Explore our library of 11 practical, research-backed toolkits designed to help institutions align financial decisions with student success outcomes.
The Student Success Hub toolkits are comprehensive, implementation-focused resources designed to help colleges and universities adopt proven student success strategies. Rather than offering theory alone, each toolkit brings together the tools, guidance, and examples institutions need to move from planning to execution.
The toolkits are organized across three focus areas to ensure comprehensive support and targeted approaches. By organizing the toolkits within these focus areas, NACUBO ensures that institutions can easily access and implement the resources most relevant to their specific challenges and goals.
This focus area offers toolkits to support institutional efforts to create or enhance a sustainable “system of knowledge management” that provides consistent visibility, accountability, and data accuracy to inform financial decisions.
The toolkits in this focus area support the development or refinement of an approach to understanding, evaluating, and prioritizing financial resource allocation with an expanded lens on student needs, support, and services that focus on student outcomes.
Toolkits in this focus area seek to refine budget models and methods that enable institutions to be more nimble and agile in meeting the current and future needs of all students, with the intent of increasing student completion rates.
Learn how other institutions have used the toolkits to improve student outcomes.
Tools for leveraging institutional data to drive informed decision-making and strategic planning.
CBOs increasingly transform organizational data into practical, forward-thinking insights that surpass conventional reporting.
The Data Ecosystem Assessment is a tool designed for colleges and universities to gain insights into their institutional strengths and areas for improvement in data infrastructure, analytics, and usage. Its primary objective is to enhance institutions' capacity to better support students and generate actionable information for strategic financial planning, with a focus on achieving equitable student outcomes.
The IPEDS Peer Benchmarking solution empowers Chief Business Officers (CBOs) and other institutional leaders to identify key data trends, understand the potential institutional impacts of such trends, and translate data into meaningful action. Leveraging pre-populated Power BI dashboards, this comprehensive tool provides a strong data foundation for leaders, regardless of institutional level, sector, or background. The dashboards help stakeholders better understand their own data and assist in developing a roadmap for contextualized data-informed decision-making.
Resources for optimizing financial resources, analyzing program costs, and maximizing institutional investments.
The Budget Builder toolkit provides flexible and customizable templates to support the process of gathering budget requests and input from institutional stakeholders. Templates are available in multiple formats, including Word, Excel, and discussion guide. The Word templates are designed with tables for easy conversion into fillable forms. Budget Builder resources prompt users to consider the expertise and time needed across different functional areas to implement and execute a budget initiative, while prioritizing students in the budget request process.
The Financial Impact Analysis provides a wide array of data visualizations to support the analysis of student outcomes and their related financial impact. Data table templates are built in Excel, and pre-built Power BI templates operate with Microsoft's free version of Power BI Desktop application. Once populated, these templates allow users to analyze enrollment, course-related data, financial data, and net tuition revenue. Program-level contribution margins can also be calculated using these tools.
Budget Builder for Grant Development and Sustainability offers a suite of customizable tools designed to assist in identifying resource needs and developing budgets. These tools can be tailored to support both internal grant development and review processes, as well as submissions to funders. The information gathered aids in planning for the long-term sustainability of grant-funded initiatives. Templates promote a 'systems thinking' approach to grant budget development.
The Program Scanner Toolkit equips colleges and universities with the insights and tools needed to align academic offerings with student success metrics and workforce needs while maintaining financial sustainability. Through interactive Power BI dashboards and robust benchmarking capabilities, the toolkit empowers institutional leaders to align academic offerings with labor market trends. Designed to serve diverse stakeholders—including CBOs, institutional researchers, academic deans, department chairs, and student success advisors—the toolkit facilitates informed, collaborative decision-making.
Frameworks for improving budget processes, fostering collaboration, and ensuring equitable resource allocation.
The Budget Equity Blueprint helps institutions examine and integrate an equity-minded focus into budget processes to increase equitable student outcomes and provide considerations for strategically funding high-impact equitable student success initiatives. Equity efforts focus on access, academic support, economic mobility through funding, and other support measures to identify and remove barriers affecting historically marginalized groups of students.
The Budget Process Assessment is a comprehensive survey designed to measure stakeholders' perceptions and comprehension of budget procedures. It also assesses awareness and understanding of the alignment of resource allocation decisions with equitable student success. By employing this assessment before and after the budget process, CBOs can gain valuable insights into budget management dynamics, communication effectiveness, and alignment of budgetary decisions with student-centric outcomes.
This toolkit offers an approach to strengthening collaborative practices. The resources can be leveraged to build and sustain collaborative capacity for resource planning, budgeting, and refining business office related processes that support improved, sustainable, scalable student outcomes. The tools include a Collaborative Assessment, four Collaboration Workbooks, and a Collaboration Jump Start Guide. The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) contributed to the development, bringing expertise in integrated planning for student success.
The Funding Allocation Matrix is designed to help leaders and finance teams make objective decisions and prioritize student-centered investments during the annual or strategic budgeting processes. Provided in Microsoft Excel and Word, these tools help institutions evaluate and fund initiatives with the greatest positive impact on students. The tool places a student-centered focus on budget requests with particular emphasis on historically or currently marginalized populations, including racial/ethnic and low-income students.
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