The leadership team at an NAIS Test School returned from the holidays ready to tackle some crucial strategic decisions in the year ahead. Concerned with enrollment trends, the team was tasked with preparing insights and options for the board to consider in its next meeting. School leaders needed not only their school's data, but some points of comparison to show the context of their trends in the industry. They turned to the new NAIS platform, Data and Analysis for School Leadership (DASL), to help.
Starting with admissions trends, they found that their school had a more rapidly declining yield (percentage of students admitted who chose to enroll) than the decline seen in two regional comparison groups and a group of girls' schools in New York City.
The trend was putting the pinch on their school budget, as evidenced in gross and net tuition revenue trends, which were growing at a slower pace than those of schools in the same comparison groups.
A quick comparison of their tuition trends with other schools in their region showed their pace of increasing tuitions was faster than that of their peers in the area. So the team focused on how to reduce expenses. A quick analysis of the school's budget showed that the single largest cost center was salaries. With several colleagues preparing to retire, the team thought that perhaps there would be an opportunity to reduce staffing costs by restructuring and streamlining the school's approach to replacing those employees.
They decided to look again at the data on staffing and salaries for their staff, and found that their FTE to student ratio was significantly higher than that of their regional comparison groups, and that their staff salaries were also significantly higher than the median values found across schools in their regional groups.
So the team designed a plan for engaging faculty and staff in generating alternative approaches to staffing that could result in replacing fewer of the retiring colleagues, and prepared to take those recommendations to the board.
Winter brings the season of strategic thinking and planning across the independent school sector. As your leadership team prepares, it is important to get a picture of how your school's key indicators trend over time, and how those trends compare to those of schools with similar characteristics or in similar groups or regions.
DASL can help school leadership access data that are relevant, comprehensive, and easy to incorporate. DASL captures more than 2,000 data points per school per year, and provides multiple tools for pulling data reports for your school. In addition, DASL has expanded to serve as the data collection platform for more than 33 state and regional associations, and more than 1,500 independent schools. Your school can benchmark in DASL, regardless of your membership status with NAIS. Here's how it works:
- If your school contributes data to a data category in DASL, you can benchmark those data with other schools in the system. You do not have to be a member of NAIS.
- Your school can benchmark against schools belonging to the same associations.
- NAIS members can benchmark against the national data set, and have access to a dashboard tool of preconfigured charts in key school leadership areas.
- If your school missed the data entry window, you can add data using an Update Past Survey Data tool, which will unlock benchmarking for that category and year once you have added data to the system.
Three types of reports are available in DASL:
- Statistical Tables – More than 250 tables displaying median values of key data points for different categories of independent schools (boarding or day, boys/girls/coed, enrollment ranges, regions, etc.).
- Dashboard Charts (available to NAIS members only) – More than 50 charts preconfigured to display your school's data with the data from the comparison group(s) of your choice. You select the years and groups; the system does the rest.
- Benchmarking – Build your own report from scratch, selecting the data points, comparison group(s), year(s), and display characteristics you prefer. Once the report is generated, you can save it to your account in DASL, and/or share it with your school colleagues in the system.
Finally, make sure that the right people have access to your school's information in DASL. Heads of school and business managers can manage the access of all other individuals to your data, following this tip sheet.