Re:University Reflections (Part 2): Program Costing is No Longer an Academic Exercise

One of the recurring themes I kept hearing at Re:University was program costing. 

This isn’t new. Institutions have been talking about program costs for decades. But this time, it felt different.

For a long time, program costing has been treated as an academic exercise: a window into how things work, interesting and occasionally illuminating, but not something used intentionally to drive change.

What I heard at Re:University suggested a shift. Institutions increasingly seem to be treating program costing as part of their core value proposition and using it as a tool for real, collaborative decision-making rather than retrospective analysis. 

I attended a particularly interesting session titled “How Can Data Help Us Understand What Programs Really Cost?”, presented by a cross-institutional team from Ontario universities, including leaders from Waterloo, Toronto Metropolitan University, the University of Guelph, and Western University. The mix of academic and administrative perspectives made the conversation especially compelling. 

Their research surfaced many familiar challenges with program costing, but one finding stood out to me: getting started with relatively fewer variables was often just as effective as building highly complex models. 

That result surprised me. 

My own experience has been that institutions willing to grapple with the full breadth, depth, and complexity of their operations - faculty workload models, cross-listed courses, shared services, physical plant allocations - are sometimes better positioned to persuade skeptical faculty and academic leaders that the exercise is fair and meaningful. Complexity, when handled transparently, can actually build credibility. 

That said, the core message landed clearly: providing departments and faculties with insight into their cost drivers empowers them to act. Rather than relying solely on central directives, units that better understood their financial dynamics were able to make informed changes on their own to improve their standing within the institution. 

The presenters also spoke candidly about programs that do not fully cover their costs, and the mechanisms institutions use to sustain them: 

• Institutional subventions, where a program is supported because it is core to the institution’s mission (fine arts is a commonly cited example). 
• Cross-program subventions, where a more profitable program agrees - explicitly or implicitly - to absorb additional students or costs to support a less profitable one. 

What struck me was not that these mechanisms exist - we all know they do - but that program costing can make these tradeoffs explicit, visible, and discussable. 

The team also pointed to a set of free, open-access resources hosted at higher-education-insights.ca, a site focused on improving transparency and shared understanding around program costing in Canadian higher education. 

At a glance, the site emphasizes practical, decision-oriented insights rather than prescribing a single “correct” costing methodology. That approach feels intentional—and wise. Program costing is deeply contextual, and tools that support exploration, comparison, and dialogue are often more valuable than those that claim precision beyond what the data can reasonably support. 

I’m keen to spend more time with these resources to better understand the kinds of questions they enable institutions to ask, particularly how they support early-stage conversations where trust, clarity, and shared language matter as much as technical accuracy. 

To me, program costing is a lot like analytics or data governance: the tools and technology are rarely the real problem. The harder work is getting people on the same page, aligning on shared definitions, agreeing on reasonable tradeoffs, and navigating inherently political questions like how to allocate physical plant or shared service costs. 

If you’re just getting started with program costing, or trying to build internal alignment around why it matters, these resources may help frame the conversation: 

• Higher Education Insights (https://higher-education-insights.ca) 
  A Canadian, open-access initiative focused on program costing and institutional decision-making, with tools and research designed to support transparent, faculty-informed conversations. 
• Start, Stop, or Grow by Robert Atkins 
  A concise and practical book that explores how program costing can inform strategic choices. While U.S.-focused, many of the decision frameworks translate well to Canadian contexts. 

Finally, if you want program costing data to actually inform decisions, not just sit on a shelf, here are a few considerations I’ve seen matter in practice: 

• Data integration: How well can you cross-walk finance and accounting data with payroll/HR, course data, and student enrolment data? Can you trace GL entries to instructional activity? Do you know which department offers which course, who teaches it, and how compensation flows? 
• Transparency and drill-through: Can users move from high-level summaries down to data they recognize and can verify themselves? That ability goes a long way toward building trust. 
• Automation and frequency: Can the data update regularly and automatically? Annual, budget-cycle-only views make it hard to support timely decisions. 
• Shared understanding: Are definitions, allocation methods, and tradeoffs clearly documented - and is it obvious who to talk to when something doesn’t make sense? 
• Scenario modeling: Can people test different assumptions and compare scenarios side by side? 

Program costing isn’t about finding a single “right” answer. It’s about creating a shared, credible foundation for making difficult choices together.