Resource College is a liberal arts school that provides local residents the opportunity to take college courses and earn bachelor's degrees. Yolanda Howard, the school's provost, recently attended a workshop in which the bal- anced scorecard was presented as a way of focusing all of an organization's functions on its mission. After the workshop, she met with her administrative staff and college deans in a weekend brainstorming session. The group determined that the college's mission was to provide high-quality courses and degrees to individuals to add value to their lives. To ensure that the college would fulfill this mission, the group established the following objectives:
¦ To provide a sufficient return on investment by increasing tuition revenues and maintaining the liquidity needed to support operations
¦ To add value to the college's courses by encouraging faculty to be lifelong learners
¦ To retain students and attract new students
¦ To operate efficient and cost-effective student support systems
¦ To determine the college's progress in meeting these objectives, the group established the following performance measures:
¦ Number of faculty publications
¦ Percentage of students who rate college as excellent
¦ Average time for processing student applications
¦ Number of dollars spent on professional development
¦ Growth in revenues for each department
¦ Average time for processing transcript requests
¦ Percentage of faculty who annually do 40 hours of professional development
¦ Percentage of new student leads that result in enrollment
¦ Cash flow
¦ Number of student complaints
¦ Return on assets
¦ Percentage of returning students
¦ Percentage of revenue devoted to student services systems (registrar, computer ser- vices, financial aid, and student health)
Required:
1. Prepare a balanced scorecard for Resource by stating the college's mission and matching its four objectives to the four stakeholder perspectives: the financial, learning and growth, internal business processes, and customer perspectives. Indicate which of the college's performance measures would be appropriate for each objective.
2. Resource College is a member of an association of independent liberal arts schools that provides industry statistics about many aspects of operating a college. What is benchmarking, and in what ways would the association's statistics assist Resource College in further developing its balanced scorecard?