What I do

Reversing decline

#1

Challenge: UG History enrolments have halved over the past five years, but several universities have bucked the trend and grown their market share.

Recommendation: Innovate new History programmes in conjunction with economics, politics and America; making History more relevant to today’s students.

#2

Challenge: Not many people know what Actuarial Science is or does, leading to a lack of relevance and declining interest from students and their parents.

Recommendation: Rename the programme Actuarial Science and Financial Risk Management (forgive the tautology but that’s what AS is) and re-present it as being at the heart of financial services decision-making.

Growth

Challenge: My client was investing a huge sum in developing a new campus, and was required by government to develop programmes in entirely new areas. Its academics were tasked with presenting new postgraduate programme ideas from which the project board had to identify likely winners and losers.

Recommendation: I worked with 90 academics over six months on 38 new programmes. Understanding the opportunities, strengthening their propositions, assessing likely ramp-up volumes, and ultimately making go/no-go recommendations. De-risking the new, without dampening ambition and innovation.

Portfolio optimisation

Challenge: This Business School was aware that new developments in business were not yet reflected in its PGT portfolio. 

Recommendations: Used HESA analysis to identify growth drivers and business analysis horizon scanning to go beyond. Five new programmes proposed, some updates to the existing portfolio, some entirely new. Some new names recommended to make them more attractive to international students.

Rescuing the walking wounded

Challenge: This client had dropped way down the league tables, and as a result was competing within a new group of lower ranked universities. This had not been recognised in several key subjects, where presentation remained highly academic, and applications were in freefall.

Recommendation: Recognise the fact that CCC students require a very different, less academic, more real world presentation. Rewrite the prospectus introduction and module descriptors.

Growing international revenue

Challenge: In common with every university in the country, my client was suffering from the UG fee cap freeze, and needed urgently to increase its unregulated income – ie to grow international student volumes.

Recommendation: Convert those PGT subjects most attractive to international students into two year programmes with a second year work placement. Highly attractive in growth markets, especially India and the entire sub-continent. Rebrand them to make them more attractive to international students.