Conversions and upgrades.
• Systems integration and interfaces.
• Enterprise Software Revitalization.
• Packaged software enhancements.

Reporting Services

Are you challenged with having too many reports and not enough information? Are you troubled with understanding which reports would meet the institution’s needs? Are you dealing with contradictory reports? Do you have problems accessing information, tools, and metrics to improve your institution’s performance? Can you view key performance indicators?

To meet these challenges, administrators and trustees are increasingly reliant on timely and accurate institutional information, which is paramount to strategic decision making. Let Marcum help you to transform how information is leveraged at your institution.

Marcum’s higher education reporting team consists of individuals with deep reporting and data warehouse implementation experience. Our background includes many years working for higher education institutions. We bring with us best practice functional and process expertise, technical skills and seasoned project and change management capabilities.

Assessing and measuring key institutional objectives and strategies with the right and timely information presented in the appropriate format for the user is what Marcum can bring to an institution. From daily production and operational reports to executive dashboards and alerts, we can assist in creating and implementing a reporting strategy that involves both the technical infrastructure required as well as the skills needed to keep institutional staff provided with accurate and reliable information to make better decisions.