Episode 205: Using KPIs on Campus with Christine Blakney

And those 40,000 students are a mix of our population. We've got undergraduate, graduate, as well as our professional law school, and we needed to be able to look at specific populations to really make sure we were looking at data and assessing it reasonably. Welcome to Focus! A podcast dedicated to the business of higher education. I'm your host Heather Hichmond and we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities facing today's higher learning institutions. On this episode i'm joined by Christine Blakney, managing director of student business services at Texas Tech University. She walks us through how Texas Tech has used key performance indicators or KPIs to help the university business and students - a task especially important once the pandemic hit. Well thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Christine. Thank you very much for having me. Well I know I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion for NACUBO earlier this year and you were one of the speakers and had some very interesting insight on using KPIs or key performance indicators. And since this term is not often used in higher ed, can you share how this helps you in running the student business office for Texas Tech University? Absolutely, and you're right that KPIs may be more of a business-related aspect of monitoring and keeping up with trends and analytics and those kind of things. But it has a very significant use in the higher education community. Because we all are monitoring anything from enrollment management, to student workflow, to where are financial management stays in place. So it's definitely a helpful tool - is what I would propose it to be. It's not something that any one particular KPI, or metric, or set of metrics, would, you know, solve everybody's problems, or would necessarily apply to any particular institution. So that's where we really want to look at the how KPIs work in higher ed. Oh, that's wonderful. And so you already had some of these KPIs and metrics established, really before this whole world change with the pandemic, right? That's correct. And, you know, COVID has impacted all of us. It's caused significant interruptions to our daily lives, as well as our business management. But, you know, one of the things that was apparent from the very outset of things was the financial impacts - both on people personally, but also with businesses, and our operations, and our ability to conduct business the way we intend to and provide the good customer support and especially student support that we need to as an institution of higher education. And so it's been something that we needed to have solid analytics and to be able to make sound business decisions. And so I see those as being more necessary now than ever before. And that's where these KPIs have really come into play. We were lucky to have some of these in place, and we were able to use the data that they represented very creatively to answer emergency needs as administration kind of moved through the pandemic. And the changing - the ever-changing - world that has seemed to come about with the pandemic as well. And even today everything remains very fluid, but it's helpful to be able to provide data to administrators to help them make informed decisions, even as continuing planning evolves and as we adapt and adjust to the pandemic, as well. Right, well it's great that you already had some of that in place. You know, there's the old saying about when's the best time to plant a tree, and it's like well 10 years ago. But the second last time is to do that now. So you were actually ahead of the game. What were some of the KPIs or metrics, and what was the process to get that going? The KPIs and metrics we had in place before the pandemic were things that you would normally track, such as outstanding receivables, days in collection, how many students had ACH or direct deposit established. And some of these things gave us the ability to look and support very good business decisions. Like, could we withstand adjusting our holds threshold, those kind of things. So some of the KPIs we had that help support those decisions were, like, an assessment of our outstanding receivables. We were looking at both term balances overall versus current balance. We looked specifically at our TouchNet Payment Plans and we could immediately see which plans were remaining current, which went delinquent, which went delinquent as of late-March - when some of this really started impacting students and families financially - and when they started to move off campus. Analyzing KPIs takes a bit of an assumption. Sometimes you do have to document what assumptions you're making anytime you're analyzing these KPIs. So, like, when the CARES Act came in, we wanted to know how many students were current and paying on time in the payment plans. We knew that COVID impacted virtually everybody financially, and we use this data reporting to see where any of our CARES Act funds could be best utilized across the campus. Not only was it just an assessment of the outstanding receivables, you know, we were able to look at specific points in time. And that's the benefit of having historical data to look back through Because you want to look back and say, "Where would we have been at this point in time? Where would we have been at this point in time? Is it different? Are we seeing major fluctuations in our outstanding receivables that people are unable to pay at this point?" And also effectively manage holds. If we put a hold on students for being late or unpaid, should we adjust that whole threshold, knowing that there's, you know, a globally financial impact happening that we need to adjust for. One of the things that makes it really important for Texas Tech to have these in place is we have over 40,000 students on campus. And administration needs to be able to make decisions. And those 40,000 students are a mix of our population. We've got undergraduate, graduate, as well as our professional law school, and we needed to be able to look at specific populations to really make sure we were looking at data and assessing it reasonably, and making sure the numbers were understandable and the percentages. To be able to look at outstanding receivables by, you know, 30, 60, 90, days late. How many of