Reference no: EM13889861

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?