Taking Advantage of Growth at Branch Campuses
So, you lead a branch campus, and enrollment is up. That's a good thing, right? Revenue should be increasing, you'd expect to be adding courses and sections, maybe considering adding to your full-time faculty, perhaps adding support services, and so on. For a surprsing number of people I encounter, things are more frustrating than that. Some campuses, like ours at Ohio University, are independently funded. They pay an overhead to the main/home campus, which may increase as branch revenue increases, but they are in a good position to invest for more growth. Many others, however, operate on an "expenditure budget," in which they receive an allocation in the same way that main campus academic units probably do. A likely result is that increased branch campus revenue is disproportionately consumed to offset institutional budget challenges. The opportunity to add branch courses and programs, never mind services and faculty, is very limited. In my opinion, even well-intenti...