those students already had holds? How many had delinquencies in the past? What their current balance owed was? Because one of the things that I know many business officers get the question of is - "Okay, you've got 10,000 holds on students. How many of those students only owe a couple hundred dollars?" And so you always want to be able to break down these analytics to where you can look successfully at specific populations of students. So one of the things we did - and again it really, really helped to be able to look at the TouchNet Payment Plans, find anybody that was delinquent in those, because normally we don't assess late fees, or we don't assess holds for people on payment plans until they've missed two consecutive payments. And so looking at those and being able to look back at historically, is this the same percentage of students that missed two payments in a row? So that was very, very helpful to be able to do that. We actually went in and looked at our holds and looked at all the balances that students had outstanding. And while we normally would have a hold on a student for any past due balance, we raised that threshold to be a thousand dollars, and allowed them to carry over a thousand dollars of previous balance without a hold. And that gave us some flexibility. So, you know, we were making very active decisions on this data as it was occurring. So we were able to very quickly adapt, and conform, and adjust, based on the metrics we were seeing. Oh that's great. And especially with the CARES Act, and you had to make some quick decisions, and really look at the students with greatest need, and being able to have all that data at your fingertips. It's not like you're going through person-by-person with 40,000 students. You have to have those data sets, right? Absolutely! That's great. So then do you find that these metrics are pretty universal? So for our listeners, you know, how do they best determine what KPIs would really support their administration and their students? And that's something I would greatly suggest you really just have to adapt these to the culture of your institution. Every institution has a unique culture, has unique expectations, has unique risk tolerance levels. Focus on what your mission is as an institution. And I know none of our mission is to collect, you know, tuition and fees from students. That's not our mission, obviously as higher educators we have to educate students. And so when we look at these metrics, we want them to support the decisions administration is making in regard to sustaining those missions. And so you break them down into various categories such as, you know, what are your strategic KPIs? What is your CFO, what is your president going to want to know about? They're going to want to really know overall totals. How much did you bill this semester? How much have you collected this semester? What's your collections rate? How many, you know, how many total refunds have you issued? When the CARES Act funds came in, how many total CARES Act students and funds were awarded? And some of that rolls into some of that upper- level, national-level reporting that you would turn into the Department of Education, or to your local legislature, to monitor the money that they funneled to us. We want to be able to report those metrics back, in addition to what I would call the strategic - the CFO and president level - we've got the managerial level, which is more our departmental management. And it's more the administrative measures that we want to assess by term. Are we on track? Are we moving forward? Are we falling behind? Is it pointing me to some area of concern that I might need to address? Maybe we've got a policy or procedure that's not working, and that was very, very important throughout the last months. To be able to assess if what was normal for us needed to adapt because of all the other adaptations that were happening. I know we've all been tasked with moving classes online, and building tuition and fees for that, and all those kind of things. So it was very helpful to have metrics of saying we would normally have this many online enrollments, we would normally bill this much in online fees, or this much in our campus base fees. And if we were to adapt or adjust those, this is the revenue loss, or those kind of things. And in a lot of ways that happens in a lot of accounting departments, in a lot of your finance areas, but I think it's pivotal to have your business office be part of those conversations, because we're the ones that generally get the questions, you know? The student's not going to call the accounting office and ask why they were towards the rec center fee. They're going to call student business services. You're the one that has to take the questions right from the students directly. Absolutely. That's exactly correct. Very interesting. I like you have on those levels, and the different types of KPIs. Whether you're looking at a strategic and what do you need to know at that level, versus the managerial to be able to make, you know, maybe changes in your process, and see really how does that affect your business differently than, you know, should really roll up to that next-level goal, right? Right. And what's important to remember about that is, you know, each institution - like I said - has a different culture. And even just the simplest of examples is a private institution. They may have a completely different hold threshold due to you know their tuition rates being different from what a public institution would be, or even a community college would be. Because each of us have our own break points of where our tuition and fees reside. And we want to make sure that anything we analyze is reflecting back on what we expect an overall total to be. And like I said, you really have to understand the risk aversion for your school. And we work well with, you know, various offices, and working well with the enrollment management office is critical to this because they can be highly concerned that these metrics are being utilized in a way that would impact their metrics for enrollment, and retention, and graduation rates. And we know that all circles back around to all of us because then that can impact your federal funding. So we want to make sure that we're cognizant of how we can't live in a silo, we can't live in a bubble, that we all have to work together to make these metrics make sense for the university. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you know, we talk a lot about the success outside the classroom for the student, and really how that success outside the classroom - such as the financial piece - impacts the success inside the classroom. So there's always this ever going question of, is it, you know, payments and finances that affect enrollment, or does enrollment affect payment? What is your insight on that? It absolutely matters, because we find that finances can be the number one stressor for most people. And that's regardless of whether you're a college student or not. I think we all have experienced that. And when your finances are at risk it's very hard to concentrate and focus, especially on your academic performance. One example I like to share is from another school that removed all of their holds and late fees. They didn't have any negative consequences tied to non-payment. And this was well prior to COVID, so it had absolutely nothing to do with the financial impacts of the pandemic. But they didn't follow their normal processes, they didn't notify students of balances, they didn't add holds, and provide notices of holds. What happened was they were two years down the path in this new world of not providing these communications, and students were starting to graduate. And they were sending communications like, "Oh now you owe us a balance." And the students were like, "What? I didn't even realize." So, yeah they, you know, unless you send them a direct communication, students aren't known to pay attention necessarily to their student accounts as much as we would prefer them to. But we've really it caused the students to be in a bad situation because, as anybody that works in with financial aid knows, you can only apply financial aid throughout the aid year. And so once you've moved past that aid year, that aid year is closed, those students now don't have an opportunity to have their aid adjusted for maybe a larger expense that they incurred that they didn't pay. And so it really put those students in a bad situation by getting outside of the standardization process of communicating, and placing holds, and placing late fees. And we realized, you know, you need to have some flexibility, and sometimes you need to massage the rules, and especially like when the pandemic hit. We definitely started getting more and more creative and more flexible with our processes, because that allowed us to react to the situation. But when you completely remove the standardization that you have and you haven't provided this reliable set process, you tend to fail the student in a way. Because they're expecting to get communications, you know, when they didn't pay. And when you don't send them a communication, it's out of sight, out of mind, and they may not follow up appropriately like you need them to. Right, I mean that's the whole point of a bill, right? Is the billing process, and cycle, and knowing I have something to pay on this date, or else! That's life! Absolutely. And, you know, that's one of the benefits that with our TouchNet Payment Plans, the messages are automated. And while there were times that we turned off an automated message about a late fee because we were going to waive those late fees, that then became our choice to make that decision. But, you know, the normal message that goes out is that reminder to students saying, "Oh wait, I wasn't thinking about this payment coming up. I better make sure I have the money in the bank that I need to pay it." So it's very, very helpful to keep those messages and that standardized process running, so that students aren't caught unaware. Yeah, that's really key. And so I think you do some other things, too, at Texas Tech to help reduce that financial stress or that burden of knowing what do I have to pay for students, is that right? Absolutely. It seems a little backwards in a lot of ways of thinking that we are a school that believes in cancellation. So lots of people call that by many names: purging, deregistration, purging enrollment, but basically it's cancelling a student's registration for not being paid. And for us we would cancel their current term registration if the previous term is not paid by a certain date, or if they're not enrolled in a payment plan. And so we want to make sure that we process that, because it ultimately becomes successful. We understand there's natural procrastinators in the world. It's one of those things that, unfortunately, you don't necessarily get a reaction, you don't get the student to take the appropriate action that they need to take to complete their financial aid package, or other situations, until you assess a negative consequence. And, you know, while cancellation we don't necessarily want it to be a negative consequence, it serves a purpose. And we've been able to teach that over time. We understand the enrollment office gets a little concerned because it is impacting their enrollment headcounts that they have worked so hard to achieve. But when you standardize it in regards to the communications, the timing, we apply the same parameters, we apply the same considerations, students can really learn about it and they can learn to rely on that process. We even find that some students know the exact time that that's going to happen, and if they have been waiting for a class to open up, they will get online and register for that class immediately after we've canceled some students, because now there's an opening! And it's not meant to really be that much of a penalty. It's really for the people that, you know, they may have registered for classes and then something happened in their personal lives and they're not coming to Texas Tech anymore. They've changed their mind. They may have registered way back in May and something happened in July, and now they're not going to return in the fall. You know, cancellation provides them a way that prevents them from having to be financially responsible for that charge. Right and it's really, like you said, it's a teaching opportunity You're really teaching that financial literacy. And so when they get out of school, and they have other bills to pay with due dates, and they're going to get communicated with the bill, they understand how that process works. That's exactly right. Because we all know that if you fail to pay your landlord, or if you fail to pay your credit card bill, or your utility bill, those companies take action against you. And that's part of the learning process of educating students that are maybe walking out into the world for the first time on their own, and never had to deal with a bill before. So they learned that there's a standardization to it that, you know, every month I have to pay this bill, every month I need to at least look at it. And that helps educate those students to be more successful later on in life, as well. That's really true, and obviously it's really key to have that consistency and standardization, especially during emergency situations like a pandemic, right? Absolutely, I saw many schools decided they weren't going to send bills. They didn't send past due notices - anything. You know, they just didn't want to send a negative message in any way. And to me it wasn't necessarily a negative message, it was more of a reminder. For Texas Tech we didn't charge late fees, we didn't place holds for two months, and we didn't necessarily proactively communicate that we weren't going to do those. When students got their bill, they saw that there was no late fee on it, or that the late fee was removed. They knew that they didn't get the hold on their account, and they were able to assess where they stood at that particular point in time, and what they needed to take care of, and they had the time to be able to work on other funding sources. Whether they need to get back to financial aid. Some students are just simply caught off guard that they think once they've completed the financial aid process that it's just going to work seamlessly. We know that often that is not the case, and sometimes the students need to take additional action. And so when we send them a bill in about March or April, you know, January and February they think, "Oh it's just coming, it's just going to take a while." But when you send them a bill in March or April they're like, "Oh wait, I might need to call and ask about this." So, again, you lose that standardization, you put yourself at a high risk, and you generally cause confusion for the student. So standardization is definitely a key to this. Absolutely. And again it gives you, you know, being able to have those KPIs in place, and being able to see those receivables, and know what are the communications, what the plans, really all goes together. So that's great. What other KPIs really outside of the receivables are you tracking? We track a lot of things. Just transactional tracking, whether we're looking for anomalies, we're looking for, of course, My Direct Deposit was a big one. Especially with the C.A.R.E.S funds we wanted to make sure that we did not create an administrative burden on the part of our staff. That when we're trying to distribute, for Texas Tech, we had over 12 million dollars that we need to get in the hands of students as quickly as possible that, while we were all working remotely, if we didn't encourage these students to sign up for My Direct Deposit and didn't have a standardized message and way to communicate that to the students, it was going to cause staff members to need to come to the university to print those paper checks and get those checks out the door. So those were some good things that we were like, okay our normal My Direct Deposits metric is about 90 percent. Looking at all the students that are eligible for C.A.R.E.S funds, it was coming in much, much lower than that. It was coming in at only about 65 to 72 percent actually had direct deposit set up. Because many of them just simply never got refunds from the university before. And so we were able to proactively reach out to those students and say, "Here's how you would sign up for My Direct Deposit to receive your C.A.R.E.S Act funds in the most expedient measure possible. Here's the steps you would take to do this." Great, so do you see a lot of students really taking advantage of that, then? We did. We've got the metric back up into the high 80s. Especially with the C.A.R.E.S Act funds. Because those were things that students had proactively gone out and filled out applications for. So it simply just took a couple of communications and then we were back up into the metrics that we would expect normally. That's great, that's great. Now I think you also looked at some staffing metrics. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? When we were running into a staffing issue with our third party area, and our enrollment at Texas Tech has just exploded over the last couple of years. And so obviously students that are either sponsored, or have a third party billing arrangement, those kind of things were things that were student populations that we were starting to struggle to provide the quality level of service that we had in the past. So where we use these KPIs was to look at the number of students that each staff member was supporting, and we were able to compare that against national trends, any benchmarking surveys, and other data that was available nationwide, and to show that you know one staff member for the number of third party students that we support was running extremely low compared to our peers and colleagues. And so I was able to negotiate adding another full-time staff member to that particular position. And I think staffing metrics are something that you always want to play into it, just to make sure that you have adequate staff to support the university's missions and goals. We know that there's going to be peak periods, and one of the struggles we have is keeping those staffing metrics to a reasonable place, but still dealing with the peak periods. So we definitely looked at where staff was functional and where we could cross-train them so that they could support different areas. And that allowed us to spread those staff a little bit more across the board than what we had done in the past. Yeah, that's great. Something to always look at. And I think sometimes there's this misconception when you bring more technology to the table that it can offset staff, but you still have to have staff to manage and maintain the technology, right? And so cross-training is really valuable for things like that. Absolutely. Great, so well, it's really clear that having your KPIs in place has really helped you in your response to COVID, but now that you're looking forward and planning the best as you can - because we know everything's changing by the day - what do you think you're going to continue to use, and maybe alter for the future, when it comes to KPIs? Well we definitely are going to continue the receivables tracking and any of our financial metrics used by our upper administration. Because those are things that it's just very important to hold on to. You don't want those to slip very far before you take appropriate action - maybe send an additional reminder, or address it some other way that with a new policy or something, or changing a existing policy, to help address a metric that's starting to slide. Obviously, you know, with their staffing metrics those are things we're going to want to keep in place. It's going to be very interesting to watch the staffing metrics in response to what we're seeing with COVID. Because we we're about two weeks earlier than normal and we are seeing significant increases in both our call center and our email communications from students. So it's been very helpful to have those metrics to know we're we're hitting a peak period about two weeks earlier than we normally would. One of the things that we you know has benefited us most - and it's probably going to stay - is watching the number of students that we do service on a day-to-day basis in conjunction with housing assignments. If housing is having a particular day to move in, do we see the increase that day? Do we see the increase the day before? The day after? And that's allowing us to adjust and be prepared. Because our housing department expanded their move-in to an appointment-based move-in over two weeks, whereas normally it's over a weekend, and we normally work that weekend. We have the office open because we know parents need to visit with us and then get back to their jobs and their hometowns. So what we were able to do, knowing the number of students that we normally service based on those move-in numbers, we were able to acquire use of the basketball arena. So we're going to be using the concourse there, and so that's going to allow us to deal with the social distancing and the large numbers of students that would come over here. And we've also - because of the metrics we had day to day based on number of people we saw - we were able to prepare and say we need the arena space for this amount of time. So we were able to actually say, "No, we need it actually the day before students have their appointments to move in because that historically has been a very heavy processing day for us." Had we not kept those metrics, had we not had our customer service KPIs, we would not know that this is as much of an anomaly as we've ever seen. And so that's really been beneficial to us. I know our metrics right now are at a much more detailed level. Administration really needed to find fine-tooth information and needed more detailed breakdowns to be able to really assess where they could give up some revenue and really benefit the student the most. I do not expect them to stay at this detailed level on an ongoing basis. I believe it's going to quickly revert back to "that's too much information, just give me the summary" level. So what we've been able to do is, with these detailed metrics, we've been able to really fine-tune where student populations are when we kind of went back to a sense of normal. So have you added any new KPIs, or are you just adding more details what you're already doing? We haven't added anything lately just mostly because of capacity and we've all been focused on all the many other issues that we've had to be dealing with lately. I believe some of the newer metrics, some of the things will remain long-term, but my intent is definitely not to become the reporting group for the institution. So whereas, you know, when the C.A.R.E.S Act funds started coming in, that was something that my office didn't even manage, but we were definitely providing metrics and data and analytics back to administration to help manage that. So some of those we hope, you know, is not something we would manage long-term across the university, but we definitely want to utilize the ones that we did develop and keep those if they have a relevance. One of the things that I've worked on in the past with a number of my colleagues that made wonderful contributions, was just a list of metrics that schools may want to consider in the future. Our goal was to kind of talk about what is a shopping list of various metrics, and how would you get the data, and what's relevant to each person. Because one of the things we found in talking across in a more national conversation, and even a statewide conversation, was that, you know, we all have different reporting lines, and we may have different responsibilities within our own offices. So what might be a relevant metric for me at my school may not be a relevant metric for someone else. So we were just trying to brainstorm all the various KPIs that, you know, someone might want to consider. Great, so do you have that list that you'll be able to share with our listeners? Absolutely, and we'd be happy to. That's wonderful, that's wonderful. Well I know another one of the big challenges that we hear often is figuring out where to get all this data. So obviously I know you have technology and systems in place in order to be able to collect all this and analyze the data, but what sources are you pulling that from? Absolutely, that's one of the most important things to consider - is what source your data is coming from. Because many schools have data storage, but it may not be real-time. And lots of times when you're dealing with student business functions, you need real-time data. Because if someone came in and paid five minutes ago, you don't want to send them a cancellation notice now. So you can't really utilize data that's a day old in a data storage facility. So we use this as our case to be granted access to have a real-time query access to that data. And that used to be locked down pretty heavily across the university, but the timing of the data when we're making decisions, and placing holds, and late fees, and running cancellation processes, and sending bills even, is one of the things that we just have to make sure we have current data. And you want to make sure you're requesting the right data at the right time. If you know it's a day behind then you know you can report that back to whoever's using the data to make sure that they understand that. You also have to have staff that want to understand student data. You know, I say all the time that we've got some staff that want to come in and do their jobs and they do them very effectively and we need those staff members every single day. We've got some staff that get very creative, and they want to do new things and venture into new areas. And so over the years we've had staff that were like really analytically driven. Once we kind of gave them free reign to say, "Okay, provide us more information about this data set that you're concerned about," that they were able to dig into the data, learn it, reach a new level of Banner (we're a banner school), a new level of understanding of that data, and how that information fed across - not just from us, we have the entire banner erp, so that's student, registrar, financial aid, everything, and even tying that into TouchNet data sources as well. So we need to make sure that staff are engaged and understand the data before we make any decisions on those, or provide a representation of what the data means to other people. So especially with what we have when registration drives most of the billing, we need to know who actually is generating that particular set of data and how does it end up ultimately affecting us in the business office? And we can write reports back and say, you know, based on these metrics, we're seeing lower-than-normal financial aid disbursed. We're seeing higher-than-normal registration. We're seeing lower-than-normal, you know, other impacts, exemptions being processed, or contracts being processed. And, you know, the end-all, be-all to most of this is that we're able to take action earlier. That's great, because you have the right data that's informing you to know, maybe, where you need a staff differently, or how you need to build differently, or, you know, communicate across the board a little bit different. That's great. So let's say, so even if a school isn't using KPIs or that terminology, but they're like, "Wow I really love what Christine had to say today." You know, what do you think is really that first step in formalizing data analytics in the business office? Obviously to me the first step is making sure you know who has the technical skills to access the data you need. I looked at - and I continue to look at - what am I being asked on a regular basis? If somebody has to ask me for the same data twice, I need to be looking at some sort of report feature and building a report to provide that, so that they don't have to keep coming and asking me. We've had significant growth in our professional programs. And that's like our Executive MBA and our Executive Personal Financial Planning degrees. And so we've been able to discuss with them what their needs are they manage it on a different, I guess, schedule and structure than what a normal academic structure may look like. And so we were able to provide them with reports that they can monitor what a student's been build over time. Especially with, we've had a significant growth of what we call program fees, that are term-based fees that we would have to charge. Some of these KPIs were very vital to deciding: Are we assessing too much? Because we weren't able to necessarily cap them over multiple terms. And so we could use KPIs and say, "What part, what percentage of a person's tuition and fees was program fees?" And when we looked at the cost of getting a degree, you know, does that program fee impact some of our degree programs more than other degree programs? Such as, like, education. They cannot tolerate a program fee in the amount that maybe a business program could. So it's been very, very, very helpful to look at what questions I've been asked and how could I prevent myself from having to stop what I'm doing right now and answer that question. And again it's getting past the terminology is the first step. You're probably doing most of this already, you just haven't really attached a name to it. Yeah, that's great. Well thanks so much Christine for sharing all your insights today. So any final words of advice to our listeners? Again, I circle back to: make sure you're considering the institution's culture. Because there's been times that I thought, "Oh this is going to be a great metric and everybody's going to want to know this information." And I roll it out and somebody goes, "Yeah, don't really care." And so, you know, that can be a little defeating sometimes. So you kind of have to get past the hurt of someone not caring as much about your numbers. Especially if you've put a lot of effort into it. And that's where that, you know, a shopping list, and just throwing out some ideas when you're discussing with your administration, "Hey, would you like to know this particular metric? Would you like to know how this trend is occurring?" And like I said, one of the most important examples I can provide is we've had in my 10 years of being in this particular position, we've had at three different presidents I believe. And each time we've had a president come into office, we've had to basically prove that cancellation was not necessarily a bad thing. And by having these historical measures in place and showing the starting point to ending point of number of students canceled, basically has allowed us to show them in numbers what we needed them to take on faith so that they didn't necessarily kill a program that we had felt was working successfully. So definitely consider your institutions culture, consider your mission, but anything you do with KPIs, it's always to end with the goal of it's in the best interest of the student and the university. And a university that's, you know, financially sound is one that's going to be able to support its students long term. That is great advice. It sounds like data can really help keep you informed to help you make those smarter decisions. Thanks again, Christine. Thank you guys so much for this opportunity. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Focus. Don't forget to subscribe so you can stay up to date on the business of higher education. For more information check us out at touchnet.com.